Trade deadline is personal for Heat
This time it’s personal for the Miami Heat.
This time, even with the recent losses, there also would be a sense of loss if Thursday’s NBA trading deadline cuts into the core of the team that advanced within two victories of last season’s championship.
A year ago at the deadline, Heat president Pat Riley and general manager Andy Elisburg excised a fifth of the roster in a deal with the Memphis Grizzlies.
The difference was Justise Winslow already was away from the team with a back injury, seemingly having mentally checked out. Dion Waiters was just weeks removed from his third team suspension, clearly wanting out. And James Johnson was reduced to nominal minutes, on the outside of the rotation for months.
Each basically already had a foot out the door.
This time, the speculation amid the countdown to Thursday’s 3 p.m. deadline has included names that have been instrumental in the franchise’s resurrection, from Tyler Herro to Duncan Robinson to Kendrick Nunn, and even the player who was a centerpiece addition at last year’s deadline: Andre Iguodala.
That doesn’t mean that any will be traded, just that their names have been linked to possible Heat deals for Kyle Lowry, Victor Oladipo and others.
With the Heat a .500 team on a fourgame losing streak, nothing is a given beyond the untouchable status of Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo.
But even those two are impacted by the emotions and uncertainty of who will be alongside come Thursday night’s game at AmericanAirlines Arena against the Portland Trail Blazers.
“It’s one of those things where business is business,” Adebayo said. “But at the end of the day, a lot of guys got families and they want to be here. They want to win. But it’s a business at the end of day.”
A personal business. “Everybody knows it’s business at the end of the day,” Adebayo said, “but I feel like it’s a lot of dudes scrolling on social media. And people are probably saying, “You should be traded’ and ‘You got to be out of there.’
“So it’s probably a lot of extra weight on their shoulders.”
Nunn said there has been so much of a whirlwind in the standings that trade concerns have been put aside.
“We haven’t focused on the trade aspect of the game,” he said. “We’re just trying to come up with a win each game. We go out and put the previous game in the past, and we try to focus on what’s here in front of us.”
But now what is in front, with the team given Wednesday off, is the trade deadline, a crossroads like few others in the team’s 33 seasons. The Oladipo speculation has been loud for months, the Lowry speculation even louder in recent days.
“The guys have to go through this every single year,” coach Erik Spoelstra said. “And it just gets noisier and noisier ever year.
It is much different than it was 20 years ago, just the amount of rumors.
“But that’s part of being a professional in this business, is learning how to compartmentalize. Our group does a very good job of that.”
But with the offense a mess in recent weeks, including in Tuesday night’s noncompetitive 110-100 home loss to the Phoenix Suns, cohesion may already be lacking. Butler, for example, declined to meet with the media after Wednesday night’s loss, leaving the explaining to Adebayo and Nunn.
“It’s exhausting because we know we’re not playing to our capabilities,” Nunn said. “So of course it’s exhausting when we lose games that we know we should have won. We’ll get things together though.”