Heat swimming upstream this offseason
Sometimes you have to know your place and the time.
When it came to Thursday’s NBA draft, it was Chris Riley who had the better sense of circumstance.
When it comes to NBA free agency, it is her husband, Pat Riley, who appreciates the moment.
In advance of Thursday’s draft, a process the Miami Heat entered without a selection, Chris Riley saw no need to put off a “see-you-later-alligator” pool party Friday for grandson Conner and 22 kids.
“My wife went ahead and set the pool party,” the Heat’s president/life guard said. “I said, ‘Chris, we might have a press conference for 1 o’clock. How am I going to be able to do this?’ ”
Chris knew. There was no Heat trade for a selection, just a Friday soaking at the Riley residence.
Next comes the July 1 start of free agency, a process that will begin with the Heat not only lacking salary-cap space, but so hard against the punitive NBA luxury tax that spending the midlevel exception could even prove problematic.
That could mean time for more pool parties at Casa Riley.
“You know me,” Riley said as his team’s focus shifted from the draft to free agency. “I sat down with a lot of guys at midnight [July 1] since 2010. I’m not sure there’s going to be midnight meetings.”
It will be a decidedly different summer for a Heat team that feasted on cap cash last summer, extending deals at $50 million or more to James Johnson, Kelly Olynyk and Dion Waiters, moves essentially required in advance of Tyler Johnson’s salary bumping from $5.8 million last season to $19.2 million next season.
“I don’t know if there’s going to be any midnight meetings,” Riley said, after wooing LeBron James at the start of free agency in 2014, Kevin Durant in 2016 and Gordon Hayward last summer.
“This might not be the year for us to do that,” he said. “But we will plan. We’re already planning for the future like we did 2006 for 2010, and 2014 as soon as LeBron left. We were in it with Durant. We were in it for Hayward.
“I don’t think we’re going to be in it that way because we can’t. We don’t have the cap space and we’re up against the tax, so we have to do some other things in reversing that direction, and sometimes you have to go through that.
“And at the same time you go through it, we believe that we’re a playoff team and that we can get better. And, so, I think there are other teams that feel the same way.”
Even with the buzz about James, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, Riley said it could nonetheless prove to be a mostly copacetic NBA summer, at least when it comes to Heat impact, with a chance of all three winding up with Western Conference teams and with the draft hardly changing the face of the East.
“If you look at all the teams that have room out there, a lot of those teams obviously are not the teams that are in contention,” he said. “There’s only two teams that could really be players, Philadelphia and maybe L.A. [Lakers], but there’s a lot of other teams out there that I’m not so sure they want to spend the kind of dollars right now that they spent in 2016.”
The brush that has painted the Heat the past two offseasons largely — and also mostly unfairly — has been one of failure, even with the remote chances of adding Durant or Hayward.
“Aggressive summers are free-agent summers, are room summers, are summers when you know you have either cap space or tax space to be able to really pursue somebody,” Riley said. “We’re up against the tax. We all know what the accounting situation is with us.
“So, when you’re a freeagent player like we have been since 2006, 2010, you go after Kevin Durant. It was a long shot and we always thought big. You go after Hayward. We’ve always thought big.
“As soon as it didn’t happen with Hayward, we went right to Plan B and I think that’s where we are.”
That doesn’t mean that pie-in-the-sky options will be summarily dismissed, only that the pursuits will be measured, last summer very much designed to set the blueprint for next season, and perhaps even the season after.
“We look at this as maybe a two-year run,” Riley said. “We’re a playoff team. We’re a playoff contender. How are we going to improve? It’s going to be from within or the possibility of some transaction that might happen. It’s not going to be easy.
“I think, yes, this could be — not a passive summer — but it might not be the kind of summer that you may think that something big can happen from that standpoint. And I think that’s the same way for a lot of teams, I really do.”
This time, instead of diving into the process, Riley well could leave it to others to sink or swim.