One last move?
Pat Riley faces his toughest challenge retooling Heat.
The center is overpriced, the youth hasn’t bloomed, the salary cap is capped out, they’ve got no draft pick, there’s no money for top free agents, and the Heat appear to a fringe playoff team in a basketball world centered in Golden State and, perhaps this summer, Los Angeles.
Just as few feared — and, perhaps, everyone should have.
So cruel, the business of sports can be, even for the best franchise in town. That’s not saying enough about the Heat, really, because they have three championship trophies in the time since our three other pro teams have sniffed any postseason success.
So this isn’t a time for crushing blame, or a lack of perspective, because even in their down cycle, the team constructed by Heat president Pat Riley was good enough to be the only one in South Florida to make the playoffs this annual cycle, as abbreviated as their series with Philadelphia was.
But this is the time hope gets injected into the NBA. Thursday’s draft is followed by the bigger moves of free agency. It’s just hard to see the Heat more than a bystander for much of this, because of the way yesterday’s moves have hamstrung them.
It’s all so easy to see in retrospect, isn’t it?
The Heat shouldn’t have shipped off two first-round draft picks for Goran Dragic, even if everyone celebrated the idea with good reason at the time. Who could have foreseen Chris Bosh being struck by illness,
his career over, even as Dragic flew into town?
They shouldn’t have signed Tyler Johnson or Hassan Whiteside to crazy contracts, even though they looked like understandable, roll-the-dice gambles at the time. No one looked ahead two years when Johnson would be defined by 11.7 points a game and $19 million for each of the next two years. No one thought Whiteside’s game and a center’s value would shrink in proportion to his maximum, $98 million contract.
The Heat also shouldn’t have bought into the feel-good of a 30-11 finish to the 2017 season, even though it did, well, feel rather good. But the feeling is somewhat different now as those year’s reclamation projects, James Johnson and Dion Waiters, tie up more big money for a few more years.
The valid criticism for the Heat is they quit trusting their ability to find raw talent and polish it up into something noteworthy without falling in love with it. They fell in love with Whiteside and Tyler Johnson one summer, with Waiters and James Johnson another.
That means they can’t really take a big swing coming up in a manner they did in 2010 when they made the playoffs even while guaranteeing a clean, salary cap sheet to recruit The Big Three.
The Los Angeles Lakers underwent a few years of awful in clearing space to make this summer’s run at LeBron James, Paul George and Kawhi Leonard. Golden State was bad for years before striking on a championship core.
It’s tough to have sustained success in sports. It’s even more so in the NBA, where one player can shift a whole franchise. Don’t look at the Heat’s issues in a vacuum to understand that.
Look at San Antonio, which downshifted to commonplace when Leonard missed nearly all the season with an injury. Look even at Oklahoma City. It rolled the dice in a way everyone would have in getting Paul George and Carmelo Anthony and came up with nothing notable to show for it.
It’s hard to see the Heat getting from where it is to anywhere important this summer. But fans of symbolism can hope: Five years ago Monday, Ray Allen hit is miracle shot at the buzzer to send Game 6 of the NBA Finals against San Antonio into overtime and pave the way to the Heat’s third championship.
The Heat needs another miracle shot, this time from a front office that has done it before. More realistically, it needs to lay down a dot or two that can be connected down the line and return them to contention.