Dragic playing like an All-Star in Heat’s surprising playoff run
Along with Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler, Goran Dragic has helped lead the Miami Heat to the Eastern Conference finals against the Celtics in his sixth season with the organization.
When Goran Dragic was traded to the Heat in the middle of the 2014-15 season, the vision behind the move was clear.
Add Dragic to a Heat All-Star core that already included Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade. The organization felt that trio alongside players such as Luol Deng, Hassan Whiteside and Mario Chalmers could contend in the Eastern Conference.
“I was really excited to pair with CB and DWade,” Dragic said reflecting on the early days of his Heat tenure. “Who would have thought what the basketball gods had in store for us?”
Just days after Dragic was traded to the Heat as a 28-year-old up-and-coming guard, Bosh’s season was cut short following just 44 games because of a blood clot issue. A second blood clot diagnosis ended Bosh’s 2015-16 campaign after just 53 games, and he never played another NBA game.
Then Wade left the Heat for the Chicago Bulls as a free agent in the summer of 2016.
In total, the Bosh-Dragic-Wade trio appeared in just 43 games together. The Heat posted a 25-18 record in those games.
“CB went down and
basically we never played together,” Dragic said. “We never had a chance to do something great. Probably this is one of those things that if I had a chance to go back into the past, I would do it and change that.”
But after missing the playoffs in three of his first five seasons with the Heat, Dragic is finally having the team success he envisioned when he was traded to Miami in 2015. The Heat has opened this postseason with an 8-1 record on its way to its first Eastern Conference finals appearance since 2014.
Miami opens the East finals on Tuesday against the Boston Celtics.
“With this team, everything is coming back,” Dragic said. “It’s an unbelievable team, unbelievable people. You can see we’re enjoying everybody else’s success. We’re smiling on the floor and we’re playing for each other.
This is probably one of the funnest seasons that I’ve had in my NBA career.”
Dragic, 34, is now surrounded by a new Heat All-Star duo in Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler and a bunch of young, talented players he’s helping guide through their first NBA playoff experience.
The Adebayo-ButlerDragic combination posted a plus/minus of plus-59 in 475 minutes together in the regular season, and the trio is also a plus-59 in 188 minutes together in the playoffs. In total, they’re a plus-118 in 663 minutes this season.
“You know when you play with some players and you just know what they’re going to do. You know how to read their body language and actions,” Dragic said.
“That’s how I feel with Jimmy, with Bam. Bam and Jimmy, they are some of the smartest players in this league. I think our games complement each other.
“I think that’s something that didn’t just happen. Of course, we put in a lot of basketball hours on the court. But the main thing is communication.”
It helps that Butler and Dragic have become close friends in their first season as teammates.
“I don’t know in my career if I’ve bonded with a player as well as I have with Jimmy. I talk to him a lot,” Dragic said. “We hang out off the floor. I think that makes a huge difference on the court. … What I like about Jimmy is he’s a really nice guy. But when you’re not doing your job, he’s going to tell you up front. He’s not going to talk about you behind your back. He’s going to tell you straight to your face and you can do exactly the same thing to him.”
It also helps that Dragic has played like the Heat’s third All-Star in the playoffs. After averaging 16.2 points on 44.1 percent shooting, 3.2 rebounds and 5.1 assists as Miami’s sixth man in the regular season, Dragic has averaged 21.1 points on 45.8 percent shooting, 4.4 rebounds and 4.7 assists in the playoffs as a starter.
“He’s an All-Star. He’s one of the proven winners in this game,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said of Dragic, who helped lead Slovenia to the EuroBasket championship in 2017.
Dragic, who averaged 10.8 drives to the basket per game in the regular season, is playing a more aggressive style in the postseason. Among remaining players, Dragic has averaged the third most drives per game in the league in the playoffs at 15.8 behind only Los Angeles Clippers forward Kawhi Leonard (18.7 drives) and Houston Rockets guard James Harden (17.7).
The results have been very positive in the NBA’s Disney bubble, with Dragic owning a team-best plus/minus of plus-81 in the playoffs.
“The main reason I’m playing so well and why I’m feeling so great is probably because there’s no traveling on the plane,” said Dragic, whose wife and two children are back in his native Slovenia as the NBA finishes its season at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “I think that has a huge impact on our bodies, especially when you’re 10,000 feet in the air and everything swells up. That’s something that your recovery takes longer. Right now while we’re in the bubble, we have one day between games and that helps a lot.”
That’s especially important for Dragic, who played in a career-low 36 games last season after right knee surgery in December 2018. He had doubts whether he would ever return to form after lingering pain in his knee during training camp in October forced him to miss multiple practices.
“Everybody is battling with their demons,” Dragic said. “One of those demons was my knee because I didn’t know how my knee was going to react. Luckily, the Miami Heat, [head athletic trainer Jay Sabol] and [assistant athletic trainers Brandon Gilliam and Wes Brown], they did an amazing job. They already had experience with D-Wade’s knee. They were telling me, ‘G, this is normal. You just need to get stronger.’
“It takes time to get there. Especially when we started the season in training camp, I would practice and then my knee would swell up and then I had to take a two- or three-day break and do everything again. I just stayed patient, stayed with the program of what I do. After that, maybe one month after training camp, everything went away.”
Dragic said “I didn’t have one problem with my knee” after the regular season began. He missed 14 games, but none were because of his surgically repaired right knee.
Now, Dragic is carrying a heavy workload of 34.7 minutes per game in the playoffs as a starter after averaging 28.2 minutes as a reserve during the regular season. The move to the bench at the start of the season was challenging for Dragic, who started 268 of the 282 regularseason games he played in with Miami prior to 201920, but it helped maximize his minutes while keeping him fresh the entire way.
“If I go back to the meeting with Spo, it was tough,” Dragic recalls.
“He told me: ‘G, I think you should come from the bench this season.’ It hit me in my head like, ‘No. C’mon, I know I can start and I can play a lot of minutes.’ But then I was sad and I was nervous. I said, ‘Look, don’t fight it G. Just go with it.’ I just set a new goal to try to be Sixth Man of the Year. I think that helped me a lot. From there on, I finally found the joy for the game again and it helped me a lot.
“Of course then the playoffs come and Spo again came to me, ‘Hey G, I think you’re going to start.’ I said, ‘Spo, I don’t know about that. I feel comfortable in my role off the bench and everything.’ He said, ‘K-Nunn missed a lot of time here in the bubble. I think we need a little bit more time for him to come back.’ From there, it just happened.”
But all of this almost never happened for Dragic, at least not in a Heat uniform.
Dragic’s name was involved in Heat trade discussions, which would have sent him to the Dallas Mavericks last offseason to free up the necessary cap space to acquire Butler. Dallas believed it was getting Kelly Olynyk and Derrick Jones Jr. in the deal and not Dragic, and that miscommunication led to the Mavericks removing themselves from the trade and Dragic remaining with the Heat.
“You know, never,” Dragic said when asked if he thinks about what would have been if he was dealt to the Mavericks. “I never thought about that because if you start thinking that, you’re all over the place. Yeah, I could get traded. It was close. But there’s no hard feelings. It’s a business. People say, ‘Oh, they tried to trade him.’ So what? Everybody can get traded. I look at it this way: ‘OK, I didn’t get traded. I still have one more shot to be better.’ I always look at it this way. I never look at it like, ‘What if this would have happened? How would my career go?’ It’s not in my thinking. I’m in the present and I’m never in the past or in the future.”
That explains why Dragic is not interested in looking ahead at his impending free agency.
Dragic will be an unrestricted free agent this offseason, with the Heat expected to try to bring him back for at least another year. Miami should have the cap space this offseason to keep Dragic, but finding the room to sign him to a long-term contract will be challenging because the Heat wants to preserve max cap space for 2021.
Would Dragic sign a short-term deal with a higher salary to remain in Miami or is his preference to sign a long-term contract that provides stability at this late stage of his NBA career? That’s still to be determined.
“It’s definitely one of the options, of course,” Dragic said of re-signing with the Heat. “I spent six years here.”
Then Dragic again made it clear that he doesn’t like to look too far ahead.
“I still have a couple of really good years left and we’ll see where this is going to get me,” he said. “I’m just focused on right now. I really think that we have a good chance of a championship, to get to the Finals and just be focused day by day. Then when this is over, then be ready for the next stage.”
But when asked to look back at his entire Heat tenure, Dragic obliged. It has been an unpredictable ride, and this season’s conference finals appearance is just the latest twist in his Heat experience.
“I would not change anything in these six years,” Dragic said. “This is part of life. You’re going to go through some challenges, some rough times, good times. I always say, if you work hard and if you’re honest to your craft to basketball, something good is going to happen at some point of your career. I’m just happy that I stayed for so long here and developed great friendships, great teammates to be part of this beautiful story.”