INGLEWOOD, Calif. — “The guys earned their ice. We haven’t really earned our ice many times.”

That’s how Heat coach Erik Spoelstra described his team’s effort in a 117-116 win over the Clippers Wednesday night. As the Heat stumbled out of the gate to a 2-5 start this season, the headlines focused on Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo playing next to each other more than off each other, and on how the offense looked clunky. Spoelstra knew that wasn’t the issue, it was the bottom-five defense in the league that was keeping the Heat from finding its identity and winning games.

“You have to make plays defensively, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do is find our identity,” Spoelstra said. “The offensive stuff like that’s way overblown. You know, going into this game, we have almost a top 10 ranked offense [11th in net rating]. That’s ahead of where I thought it would be at this time. But our defense is way behind. That’s why we lost games.”

For 29 minutes Wednesday night in Los Angeles, from the start of the third quarter through Klay Thompson’s overtime game-winner, the Miami Heat found that identity.

Miami used its length and athleticism to pressure the Clippers’ ballhandlers up the court, switched pick-and-rolls more — and more effectively — than they have all season, and played bully ball against a team light on shot creation. Davion Mitchell was ripping the ball away from Darius Garland.

They looked like the team Spoelstra envisioned — a team that played intense, high-energy defense and would get enough offense from its stars. A team with a defense-first, gritty identity and turned that defense into offense.

“I think we turned it up in the second half, majorly,” Thompson said. “That ball pressure at half court that Bam, Giannis, Davion, Pella [Larsson], Ryan [Conwell] had was just a game changer.”

“One game, does that solve everything? No, but at least now we can see,” Spoelstra said. “All right, this is what the plan was the first day of training camp. Everybody wrapped their mind around it, and it just hasn’t gone according to plan. But you could see the efforts. The guys earned their ice.”

All about the second half

They earned that ice in the second half — the second quarter was more of what had the Heat losing games to start the season. The Clippers went on a 30-4 run to open the frame and dropped a 43-point second quarter on the Heat, with Garland carving them up as LA shot 16-of-22 in the quarter, including hitting 6-of-7 in the paint and 8-of-13 from 3. The Clippers had a 172 offensive rating in the second quarter as they got the shots they wanted — 75% of their first half shots came at the rim or from 3 (and they were hitting those deep balls).

“We gave up 67 points in the first half, and we just really wanted to try to prove to ourselves that we could do something tough,” Spoelstra said. “And we opened up the third quarter, had a really good defensive quarter, held them to 20 points, and then did it again, held them to 20 points in the fourth before overtime.”

Miami did it for a night, but now comes the hard part: Doing it again. Especially on Thursday night, going up to the Bay Area for a back-to-back against a Warriors team finding their identity and with a pretty good shooter of their own in the backcourt.

“That’s our identity. That’s what we have to be. Not every other night. We gotta be there every night,” Adabayo said of the second-half defensive effort. “We’re not scoring, we gotta make sure they don’t score either... Being disruptive, we were flying around. That’s what it takes... It’s gonna be moments when it’s uncomfortable. So being able to get out of that comfort zone and then communicate, you see what the potential is.”

Miami now has to live up to that defensive potential nightly — but the second half against the Clippers showed them the path.