There are nights they defend with the passion of Boston and nights they pass with the zeal of San Antonio. There are nights they act as unselfishly as Golden State and nights they even shoot as beautifully as Houston.
And then there are other nights. The nights like these past four for the Heat, when the same team neglects to defend, can't shoot and either hasn't inbounded a final pass properly or, if they have, doesn't have anyone to get the shot off.
That's them, too. That's what they can forever be without the kind of singular go-to player to carry them across the finish line on bad nights they way they've had. They're a team of Robins. They lack Batman.
"The crazy thing about this league is we're not that far off from where we were before," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. "Six days ago we're eight above and playing for the third spot. Six days later all of a sudden it feels like the world is coming down.
"Three weeks, a month ago, we're in a lot of the same games but we were winning these close games. The last nine games have been _ quote unquote _ clutch games, and we haven't been able to get over the hump.
"So that's why we've been focusing on improvement and getting better. Trying to get our defense more consistent and see if we can make improvement in that way."
Once upon a time, performance artist Pat Riley dunked his head in a bucket of water before his players at a stretch like this and stayed down, and down, to remind them how badly they needed to win. " 'Til your last breath!" he came up, heaving.
Spoelstra is more a motivator of words like Earl Nightingale and Zig Ziglar. Passion. Desire. Trust. Effort. Those must be givens with this Heat team full of average talent and good chemistry. If those attributes don't show up, as they didn't on defense Monday against awful Orlando, they're awful, too.
"We were taking the ball out of our net so much that it hurt our offense," guard Tyler Johnson said of the lackluster defense.
Here's a staggering stat of the Heat talent. They're 28th in scoring in the league. Back with The Big Three, the challenge was getting Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to accept lesser roles. That was hard to do.
This is harder: Making a roster of average parts look good. That's the Heat, too when you get by the coach on the sideline and the banners in the rafters and the 72-year-old legend in the fourth row.
Nothing tells you how average their talent can look than the final seconds. Who is their go-to player?
"We've got a lot of guys," Johnson said.
When you have a lot, you don't have any. Not really. Everyone knew the ball was going to Wade. Then LeBron for a few years. Then Wade again. That's the nature of basketball. It's a problem for this Heat team.
The go-to player for the Heat most nights is Spoelstra. The hope is he'll draw up a good enough play to win almost by sleight of hand. But that only goes so far, as Philadelphia had seen that back-cut to the rim and intercepted it. Orlando put big 6-foot-11 Bismack Biyombo to harass inbounds passer Justise Winslow since no big man was on the court.
On those kind of nights, the Heat look flat and ordinary.
"Every little detail matters, every possession matters," Spoelstra said. "We've have been making strides. It's tough to get through the weeks sometimes when you're only focused on the result, but our defense had been trending better, and I feel our offense was certainly good enough in several of the last few games to get the job done."
Unless there's some big deal at Thursday's trade deadline lurking in the weeds, this is who the Heat are. The line between fun and failure can be hard to see on a team with no go-to guy. Someone get the ice bucket ready. This team might need a reminder.
