Will Heat keep Ellington? Can they afford to?
INDIANAPOLIS — The Miami Heat have been here before, as they are now with Wayne Ellington, with similar dynamic 3-point shooters.
In 2004-05, Damon Jones set the franchise record for 3-pointers that still stands, of 225.
The Heat let him walk the following offseason, with Jones signing a fouryear, $16.1 million contract (which actually was a lot of NBA money back then) with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
In 2006-07, Jason Kapono led the league with a .514 3-point percentage for the Heat, a year after he shared in the Heat’s first NBA championship.
The Heat then let him walk during the 2007 offseason, when he signed a four-year, $24 million deal with the Toronto Raptors.
In the wake of those approaches, the Heat toed the line with 3-point specialist James Jones, three times having him back only at the veteran minimum.
Which brings us to Ellington, who stands poised to make a run at Damon Jones’ franchise single-season 3-point record and who has proven to be a game-changing catalyst these past two seasons.
Last summer, the Heat got creative with bonuses in the contracts of Dion Waiters and Kelly Olynyk to fit in Ellington’s $6.3 million team option for this season.
In retrospect, that was simple math.
This summer, unless the Heat are able to offload guaranteed money elsewhere on the payroll, a contract commensurate with Ellington’s productivity would put the Heat into the 2018-19 luxury tax.
As Pat Riley has continually emphasized, the Heat prefer to only go into the tax when they believe they are in title contention.
The Heat aren’t there yet. And they well might not be positioned for such in 2018-19, either.
But the league has changed since Damon Jones and Kapono were slinging in Heat colors.
Riley knows that. Erik Spoelstra knows that.
And, just as significantly, Ellington knows that.
“I don’t think there’s a ceiling,” Ellington said of the NBA’s three-for-all, an approach that has the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets as the league’s elite. “It’s been interesting, though. It’s been fun to see where the league is going and how the league is evolving and where it’s headed.
“I’m ecstatic that it’s headed that way. It’s fun basketball.”
And potentially highly lucrative for Ellington, who, until this Heat contract, had never earned more than $2.7 million in any of his first seven NBA seasons. Turning 31 next season, this could be his final bite at a sizable, longer-term deal.
But there also is more than salary and cap math at play.
With Waiters expected back next season from his January ankle surgery and with it looking likely that Dwyane Wade will be back for another season, that would leave the Heat with Waiters, Wade, Goran Dragic, Tyler Johnson, Josh Richardson and Rodney McGruder available on the wing, not even getting into Justise Winslow’s ability to play as a distributor.
So can you pay bigger money — taxed money — for what could become a role player, a James Jonesor Jason Kapono-type specialist?
To his credit, Ellington is aware of the bigger roster picture, even with the Heat at times turning the 3-pointer into a Pop-aShot.
“At the same time,” he said, “you can’t forget about that interior presence. It’s the game of basketball — everybody wants to shoot threes — but you can’t forget about that presence in the paint.”
That’s where the Heat are loaded up with the salaries of Hassan Whiteside, Olynyk and even James Johnson.
Over the years, the Heat have developed their 3-point shooters at relatively low cap cost, with McGruder a prime example. The alternative approach could be to mine an Ellington clone in the offseason, or perhaps scour for a lower-priced alternative, with interest in Marco Belinelli at the trading deadline.
And yet this feels decidedly different than with Damon Jones or Jason Kapono — which could lead to a most taxing decision.