South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Interest in Houston remains
Heat didn’t pursue Harden, but don’t rule out Oladipo
NBA blockbusters don’t occur in vacuums, but they do leave a wake that ripples throughout the league, including, in this case, all the way to the Biscayne Bay shores of AmericanAirlines
Arena.
Yes, the Miami Heat considered the possibilities of James Harden, If not, the team never would have come out and said at the start of the season it was out of the process.
But there was, and is, no avoiding the implications for Pat Riley and his staff, on multiple fronts.
The immediate future: With the Brooklyn Nets bolstered by Harden, there is no question about living in the moment.
While Harden-Kevin Durant-Kyrie Irving might not be the two-way Big Three of the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo-Jrue Holiday-Khris Middleton, it clearly sets a regular-season Nos. 1-2 hierarchy in the Eastern Conference when it comes to the top seeds.
Factor in what the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers have shown, and the question is where the Heat fit into the regular-season mix.
Yes, the Heat emerged from No. 5 to last
season’s NBA Finals, but there again is the threat of the Indiana Pacers, who finished No. 4 last season, and an expected revival from the Toronto Raptors (perhaps in their two games against the Heat this coming week in Tampa).
And keep in mind that if you fall to No. 7 this season, you fall into the play-in round. A couple of bad nights (or one ill-timed injury) and no playoffs.
The next step: Because the Heat acknowledged talks with the Rockets, it means Houston has done its Heat homework.
Victor Oladipo, acquired in the Harden deal by the Rockets and an impending free agent, is known to have a strong interest in the Heat, and there appears to be mutual interest from them.
Still, it’s not as simple as considering whether to trade Tyler Herro for Oladipo straight up (plus cap filler from the Heat).
With Herro on his rookie-scale contract, it means the Heat could go into the offseason with Herro and major cap space. Flip Herro now for Oladipo, and both Herro and the bulk of that cap space go away (if Oladipo is retained).
With a slight concession from Oladipo in free agency this offseason, it is possible the Heat can stretch their cap space to eventually wind up with both Herro and Oladipo.
The futures market: With the Nets trading their draft future for Harden, it rekindles the debate about playing the futures market with first-rounders.
It certainly backfired for Brooklyn when it came to acquiring Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce from the Celtics (hello Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown).
But it also is a reminder of the Heat dealing a pair of future
first-rounders for Goran Dragic in 2015. The first of those picks turned into Zhaire Smith at No. 16 in 2018, who is out of the league. The second of the two picks comes without lottery protection in this year’s draft.
Barring a fall into the lottery by the Heat, the value realized in Dragic far exceeds the draft capital.
The Stepien Rule: Among the NBA’s nuances is the Stepien Rule, which prohibits teams from trading consecutive future first-round picks.
It is named after former Cleveland Cavaliers owner Ted Stepien, who, shortly after purchasing the team in 1980, traded away, over a five-month span, his team’s first-round picks in 1982, ’83, ’84 and ’85, with James Worthy, Derek Harper, Sam Perkins and Detlef Schrempf among those taken with those selections.
To guard against such future shock, the Stepien Rule was adopted. But now NBA executives have somewhat circumvented it by agreeing to pick “swaps” in the years the first-rounders aren’t dealt, as was the case in the Rockets-Nets deal for Harden.
Considering such arrangements still could leave teams bereft of quality draft capital well after current management, coaching staffs and perhaps even ownership are gone, it could be time to close that loophole as well.
IN THE LANE THE HEAT PICK:
The only certainty regarding the Heat’s first-round pick in the 2021 NBA draft is that it is headed elsewhere, already having been flipped for Goran Dragic, Tobias Harris and Paul George, among others. But where? Either Oklahoma City, Houston or Brooklyn. An explainer: Oklahoma City gets the two best picks out of its own, Houston’s and the Heat’s, with Houston getting the third-best. (The exception is if the Rockets’ pick is among the first
four, in which case it’s protected.) The Rockets then can flip the remaining pick of those three, or first-round picks potentially received from Dallas and Portland, for Brooklyn’s. Based on the likely standings, the Thunder will keep their own pick and take Houston’s. The Rockets then likely will wind up with the Heat pick, with Brooklyn, likely to have the best record of the swap pool, to keep its pick.
HARD SELL: The toughest cover when it comes to the Heat? According to Jimmy Butler, it might be teammate Goran Dragic, at least when it came to covering his bill at Butler’s pop-up Big Face Coffee enterprise last summer at Disney World. Butler explained in a video produced for GQ.“I have to say that my No. 1 customer was Goran Dragic, The Dragon,” Butler said of his $20-a-cup operation, before further explaining.“It doesn’t really count. He is the only person that never paid for a single cup of Big Face coffee. And the only reason why [was] ’cause he knew how to get me. He would come into the room, ‘Hey, how you feeling today? How’s your body? Did you watch soccer last night? Oh, yeah, Neymar’s so good, so good.’ And then he’d throw away a, ‘Yo, like let me get a cappuccino.’ And then he’d keep going. And so, I thought I figured out. But he knew how to get me to get to talking. He’d butter me up a little bit. Goran, he’s in debt to me.”
RILEY REMEMBRANCES:
With the Heat playing twice in Philadelphia this past week, 76ers coach Doc Rivers was asked about Heat President Pat Riley, his former coach with the New York Knicks, and what set Riley apart from a leadership standpoint. “His ability to get every player to buy into his role, to get every player to understand there’s something bigger than himself, and for you to play for the team,” Rivers said. “And he did it every year. He gets you to buy in. And there’s no team that’s ever won a title that everyone didn’t buy in. You just have to.
You have to give up yourself. You have to give up some of the things that you want to do, to become a better team. And I thought Riles was best leader I’ve ever seen in that regard.”
LESSONS LEARNED:
Having moved on from the Heat in free agency, Solomon Hill said last summer’s bubble with the Heat has helped him provide lessons this season with the Atlanta Hawks, including during the current absence of Bogdan Bogdanovic. “Every team at some point is going to have somebody missing,” Hill said. “I went through this in the Finals. We had two guys go down, and it’s next man up. The one thing we keep saying about this team is our depth. So why are people being down? It should be that when you have depth, it’s no problem. If we truly are a deep team, then it’s an opportunity for the next man up.”
WIZARDS WHIRLWIND:
For Washington Wizards guard Bradley Beal, the NBA’s COVID-19 testing remains the most inexact of sciences. First he missed last Saturday’s game against the Heat before being cleared by negative tests. He then was back Monday against the Phoenix Suns, when he scored 34 to lead the Wizards to victory. And then the Wizards’ schedule was put on hold by the pandemic. “It was weird,” Beal said of his whirlwind, “having to stay away from everybody and quarantine with myself the last couple of days. The positive is I’ve been testing negative, so that’s a good thing.” The negative is that in the wake of playing the Wizards, the Heat’s roster was ravaged by contact tracing. Therefore, it only seems fair the Wizards now trade Beal to the Heat.
NUMBER
2-to-5. Miami Heat front-running odds, according to BetOnline, about where Victor Oladipo will be next season. The bookmaker then lists the Rockets at 5-to-2, the Knicks at 7-to-2, the Raptors at
5-to-1 and the 76ers at 15-to-2.