The Miami Heat look to be set for next season, but there remains a free agent with lots of buzz on the market. Should the Heat make a play for Joe Jo hnson?
The Miami Heat weren’t able to get a deal done with guys like Kawhi Leonard or Kevin Durant this summer, but there has been a recent addition to the free agent market who has created plenty of his buzz over the last couple of weeks. Former Miami Heat player, 7-time All-Star and 17-year NBA veteran Joe Johnson is that man everybody wants these days.
Johnson is coming off an impressive performance in the BIG3, a 3-on-3 league populated mostly by former NBA players. He was named league MVP for his performance with the Triplets, an expansion team in its first season in the league, and he hit the league championship-winning shot to take home the BIG3 title for his team.
He averaged 21.9 points per game, shot 48.5 percent from the floor, 39 percent from 3-point range and made 4 of his 8 4-point attempts (that’s right, the BIG3 has a 4-point shot). These are impressive numbers at any stake, but it’s important to remember this is a league played in the half court and spacing is artificially inflated as a result of the reduced number of players on the floor and the threat of the 4-pointer.
Joe Johnson has been getting attention around the NBA with tryouts for the Philadelphia 76ers, LA Clippers, Denver Nuggets and New Orleans Pelicans already in the books, and tryouts scheduled for the coming week with the Detroit Pistons and Brooklyn Nets and Milwaukee Bucks.
Johnson has been out of the league for two years, with his last action in the NBA split between the Utah Jazz and the Houston Rockets in 2017-18. In that final season he played 55 games, averaging 21.9 minutes per appearance. He shot just 40.6 percent from the floor and 27.6 percent from 3-point range.
Mind you, between 2005 and 2017, he did hit an impressive 38 percent from long range, and in 2016-17 he played 78 games and hit 41.1 percent from 3-point range. While it’s difficult to evaluate how BIG3 performance will translate to the NBA, it’s safe to say he probably still has that shooting touch, and the Miami Heat are a team that needs that shooting touch quite a bit.
There’s a catch if the Heat want to make a move for Joe Johnson’s services. They have a full roster and they’re right up against the hard cap with just $965,000 to spare, which means they would need to make a trade to shed salary just to accommodate what would likely be a minimum salary for Johnson.
They also have the option of waiving Kendrick Nunn‘s non-guaranteed contract. This would clear almost $1.3 million which creates enough space. However, Nunn is coming off a tremendous Summer League performance, and Joe Johnson is 14 years older than Nunn, and that makes such a move considerably less favorable.
Johnson is definitely worth a look and a number of teams could probably justify signing him, but it’s not the best move for the Miami Heat.