Changing gears in a hurry

Heat move immediately from NBA Finals in a bubble to NBA draft

By this stage, calendars practically are obsolete at 601Biscayne Boulevard.

In a year when their appearance in the NBA Finals was completed in October, the Miami Heat now are preparing for an NBA draft in November.

The new normal isn’t normal at all. If anything, when it comes to the draft, it’s practically resuming a process already in progress.

“We’ve had a lot of Zoom meetings,” Chet Kammerer, the Heat’s senior advisor of basketball operations, told the Sun Sentinel. “In July we met, we talked a lot.

“We had a lot of meetings, andwe still do the same process we’ve done for 20 years or more. And we’ve gone through ’em this year.”

Only this year has been like no other, due to the coronavirus pandemic. Assistant general manager Adam Simon, who has taken over as the Heat’s point man

on the draft, only thisweek emerged from three-plus months inside the league’s quarantine bubble at Disney World.

He arrived to yet another twist in the process, with teams now allowed in-person interviews and singleplayer workout sessions with a small group of prospects starting Friday, with that memo sent out to teams thisweek.

Before the NBA’s March 11 shutdown, the planning had been geared toward what was scheduled as a June 25 draft.

Now the draft is scheduled for Nov. 18, with the league reminding that it still reserves the right for another delay.

It wasn’t until the Heat completed their regular season at Disney in August that they were locked into the No. 20 selection.

So now the work is reset and resumes mere days after the Heat on Sunday night were eliminated in Game 6 of the NBA Finals by the Los Angeles Lakers.

“Now, it’s been so long, I’ve been making some phone calls to people I know just tobe refreshed in my thinking about certain players,” Kammerer admitted. “This year’s draft is going to be the hardest by far.”

As with all things Heat, the team has been meticulous and constant in its draft approach during Pat Riley’s quarter-century stewardship of the franchise. That, in recent years, has resulted in the selection of players such as 2020 playoff standouts B am Adebayo and Tyler Herro.

Now that routine has been altered.

“The process, I think, has been excellent for us,” Kammerer said of what had been the team’s scouting and evaluation approach. “During that process, that month we have together [leading to a typical lateJune draft], people move up and people moved own .”

Now there is a degree of sight unseen, at least in person, save for the upcoming hastily organized individual sessions.

“A lot of key players I personally didn’t see,” Kammerer said. “And I wasn’t worried about it because I was [going to] the SEC Tournament. I was going to go to an NCAA regional tournament. Iwas going to go to the Final Four. Iwas going to go to all these agent workouts.

“So I thought, ‘Hey, I’ll be able to home in on these three or four guys who our staff really likes.’ But this year we weren’t able to do that. And it’s tough.

‘‘Tome, it’s hard because I really like to see guys at least live. And when we bring them in, it’s not whether they make the jump shot; it’s what the stroke looks like. And you’re really able to home in when you’re in that setting.”

Because the Heat traded their 2021 first-round pick in the 2015 trade with the Phoenix Suns for Goran Dragic, they must, by NBA rule, exercise a firstround pick this year. That doesn’t preclude an immediate trade. But with plans to eventually return to the cap-space race in free agency, there is something to be said about adding a prospect on the league’s lower-cost rookie scale.

But this year, without tournament play, without an in-person combine and without the typical revolving door of multiplayer workout sat American Airlines Arena, the Heat’s ability to stay ahead of the draft curve figures to be severely tested.

“To me, it’s hard,” Kammerer said. “It’s going to be more difficult.”