Miami Heat: Three HUGE reasons they won’t acquire Blake Griffin
Over the last few days, Blake Griffin to the Miami Heat trade speculation has been circulating around the NBA atmosphere. Here’s why it will dissipate.
Huge salary-Have you seen Blake’s contract?
One of the first things you look to when thinking about a trade in professional sports, and especially for the Miami Heat, are the salaries. How will they align? Which team or teams are taking on the most salary?
Can said team afford to pay said salary and potentially add more pieces? How will this effect the salary cap moving forward?
These are all pertinent questions, and even more so when talking about a player such as Blake Griffin. Over the next three seasons, Griffin has an elevating salary of $34 million, $36 million, and almost $39 million dollars in the final year of a 5-year, $173 million deal he signed before leaving the Los Angeles Clippers.
Even though he averaged 24.5 points on around 46 percent shooting, 7.5 rebounds, and 5.4 rebounds this past season for the Detroit Pistons, the Miami Heat can’t afford to absorb such a contract. Being capped-strapped as it is, doing so would be an exercise in redundancy, putting them back in said position while also being unable to build around him at all.
Huge Haul-The Miami Heat would have to empty the cupboards
When thinking about what it would take to get Blake Griffin in a trade, that is exhausting. Exhausting indeed, and for more reasons than one.
If you take a look at the Miami Heat’s current roster, they do have some relatively bad contracts that they may be looking to move off of. However, in order to pry Blake away, it would take everything the Heat have of value to make absorbing some of those contracts worth it for potential trade partners.
Attaining Blake alone isn’t worth moving everything of value to the Miami Heat to do so. Furthermore, even if it meant getting off of contracts such as Dion Waiters, James Johnson, or Hassan Whiteside, it still wouldn’t be worth it. Those deals are for much less individually, and they all expire before Blake Griffin’s does.
Huge Potential-Blake meet BAM..BAM meet Blake
To start here, Bam Adebayo is currently not the player that Blake Griffin is. What he is however is a much younger player with similar athletic abilities and skills, and the potential to still develop into a really good player in his own right.
More likely than not, acquiring Blake Griffin would require moving Bam Adebayo as a part of said deal. Even if it didn’t, Blake would more than likely stunt the development of Adebayo. Not that Griffin and Adebayo couldn’t play together, but one would like to think that Adebayo is best suited to be the “Blake” of a lineup.
Blake Griffin is a smooth, athletic and skilled big who is physical enough to guard bigger guys. Sounds a lot like Adebayo. Although and again, Adebayo still has a ton of development to do before being considered in Blake’s class, he has all the potential to develop into that type of player.
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Speculation be darned, it will let you down every time. Sort of anti-climatic even, in the way a certain popular medieval T.V. show was during a supposed epic battle. Either way you see it, those are a few HUGE reasons why this trade just won’t happen.