It was a moment of meltdown, even as a road win was being solidified.
So Kyle Lowry said you take it as that and move on, appreciating how much these games mean to the Miami Heat while playing in the injury absences of Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo.
With 42.8 seconds to play in Friday night’s 113-104 victory over the Indiana Pacers, after a 20-point Heat lead with 5:36 to play had been trimmed to 11, the Heat seemingly did the one thing they couldn’t afford — lose their composure.
After a questionable out-of-bounds call initially made in the Pacers’ favor, the Heat had the immediate right to challenge the ruling, as they were in the midst of requesting.
Only amid those deliberations, forward P.J. Tucker, who insisted he did not touch the ball as it went out of bounds, was called for a technical foul as his contention grew heated. At that same moment, Heat coach Erik Spoelstra was being whistled for a technical foul by crew chief James Williams for stepping on the court before issuing his coach’s challenge.
“Yeah, James was just reading it by the letter of the law. And I get it. That’s a tough call,” Spoelstra said, as the Heat turned their attention to Saturday night’s game against the Milwaukee Bucks at the close of the two-game trip. “I’m going to be calling Byron [Spruell, the NBA officiating chief], though, tomorrow. I want my money back on that.
“It was one of those situations where everybody was wondering, ‘What’s going on?’ It is a timeout. I was challenging it. It’s on the far end. I’ve also been on the other end of that, where you can’t get an official’s attention. But this was a timeout. It seemed like common sense that everybody was just kind of converging at halfcourt.”
The Heat won the challenge, but even with the officials erring in initially awarding possession to the Pacers before making the correction based on video review, Indiana’s Malcolm Brogdon still was granted the technical free throws, converting both to make it a nine-point game.
Moments later, a 3-pointer by Heat guard Gabe Vincent made it academic.
To Lowry, it was nothing more than well-intended emotions being misconstrued, similar to his disgust moments earlier over a flagrant foul not being assessed upon replay to Indiana center Myles Turner for a hard foul against him.
“I’m not going to get fined, but definitely don’t want to comment on that, because I don’t think we did anything wrong, honestly,” Lowry said of the double technical fouls on Tucker and Spoelstra. “I don’t think P.J. did anything wrong; I don’t think coach did anything wrong in that situation. I didn’t get the flagrant call that I thought should have been, but it is what it is. So I’m not going to complain or worry about it. It’s over. It didn’t happen.
“At the end of the day, we make decisions as men, as a group. P.J. had a tech. OK. Whatever he wants to do, he’s going to do it. And he’s still our teammate. Our coach got a tech. I don’t believe he did anything wrong. But, you know, who knows? It’s not my decision to make those calls.”
Those calls came in the wake of Heat captain Udonis Haslem receiving a technical foul last week in Minnesota while on the bench in a game he did not play, and Lowry receiving a technical foul in Monday night’s loss to the Denver Nuggets while on the bench.
“Every technical has a context to it,” Spoelstra told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “I got a technical last week, and the official apologized.
“I think on both of these situations [Haslem and Lowry], it was just emotion. We say something at one point of the game and you say it at another point of the game, it could be interpreted in an entirely different way. I don’t think either one of those merited a technical. But that was the call they made. We lived with it.”
