Miami Heat: A Bold prediction for Meyers Leonard in the 2019-20 season

One of the newest members of the Miami Heat is Meyers Leonard. Here is a bold prediction for the seven-foot flamethrower in this upcoming season.

The Miami Heat were in a very tricky place as this offseason began, a place that got even trickier as they tried to make the Jimmy Butler acquisition work. They had a seemingly disgruntled big on their roster, he who is not to be named, while also lacking the essential cap space to sign a big-name free agent outright.

Well as it may be, those two issues not only seemingly solved themselves, but had a certain mutual synthesis about them in their execution. The Miami Heat were able to acquire Jimmy Butler by moving Josh Richardson to the Philadelphia 76ers, but after the initial deal fell through that included the Dallas Mavericks, they had to rework some things.

The reworked and revised deal allowed them to kill another bird, so to speak, with that very same stone. They concocted a scenario that brought the L.A. Clippers and the Portland Trail Blazers into the fold. The Trail Blazers would send Moe Harkless and Meyers Leonard to Miami in exchange for he who is not to be named, while the Heat would then turn around and ship Harkless to the Clippers along with a future draft pick.

This was a net positive for the Miami Heat however because not only did it allow them to attain Butler, but it brought a guy back in Leonard who could fill a need and a role that the aforementioned unnamed could never fill, that of a floor-spacing big. That leads right into Leonard’s prediction though, here goes nothing.

Meyers Leonard will be one of the top three-point shooters for the Miami Heat this season

That’s right, you read it correctly. Leonard shot 45 percent from distance on last season, a staggering number, although he only averaged 1.8 attempts per game during last year’s regular season. He flashed his talents to the max during the Trail Blazers’ playoff run, where he shot 42.4 percent from deep on four three-point attempts per game.

This marksmanship is what allowed him to go off for the Blazers during their series against Golden State from this past season’s playoffs. He went for 30 points, 12 rebounds, 3 assists, a steal, and a block in the game in which they were eliminated by the Warriors, this after logging five DNP’s and a grand total of 168 minutes and 48 seconds out of a possible 768 minutes that his team played in the playoffs.

Although his percentage would have ranked him as the best three-point shooter on the Miami Heat’s team last season by far, his attempts would have ranked 12th. This season, not only will he rank in the top three on the team percentage-wise, but he will also rank in the top five on the team in attempts per game. That is how he will become one of the top three-point shooters for the Heat.

Not only should the coaches implore him to shoot, due to the need for outside shooting and scoring in general, but he should see ample opportunity to do so considering his very unique combination of size and skill set. This should allow him to see a ton of minutes because he really doesn’t have a bad pairing as far as who he could possibly be playing with.

Whether he slots in beside Bam Adebayo, Kelly Olynyk, James Johnson, the gloriously returning Heat Lifer in Udonis Haslem or Derrick Jones Jr., he fits because of his size and shooting abilities to space the floor. That is why this is his bold prediction for this upcoming season.