While the Heat exceeded expectations in the playoffs, they will likely need to upgrade their roster to get back to the Finals next season.
Before the prescription, you need a diagnosis. And it’s hard to diagnose a problem when you don’t really know the patient. That’s the first challenge this summer for the Miami Heat.
You don’t have to be a physician – or even a Doc in NBA terms like Mr. Erving or Mr. Rivers – to see that Miami was two different patients over the totality of its 2022-23 season.
Freshest in our minds are the plucky overachievers who scrapped and clawed their way from a narrow Play-In chance all the way to the Finals, knocking off three of the Eastern Conference’s top four seeds in the process. The Heat got so much attention for excelling with its bevy of undrafted players, including four heavy contributors (Caleb Martin, Duncan Robinson, Max Strus and Gabe Vincent), that coach Eric Spoelstra grew weary of the undrafted label.
But Miami also was distracted underachievers in the regular season, limited by injuries, and uninspired by the regular-season schedule, apparently out with the “South Beach Flu” for much of October to April. The Heat were losing to Chicago with three minutes left in their second Play-In game before their vaunted #HeatCulture kicked in.
That Heat team got outscored across 82 games, ranked 25th in offensive rating (112.3 points per 100 possessions), and finished three spots from the bottom in 3-point accuracy.
Fortunately for Miami and its fans, recency bias is powerful, so NBA free agents might be looking at south Florida with fresh eyes. Recalling the Biscayne Bay glamour shots they’ve seen on playoff telecasts since mid-April and the zero state tax rate, such players could step in to plug some holes. Miami’s hefty payroll and the new collective bargaining agreement, however, will constrain a lot of those ambitions.
In general, though, here are three areas Miami must address if it wants to be the team wearing goggles in 2024:
1. A better No. 1
This might be heresy to those wowed by Jimmy Butler’s work in the first round against the Bucks (37.6 ppg) or who have bought into the “Playoff Jimmy” mystique forged previously in the Orlando bubble. But plenty of NBA observers have contended this for a while: Butler cannot be the best player on an NBA championship team.
It never was more evident than in Denver’s clinching Game 5 victory. Through three quarters, Butler had taken only 10 shots and made two. Miami’s heavy lifting was being done by Bam Adebayo (20 points) and the Miami bench (22 more). It wasn’t until the fourth quarter that Butler asserted himself for 13 points on a couple 3-pointers and a flurry of free throws.
He shot 3-for-8 in the quarter and was a minus-6. And let’s not forget his late turnover, passing right into the hands of Denver’s Kentavious Caldwell-Pope with 27 seconds left.
Not to overemphasize one game, but it was a snapshot of who Butler is as a player. He’s not a natural scorer and he knows it, evident in how often he won’t even look at the basket when he has the ball.
Jimmy Butler discusses the Heat’s difficult road to the NBA Finals, not taking anything for granted and remaining confident.
“I’m not a scorer. Just because I score a lot of points one game doesn’t make me a scorer,” Butler said during the Finals. “I’m not a volume shooter. I don’t press to score. I press to win. If I pass the ball every possession [and] we win, I don’t care. If I shoot the ball every possession and win, I don’t care.”
He’ll turn 34 in September, and this is where the speculation of adding another All-Star such as Portland’s Damian Lillard or Washington’s Bradley Beal offers hope. A player like that — if the Heat front office could procure such a player — would happily step in as the top offensive option, and it’s a move that would mesh well with Butler’s more all-around, two-way facilitating game.
The question then: Would Butler’s alpha personality make room for an equal or even better teammate? At the Finals, Butler talked repeatedly about his focus on team. “I’ve had some helluva teammates come through and compete with me and give us the opportunity to win a championship, which I still believe, with everything in me, that we will do as a team here.”
Heading toward NBA senior status, it might be time for Butler to be the sidekick to someone else.
2. More scoring
If you only paid attention to the first three rounds and focused mostly on what Miami did from 3-point territory in the postseason, you might assume there’s plenty of offense at Spoelstra’s finger tips. But his team averaged a league-low 109.5 points per game and failed to crack 100 four times in five Finals games. These guys topped the NBA in games determined by five points or less not only because they wanted to. Often, they had to.
Should the Heat stay the course with their current roster or add another All-Star caliber player before next season?
Using 26 different starting lineups in a season can wreak havoc on the best offensive plans, and Tyler Herro’s injury that wiped out his postseason drained points from the Heat totals too. Still, Butler’s best self, Adebayo’s role as an almost accidental scorer and Herro’s tendency to pound the ball too deep into the clock on many possessions makes the case for a refreshed attack.
Configuring the offense differently around the available talent — with Vincent, Strus and Kevin Love as free agents to re-sign or not — is one way to go. Swapping for Lillard, Beal or some other scorer/shooter is another. Doing nothing on this front is not an option if Miami wants to play in June again next spring.
3. Gotta get bigger
It didn’t derail them against Milwaukee, New York or Boston. But it did play a damaging role at the end against Denver. The Heat got outrebounded in each of their four playoff series, including by 44 in just five games against the Nuggets. It was the same in the regular season, outrebounded overall, and they were 18-29 when they didn’t win the battle of the boards.
Adebayo ranked 17th in rebounds per game (9.2) and Butler, with 5.9, was the Heat’s second best — 55th overall, fewer than James Harden, tied with Ja Morant. Miami ranked 18th in rebounding percentage (49.8). And at 6-foot-9, Adebayo — as the team’s primary defender against bigs — is versatile and switchable, but too often undersized. Finals MVP Nikola Jokic, from his high post position, essentially had unobstructed views all series long to find targets for his deft passing.
Love and Cody Zeller were double-digit rebounders pro-rated to 36 minutes but have defensive limitations and don’t log heavy minutes. Seven-footer Omer Yurtseven, a restricted free agent, boarded at a 15.0 per 36 pace as a rookie in 2021-22 but appeared in only nine games. Enhanced gang rebounding might be the only solution, if no one with that skill gets added.
Picking up slack as a unit, of course, has been a key to this edition of the Heat. “You take the experience of this season,” Adebayo said after the Finals when asked the “what’s next?” question, “and if you can just bottle that up, and everybody just have their own portion or rewritten story of it. The No. 1 thing I think would be will.”
Absolutely correct. As in, will Miami make the changes it needs to contend again?
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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.
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