Playing chess game
Winslow adjusting game after opponents figure him out at point guard spot
Justise Winslow is making his second pass through the batting order, with opponents beginning to catch on to this curveball Erik Spoelstra tossed into the Miami Heat mix two months ago.
Practically a revelation when he stepped in for an ailing Goran Dragic in December at point guard, Winslow, like the Heat, has leveled off, with a decision by Spoelstra soon due with Dragic expected return from his knee surgery after this weekend’s All-Star break.
“I’m sure that they’re treating him with a different level of detail,” Spoelstra said. “Not to the point where, I think, that’s taken him out of being productive. For Justise to be productive, the unit has to be efficient.”
When the Heat conclude their fivegame trip with Wednesday night’s game against the Dallas Mavericks at American Airlines Arena Center, it will be against another hybrid playmaker, with forward Luka Doncic so efficient that Dallas offloaded point guard Dennis Smith at last
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To this point, the league largely has failed to catch up to the savvy 19-year-old Doncic, who arrived to the NBA with years of professional experience with Real Madrid.
By contrast, Winslow, 22, only over these past two months has he been able to explore his possibilities as a professional playmaker.
And only now is the league going to school.
“They’re still letting me shoot versus letting me get to the hole,” he said, despite upgraded consistency with his 3-point shot. “They’re still going under. They’re still not pressuring me. They’re still letting me shoot it.
“But it’s really just different action. I think they’re just getting used to guarding me in different actions. trading deadline. Instead of me being the screener so much, I’m the handler. So they’re just getting used to it.”
Winslow said it feels as if he has been through this before, from when he first entered the NBA in 2015 as a mostly unknown commodity after only a single season at Duke, albeit a championship season.
“It’s just like playing against a rookie,” he said. “You don’t know a rookie’s tendencies until kind of like their second year. A lot of people say rookies have great years. And then they say the real test is kind of the second year, once guys start getting used to it.
“I think I’m starting to go through that. Teams that we’re playing repeatedly are getting used to it. But luckily it’s kind of halfway through the year. So a lot of teams we play, we don’t play that many times more.”
But there will be enough common opponents to necessitate adjustments, and more nights like Monday night’s 103-87 loss to the Denver Nuggets when he played without a single assist on a 6-of-16 night from the field.
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s kind of like going through your progressions. You learn how to do a move, then you learn how to do a counter to the move. Then you learn how to read, when to use you counter, that sort of thing.
“So I think it’s more me than on the defense. It’s more me just reading the defense than the defense just really changing. There haven’t been too many changes, I think, thus far.”
For the most part, the adjustment has been eased by opponents defending him with forwards, just as Winslow mostly still defends opposing forwards. That has minimized crossmatches.
“It really hasn’t been hard for me,” he said. “A lot of time I guard the guy who has been guarding me. That really hasn’t hard to adjust to.” Spoelstra agreed. “There’s a lot less of it in today’s league,” Spoelstra said. “Now you’re dealing with the cross-match at the five. Mostly everybody else league-wide is relatively position-less.”
As he has grown more comfortable in this new role, Winslow said there have been fewer second glances to the bench for play calls.
“I think it’s more reads,” he said. “This game is super fast and there’s not a lot of times where your head coach can tell you exactly how it’s going to happen. You kind of have to read it. He’s given me a lot of freedom to make the right reads.”
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