The Miami Heat are a living billboard for the G-League’s success
The Miami Heat are a really good team this season, heavily due to the sum of their parts. Quite a few of those parts, however, were one day in the G-League.
The Miami Heat are an organization that has long been known to be able to find talent anywhere. While they are just as adept as any other NBA franchise and organization as finding talent through the typical and traditional vehicles of finding and acquiring talent, the NBA draft or Free Agency, they have also mastered the ability to take nontraditional routes towards finding great talent.
The Miami Heat are not only great at finding this talent, but they also succeed post-discovery for the most part. While this success is heavily associated with the fact that the Miami Heat have high expectations of their players, they are able to have this success nonetheless.
With these thoughts in mind though, it brings one to another amazing thought. The Miami Heat are a living billboard for the NBA’s G-League. If you compiled a list of former G-Leaguers based on the Miami Heat’s roster, and even more specifically at the players that make a meaningful impact for them on a game in and game out basis, that list would be quite the hefty one.
Derrick Jones Jr, Kendrick Nunn, and Duncan Robinson have all spent considerable time in the NBA’s developmental league. Miami Heat swingman and a recent draft pick, KZ Okpala, has played a few games there as well as two-way guy Daryl Macon, but you also have to include the supposed “two-way” guy in Chris Silva. I have the least bit of doubt that Silva will never see Sioux Falls.
You also have to expect that based on the past performance and track record of the Heat’s developmental system and their player acquisitions, that Okpala and Macon will one day turn out to be at least half-decent NBA players. You also have to give credence to the fact that although the Heat saw enough in Silva to bring him into their system and into what was thought to be their developmental system, they were so right in their belief, providing how well he’s played, that they haven’t been able to bring themselves to send him down!
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Regardless of your opinion, the facts are the facts. The Miami Heat flat out know what they are doing when it comes to acquiring talent, developing players, and how to go about it using their G-League or developmental league affiliate. That is why the Miami Heat are a living advertisement and endorsement of the NBA’s G-League.