It has been an eventful start to 2025 for the Miami Heat. It has also been a challenging start to the year for the Heat. As the Heat and Jimmy Butler butted heads, the Heat ended up suspending Butler three times in January before eventually trading him to the Golden State Warriors last week as part of a five-team deal. In return for Butler, the Heat acquired Andrew Wiggins, Kyle Anderson and a top-10 protected 2025 first-round pick from the Warriors and Davion Mitchell from the Toronto Raptors.
“It was six, eight weeks of not having full clarity,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said ahead of Monday night’s matchup against the defending NBA championship Boston Celtics at Kaseya Center. “But I think that helped our team develop some grit. Even though our record isn’t where we want it to be, it could have been a lot worse. You go through a lot of circumstances like that, I’ve seen a lot of teams just fall apart. So we were able to develop some grit that I really like when you have those opportunities during a regular season.”
But the Heat also would have liked to develop some more consistency along the way, entering Monday’s game against the Celtics with a subpar 9-11 record in 2025. Miami also posted the NBA’s 26th-ranked offensive rating, 14th-ranked defensive rating and 21st-ranked net rating during its first 20 games of the year.
The now Butlerless Heat enters Monday in seventh place in the Eastern Conference — just one-half game behind the sixth-place Detroit Pistons but also just 1.5 games ahead of the ninth-place Atlanta Hawks. After Monday’s matchup against the Celtics, the Heat has two games left to play (Wednesday at Oklahoma City Thunder and Thursday at Dallas Mavericks) before entering the All-Star break. “We have some work to do,,” Heat veteran center Kevin Love said. “We look at the standings, we know that we’re a few games back from home court. But we just need to start — we have 32 games left — we’ll start putting in the work now.
