Miami Heat: How Justise Winslow needs to improve in 2019-20

Justise Winslow had a respectable transition to point guard in 2018-19 for the Miami Heat, but he’s got some work to do if he wants to take the next step.

The Miami Heat have a great deal of positional interchangeability up and down the roster. It’s an asset in some cases, but in other cases when forced by injury to force square pegs into round holes, it can cause an uneasy transition. That was the case with Justise Winslow, who found himself starting at point guard for much of the second half of the 2018-19 season.

With Goran Dragic sidelined for 46 games and no natural fit at point guard, head coach Erik Spoelstra turned to Justise Winslow to start at the one. The results were reasonable, especially late in the season when Spoelstra moved Bam Adebayo into the starting lineup in place of Hassan Whiteside, as the ensuing lineup had a sparkling +19.5 net rating in the brief 15 game period it was intact.

That said, Winslow may actually fit better with the reserves over the long haul. The Heat were +2.6 when he was on the floor as a starter, and +6.8 when he played with the reserves. Most important, the Heat are in the positive either way, but optimizing his role remains the tricky part here.

If Winslow is to remain the starting point guard for the Miami Heat, he has some things to work on.

Justise Winslow is in the 14th percentile of pick-and-roll ball handlers, scoring just .638 points per possession. Out of the 200 players who had more than 50 pick-and-rolls last season, Winslow ranked 192nd, and he’s the only played with more than 200 pick-and-rolls to score less than .7 points per possession.

Winslow struggles mightily as a facilitator in ways that go far beyond having just 4.3 assists per game in a season where he was a starting point guard. He has an astronomical turnover rate of 22.8 percent in the pick-and-roll, tied for second with Ricky Rubio among all guards to have 200 or more such possessions.

He has the 70th-best field goal percentage of the 80 players to have that magical 200 PnR possession number at just 39.9 percent.

With Winslow’s early struggles being the lead guard, Spoelstra may already be reaching a crossroads. Does he take the patient route, giving Winslow up to another full season (or more) to acclimate to a position that takes almost every young player a long time to learn, or does he move Winslow off the ball?

If Goran Dragic does opt out, as he’s suggested, there’s no heir apparent. A team already bereft of experienced ball-handlers will be down to whatever Winslow can do, and perhaps a platoon of Dion Waiters and Josh Richardson.

While it may not be preferable to keep pounding this square peg into a round hole in the short term, if the lessons don’t break Justise Winslow, perhaps both he and the Miami Heat will be better off in the long run.