Heat @ Thunder

Who will WIN this matchup?

Miami Heat (28-12)

@ Oklahoma City Thunder (23-18)

Current odds:

Miami Heat: (-104)

Oklahoma City Thunder: (-112)

• The line for this game is Thunder by 1 point.

• The Oklahoma City Thunder’s surge up the standings hit a snag on Wednesday, when they forgot to bring the defense in a 130-121 loss to Toronto. The Thunder will try to bounce back and avoid their first back-to-back losses in over a month when they host the Miami Heat on Friday. Oklahoma City won 12 of its last 16 games but fell into a 30-point hole in the first half against the Raptors on Wednesday and could not dig all the way out while allowing Toronto to shoot 61.2 percent from the floor. “We did a better job in that second half,” Thunder coach Billy Donovan told reporters. “Our pressure up the floor was good. I thought we came over and helped a little bit more aggressively than we did maybe in the first half. We got active with our hands, and we were a little bit disruptive and deflected some passes and did a better job with our activity in the second half.”

• The Heat improved to an NBA-best 18-1 at home with a 106-100 win over the Spurs on Wednesday but are just 10-11 on the road, where they will play the next two games. “We definitely have to carry this momentum into the road games,” Miami center Bam Adebayo told reporters. “We’re going into other people’s gyms and we can’t have the same game that we play at home. We got to have a better game because we’re away. The rims look different, the atmosphere is different. So, we just got to go out there and bring more of an edge.”

• Miami could use a road performance from rookie Kendrick Nunn like it got at home on Wednesday, when the 24-year-old went for 33 points on 13-of-18 shooting. “He has been putting in some of these kind of shooting performances behind the scenes and in practice,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra told reporters of Nunn. “Maybe not to this extent, but he just stays with it and he doesn’t get caught up in all the highs and lows that can happen during a season.” Nunn went 5-of-7 from beyond the arc on Wednesday while reserve point guard Goran Dragic knocked down 5-of-10 from beyond the arc in the 106-100 triumph.

• Oklahoma City guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander followed up his 20-point, 20-rebound, 10-assist triple-double with 21 points, six rebounds and six assists on Wednesday and was happy with the fight the team showed in the loss. “We know if there’s time on the clock, there’s nothing us as a group is not capable of,” Gilgeous-Alexander told reporters. “It’s been a little bit of us in the past to get down a little bit, a lot actually, to start games. We’ve just got to figure out a way to not let that happen and put together a full four quarters.” Gilgeous-Alexander scored 20 or more points in five straight and seven of the last eight games and is shooting 53.8 percent from the floor in that span.

• Adebayo collected 14 points and 13 rebounds on Wednesday to snap a streak of four straight games without a double-double.

• Thunder C Steven Adams (knee bruise) left Wednesday’s game and is day-to-day.

• Miami snapped a six-game losing streak in the series with a 116-107 victory at Oklahoma City last season.