Bam Adebayo didn’t mince words about his performance against the Knicks Tuesday night, shouldering the blame for Miami’s Game 2 loss at the Garden.
Game 3 will be Saturday in South Florida, with a salty Miami team and a highly motivated Adebayo looking for payback.
And redemption.
“I just got to play better,” Adebayo said. “I feel like this game was on me, and I lost it for us. I’ve got to be better. I played terrible. I put this one on me.”
None of the Heat did, but Adebayo fell on the proverbial sword nonetheless.
With Jimmy Butler sidelined due to a sprained ankle, Adebayo had been Miami’s best remaining player.
But he was just their fourth-leading scorer Tuesday, with the Knicks frequently running an extra defender at him before he could solidify position in the paint.
He had 15 points, eight rebounds, six assists and got held to just two points on a single shot in the pivotal fourth quarter.
Still, even with Butler’s status in doubt, it’s not like Miami needs huge scoring explosions from Adebayo.
They just need the Newark-born center to play like himself, something the star hasn’t done so far in the playoffs.
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“He doesn’t need to score 50 for us to win this game. But he has to have his fingerprints all over this competition,” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra had said of Adebayo before Game 2.
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“And the way he does it is very similar to the way that Jimmy does it. He has to do it on both ends with massive challenges for him to be able to defend everybody, anybody and all the schemes. Then offensively, all the scoring, the facilitating, all of that. But that’s what he wants.”
If Adebayo and the Heat got any sleep Tuesday night before returning to Miami — and that’s questionable — their dreams were likely haunted by a single play that stuck in their collective craw, his most of all.
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With Miami rolling along with a 93-87 lead nearly midway through the fourth quarter, Adebayo was trying to close out on a 3-point attempt by Jalen Brunson but got whistled for a foul after running through a screen set by Isaiah Hartenstein.
He knocked the Knicks center to the court, Brunson hit the 3 and Adebayo’s ill-timed foul turned it into a momentum-changing four-point play with 6:42 left.
“Watching film, we’re going to regroup and figure out what went wrong. Well, I know what went wrong. The turning point was me running into [Hartenstein] and Brunson hit the 3,” Adebayo said.
“I took off too fast, and I should’ve just let [Brunson] shoot it instead of trying to run through [Hartenstein], get around him. Coach has been telling us night-in, night-out to watch the back screens on the back side, and I got caught with one.”
Hartenstein’s free throw sliced Miami’s lead to a deuce and sparked a 24-12 Knicks run to close the game and steal a split in the Garden.
“When you’re up six in that timeout, you get a stop, have an opportunity to score on the other end; but all of a sudden, by the time you’re going to the other end it’s a two-point game,” Spoelstra said. “That was probably the biggest swing moment.”
Adebayo is averaging 16.9 points and 8.4 rebounds on 47.6 percent shooting in the postseason, down from his career-high 20.4 points and 9.2 boards on 54 percent in the regular season.
Part of that could be due to a nagging left hamstring strain, but whatever the case, he’s more interested in a bounce-back than excuses.
