Miami Heat: Pat Riley will take the right approach with expiring contracts

The Miami Heat are in salary cap purgatory. With a few player-options potentially on the books for next season that also happen to be expiring contracts, Pat Riley will optimize the situation.

When looking at the Miami Heat salary cap for next season, things don’t seem that promising at first glance. If you take a look at the payroll for next season, you will notice that they are already over the salary cap threshold.

What makes this even worse is the fact that this current iteration of the team has seemingly reached its peak. With player options coming up for Hassan Whiteside and Goran Dragic, that also just happen to be the last years on their particular deals, what could Pat Riley possibly do to make this team better for this upcoming season?

If you take a long view of the situation, one possibility starts to become clear. If something has been proven true over time, it’s that Pat Riley is among the best executives in the NBA. This is where he would once again remind the NBA world.

Let’s move ahead to next season, more specifically, let’s move up to next season’s trade deadline. If both Whiteside and Dragic were to accept their player options for next season, he would then be able to move one or preferably both of these expiring contracts for an impending free agent next season or even in 2021

If you take a look at a few of the names with potential for free agency at the end of next season, you’ll come up with names like Anthony Davis, Ben Simmons, Mike Conley, DeMar DeRozan, Pascal Siakam, and quite a few others. If you look even further towards the end of the 2021 season, there will be players like Paul George, Victor Oladipo, or Jrue Holiday, and that’s just to name a few. Not that the Miami Heat will be able to hand-pick a deal to acquire their choice of the players mentioned above, but this says that there will be options out there.

If you take an even longer view of things, Pat Riley could choose to put his patience on display for the world to see. This would the case if both Whiteside and Dragic chose to opt-in to their player options, while the Miami Heat simply decided to run it back with this past seasons roster.

As mentioned, this current roster has seemingly maxed out on its potential, essentially having been the same for the past two seasons, to only achieve very similar yet disappointing results. It wouldn’t be all that bad though, as it guarantees two things. The first would be that there is a positive image of the Miami Heat front office heading into next seasons free agency due to them sticking with the guys they had signed, but it would also give the Heat quite a bit of cap space at the end of next season as these deals and the money for Ryan Anderson would come off the books.

Taking an optimistic view of things, one or both of Whiteside and Dragic could opt out of their player options before the June deadline this year. If this were to happen, it would give the Miami Heat a bit of cap room, although it wouldn’t be enough to totally remake the team.

If this were to occur, it would allow them to tinker a bit with the current roster, while possibly adding one free agent with a bit of cap gymnastics. This would probably be the most desired outcome if Pat Riley were being honest, but he would never admit it publicly.

Regardless of what the outcome is, in Pat Riley the Miami Heat trust. There could be worse names to have trust in however because Pat Riley will do what gives the Miami Heat the best chances of getting back to title contention as quickly as possible.