Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Next up for Heat
No pick, but team’s in the game for the draft on June 21.
If you’re looking for a Miami Heat scout these days, there’s a good chance you’ll find him in Seat 5B or connecting in Atlanta or answering the age-old question of, “Peanuts or pretzels?”
Such is life when you don’t have a selection in either round of the June 21NBA draft but insist on remaining in the game.
Without a pick for the second time in three years, the Heat are reverting to the approach they implemented in 2016, when they also were without a selection:
If the prospects won’t come to the Heat, then the Heat will go to the prospects.
This week that will have Heat scouts in Bradenton, New York City, Atlanta and Myrtle Beach, for workouts staged by agents and trainers. Next week, the Heat’s scouting staff is scheduled to attend seven workout showcases in the Los Angeles area and then another in Las Vegas.
The preferred pre-draft approach is to invite small groups of prospects, typically six at a time, to your own practice facility for drills and court work, followed by conversations over dinner. But the lesson from previous times without draft picks is a lack of bouncing balls.
“Invariably,” Heat vice president of player personnel Chet Kammerer said, “what would happen in the past is we would have a player we liked and we had him coming in at such and such a date. You usually want six guys, so you really have a player that you really wanted and you have fillers. And so
what happens is you get them ready and like the day or two before they’re set to come in for the workouts, ‘Well, we’ve got chance to work out for Milwaukee. They have the 38th pick; you have none. So we’re going to Milwaukee.’ And you’re left hanging.
“So what we have found out to do and we’re going to do this year and even next week, we’re going to go to like six different pro workouts. And we’re even splitting up as a staff to cover them all.”
With a goal of turning the sessions into their own.
“And we go there not only to watch that workout, but we also would use that as a mini-Chicago, where we interview players,” Kammerer said of mimicking the approach of the just completed Chicago pre-draft camp, when a Heat contingent that included Pat Riley, Andy Elisburg, Erik Spoelstra, Kammerer and the rest of the team’s scouting staff interviewed 20 prospects. “It’s not us running the workouts, but we’re going to get to look at as many people as we can among our staff.
“And those that we are totally unfamiliar with, we will try to set up a time when we can interview the player and get to know them on the personal side some time during that day.”
While the stakes are higher when the Heat search comes loaded with a lottery pick, such as utilizing the No. 10 pick in 2015 on Justise Winslow or the No.14 pick last year on Bam Adebayo, Kammerer said times such as these are more challenging when assessing the 60 potential selections over the draft’s two rounds.
“It’s almost more difficult not having a pick than it is when you know you have one at a certain spot,” he said. “And the reason I say that is it kind of makes the task larger, because you don’t know what you have and you have to be prepared for at least three different scenarios.
“Probably the three areas we focus in on as a staff would be something that gets us in the 20s if we made a trade of some sort. The second would be something which we have looked almost every year, and that is the possibility of coming after a pick in the 30s or late 30s or somewhere in there, where you can purchase a pick. You got to be ready for something in the 30s. And then one we’ve done almost every year is trying to pick out the 61st first pick. And everybody laughs at that. But you realize that a lot of times we’ve been fortunate enough to pick players for our summer-league team that turn around and become players worth our roster.”
With that, scouts from Eric Amsler to Keith Askins to Bob McAdoo have their assignments in hand. The challenge remains to assess what is available, with Riley, Elisburg, Nick Arison and Micky Arison then to decide whether there will be a buy-in, be it a trade for a first-round pick, the purchase of a second-round pick or enough of a partial guarantee to attract the best available talent beyond the 60 selections on June 21 in Brooklyn.
“We’ve got our schedule for the next two weeks,” Kammerer said. “We’re splitting up our staff. We’re going to be everywhere.”