Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Heat doing more than buying time with 2nd unit
Miami bench earning trust of Spoelstra
NEW ORLEANS — “Oh, no” time seemingly has turned into go time for the Miami Heat.
No longer does a sense of doom permeate the outlook when coach Erik Spoelstra goes stretches without either Bam Adebayo or Jimmy Butler on the floor.
Instead, with upgraded play from Goran Dragic and Kelly Olynyk, and with the arrival of Jae Crowder and Andre Iguodala, the Heat have developed a quartet that can be airlifted into a game without a sense of the air being sucked out of the room.
“We bring that energy. We play together,” Dragic said ahead of Friday night’s game against the New Orleans Pelicans at Smoothie King Center. “Jae and Iggy, they now finally know the system, and it’s so much easier to play.”
Iguodala and Crowder not only have ingrained themselves from a strategic standpoint since their arrival at the Feb. 6 NBA trading deadline, but also an energetic one.
“Me and Jae,” Dragic said, “we’ve communicated a lot. Especially when we’re on the bench, you can see the game differently. Me and him, we’re talking, ‘We need to bring that energy.’ That’s what we want to bring with the second unit, that pace, that we play with a lot of energy.”
Even with the recent success, the approach with the second unit likely will be fluid, with Tyler Herro and Meyers Leonard working back from ankle injuries. That could have Herro and even Derrick Jones Jr. back in the reserve mix.
For now, familiarity has been fast tracked.
For Crowder, the adjustment to the second unit has been eased by the two-plus seasons he spent alongside Olynyk with the Celtics.
“It’s pretty much the same style of offense, with the ball movement we had in Boston, but more so here, I would say, free reign just to play off one an another and read and react off one and another,” Crowder said.
“I think with us having that chemistry, it’s been working pretty well. We definitely have some type of chemistry playing with each other for two years.”
The irony is that even though he arrived with Iguodala from the Memphis Grizzlies at the trade deadline, Crowder and Iguodala had not played together, with Iguodala sitting out the start of the season until he could be rerouted. Now, Crowder typically enters moments before he is joined late in the first quarter by Iguodala. At that point, the quartet of Dragic, Olynyk, Crowder and Iguodala is fully set in motion, alongside one of the starters, typically Duncan Robinson.
“I mean, obviously we know then that the whole second unit is there, on the court,” Crowder said. “We do want to change the game. We talk about it. We talk about what we need. And we look at the first six minutes of the game and how it’s been played, and we try to bring what we’ve been lacking, and keep up where we’re doing good.
“We talk about it on the bench. We definitely have a mindset, going into the game, checking in, that we want to change the game in the right way.”
Often changing it with 3-point shooting.
“KO, he can shoot, I can shoot, Jae can shoot, Duncan and Iggy,” Dragic said. “So we’ve got basically five guys who can spread it around the three. And from there on, we can put the ball on the floor.”