Heat captain Bam Adebayo looks back on rough season and looks ahead at important offseason.
Miami Heat center Bam Adebayo has still never won an NBA championship, but the three-time All-Star has done plenty of winning during his career. In fact, Adebayo and Boston Celtics forward Jayson Tatum are the only players in the league currently younger than 28 years old who have already appeared in at least 78 playoff games.
But following the Heat’s midseason trade of Jimmy Butler in February, Adebayo came away from his eighth NBA season with a better appreciation of how difficult it is to win games after the Heat’s ugly early first-round playoff exit. The Eastern Conference’s top-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers swept the East’s eighth-seeded Heat in the first round, 4-0, with the Cavaliers winning the four games by a total of 122 points to make it the most lopsided playoff series in NBA history.
“Really understanding how hard it is to win a playoff game,” Adebayo, 27, said last week when asked what he took away from the Heat’s first-round playoff nightmare. “… To understand how hard it is to win. I feel like a lot of us take it for granted, when we’re out there and kind of beating a team you’re supposed to beat. Then you get in the playoffs and it’s an even playing field, and you got to really work through it. So I think just valuing winning.”
