Miami Heat: Worst case scenarios for the Heat in 2019-20

The Miami Heat suffered through their own worst case scenario last season. The roster they have constructed has potential to struggle even more next season.

The Miami Heat had a season to forget for a lot of reasons last year. With what seemed like countless man-games lost to injury for key contributors like Goran Dragic, Justise Winslow, Dion Waiters, James Johnson and Josh Richardson, there were no lucky breaks for the Heat to catch from the moment the season tipped off in October until it ended for them in April.

The Heat took steps to add talent this summer in acquiring Jimmy Butler from the Philadelphia 76ers on the first night of free agency, but the sign-and-trade mechanism with which they picked him up made it difficult for them to add back-end depth. In fact, thanks to being hard-capped, their depth largely consists of the same minimum contract players they had last season, and their mid-tier talent remains the same injury-prone cast of characters it consisted of in 2018-19.

While we can simply take an optimistic approach and hope for better things in the future, a more realistic perspective suggests there is really no reason to expect a crew that couldn’t stay healthy a year ago could stay off the injury report another year older. In addition, Jimmy Butler has a reputation for durability but has only played more than 67 games twice in his career, and the first time was before he was even a full-time starter.

Butler’s addition to the Miami Heat roster is even more fraught with danger than the mere possibility of injury risk. He has had a tendency to grate on teammates, especially when his teams are losing, and there’s no reason to think this stop will be any different if things go badly in the early stages of the season.

In fact, with the somewhat low ceiling the Heat expect to have, chances are pretty good that Butler will have frustrating times in Miami, and we’ll simply have to wait and see how he responds to those and whether he makes them worse as he relates to his teammates.

There’s no doubt that Jimmy Butler was a high-risk, high-reward acquisition for the Miami Heat, and as long as team president Pat Riley, head coach Erik Spoelstra and the rest of the organization are prepared to deal with the potential fallout, the blockbuster trade for his services was likely still a risk worth taking.