The Miami Heat are saddled with a shortened roster and have just a single season of Dwyane Wade remaining, but what is the team’s biggest concern?
The start of the NBA season is usually a time for frivolity.
Teams embrace their rosters’ fresh legs as game scores sore into the stratosphere, while players thought too decrepit to perform, provide flashbacks to yesteryear. With 82 games to look forward to, the start of the NBA season is a limitless well of potential.
The Miami Heat have drawn from that well at least a handful of times already.
Rodney McGruder, a former starter in the 2016-17 campaign, has regained and surpassed his former glory, just as Hassan Whiteside has stowed his once problematic attitude securely and in an upright position, out of sight of the AmericanAirlines Arena.
But sometimes, that limitless potential makes for overwhelming situations.
Teams have too many fresh legs. Players take too many wild shots. Adrenaline runs high through the season’s first month and things that were thought safe six games in to the year—like head coaching positions—are tossed aside recklessly.
The Heat have been hit with that overwhelming force as well.
Injuries, a familiar story in South Beach, have kept Miami from fielding its full set of players, leaving head coach Erik Spoelstra to clip the rotation to about nine guys per night.
Only eight players on Miami’s roster have played in all seven of the team’s games. If this were April, that’d be perfectly acceptable.
Come playoff time, rosters shorten, and feelings get hurt. It’s the price of doing business in the NBA. When the playoffs roll around, teams are expected to be well oiled machines.
A seven-game series seems like a lot, but basketball’s momentum-based nature sways in favor of the team not prone to infighting and incorporating new pieces.
For the Miami Heat, infighting is not the problem.
Rather, incorporating players upon return from injury might set the team back farther than it has already fallen.
Although James Johnson, Dion Waiters and Wayne Ellington are all inching closer to their returns, their reintegration in Miami’s roster is a problem the team needs to have sooner, rather than later.
The perils of reintegration are currently exemplified with the Boston Celtics.
Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward have taken the parquet floor at the Boston Garden, but they’ve yet to hit their strides, on what some considered the best team in the East.
Through seven games, Irving is averaging a career-low 16.4 points per game and is making 3’s at a 30 percent clip, also the lowest in his career.
Hayward’s story is similar, as he and his reconstructed ankle are trying to figure out exactly how to fit with the Celtics.
Boston, however, is lucky, because it begins the year able to iron out such problems. Assuming they stay healthy, Irving and Hayward will play plenty together and figure things out as the season progresses.
But in Miami’s case, the piecemeal insertion of players will inevitably create stumbling blocks in the way of Miami’s progression.
Looking back at the Boston example, Irving and Hayward, despite the rough start, know how their roles will develop in Boston. They are relied upon for pacing the offensive effort as the transcendent, All-Star forces they are.
In Miami however, the reincorporation of Johnson, Waiters and Ellington will leave Spoelstra with rotational issues. The Heat can’t plug in any of their returning players, without impacting the role of the current roster.
Johnson’s minutes will surely take time away from Kelly Olynyk or Justise Winslow. Ellington could depose Richardson or McGruder. The roster’s flexibility will increase, no doubt, but its increased variation could introduce too many options as the season continues.
Miami already experienced this problem in the 2018 playoffs.
Despite having defined roles for up and down the roster, Miami ran 11-deep in the postseason and subsequently was left trying to figure out how to stifle a seven- or eight-man nucleus, in the Philadelphia 76ers.
Spoelstra is acutely aware of the forthcoming rotation storm and has a candid perspective on the matter.
"“I’ll do my job and I’ll pencil in, and I’ll communicate as much as possible,” Spoelstra told the Miami Herald. And when it’s tip-off, we’re going to do and play whoever we think gives us the best opportunity for that night. And I’m not perfect either. I’ll make mistakes.”"
Having depth in the regular season is great, but unless Miami can find a way to trim the fat, then fans could be looking at a team that fails to nail down its core once again.