East teams establishing some long-term roadblocks to Heat
MIAMI — There are several ways to go about this.
For the Philadelphia 76ers, it was sacrificing nearly half a decade to position themselves for this moment. For the Boston Celtics, it was hoarding draft picks. For the Cleveland Cavaliers, it was utilizing the allure of the game’s most dominant player. For the Milwaukee Bucks, it was going to great lengths to identify players with great length.
Because of that, the Eastern Conference no longer is viewed as the NBA’s decided lesser half.
And for the Miami Heat, that has to be a concern, and for far more than this moment, mired in the mediocrity of an uneven start.
The thought in the East in recent years had been to merely wait out LeBron James and the Cavaliers, especially with James in a contract year and all that noise of an offseason shift to the Los Angeles Lakers.
And yet considering how he convinced Kevin Love to re-up in Cleveland and potentially could do the same with Isaiah Thomas, while running in more Dwyane Wade-like super friends, the lure of LeBron might not be a thing of the past.
Then there are the Celtics, who drew nothing less than the notice of Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr as the next big thing in the East, having maximized the draft selections of Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum and then flipped one of their Brooklyn Nets first-round picks for Kyrie Irving. The Celtics clearly are more than a team of the moment.
Ditto for the 76ers, with Joel Embiid already the NBA’s next big thing and Ben Simmons a playmaker who continues to hearken comparisons to Magic Johnson. All that losing under Sam Hinkie has left Philadelphia with a trove of youth like few others in the NBA.
Beyond that is what the Bucks possess with Giannis Antetokounmpo and Thon Maker, length in a duo heretofore unseen.
That’s not even getting to a pair of teams of the moment, in the Toronto Raptors and Washington Wizards, who assuredly still will be contending for homecourt in this season’s playoffs.
For a team such as the Heat, which appears to be somewhat stuck in the middle in the East, even that could prove to be a reach. Even the New York Knicks (Kristaps Porzingis) have a player better than anyone the Heat can offer.
That’s what makes the ones that got away, the games against the Denver Nuggets, Detroit Pistons and Wednesday against the Washington Wizards, all the more difficult to stomach, leads blown in each.
Because it can be argued that no team with playoff visions routinely counts as much on ensemble success, particularly with Hassan Whiteside often being marginalized (that first All-Star berth already is looking like a longshot, in light of the early season play of Embiid, Porzingis and Andre Drummond).
For the Heat to succeed, it means quality efforts on the same night, each night out, from Whiteside, Goran Dragic, James Johnson, Dion Waiters and at least a few more rotation players.
This was the plan the Heat wed themselves to with the offseason $200 million outlay on James Johnson, Waiters, Kelly Olynyk and Josh Richardson.
“There’s just different ways to build teams,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said during the recent road swing. “And this league is so competitive now and the landscape has changed a little bit from where we put teams together before. And we really liked a lot of the guys.
“And as much as we did last year, we felt that there’s a much higher ceiling with these guys in our program with our structure and our ability to work with our guys to develop that we can grow to a higher level.”
To a degree, many now being cast in leading roles by the Heat are similar to the types who had complemented when LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were the leading men, similar to the likes of Shane Battier, Mike Miller, Ray Allen, Chris Andersen, Mario Chalmers.
When there was just one target team in the East, it was the type of offseason play that looked solid enough for at least a return to the second round of the playoffs, if not a challenge for a berth against the Cavaliers in the conference finals.
But now the East has offers a different long view. It’s not quite the same as what the West presents with the Warriors, Thunder, Rockets and Spurs, yet an argument could be made that there could be greater lasting success from some of these East rosters.
It is against that revised landscape that the Heat move forward as an ensemble.
“Our expectations as an organization are the same,” Spoelstra said. “We think big. People probably think we’re crazy. You’ve got to have a little bit of crazy in this league to be good.”
Or a little bit more in terms of star potential.