After the Miami Heat got a good win to close their road trip on Monday, later that evening, Jake Fischer of Bleacher Report reported that the Dallas Mavericks have “sniffed around” about a possible trade for their Unicorn, Kristaps Porzingis.
Early on Tuesday, Dallas Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban, came out to say that those reports were “not accurate”. However, we all know that players and front office people both lie, so I would take what Cuban said with a grain of salt.
It does beg of a question though. Should Miami see what it would take to land Porzingis from the Dallas Mavericks?
The Miami Heat could stand some help in their painted area and perhaps Kristaps Porzingis is available?
The good thing about current Miami Heat star, Bam Adebayo, is that he can play the four or the five position, depending on who his frontcourt partner is. So that means that the question is does having Porzingis next to Adebayo fit?
I think so. I get that, defensively, Porzingis has struggled this year.
To be frank, he has been an up and down defender throughout his entire career but next to Adebayo, it could help to make up for his mistakes. Porzingis has never played with a big like Bam.
It would take time to get that to work defensively but Kelly Olynyk has played well next to Adebayo the past couple years defensively as a positional defender and that means that at worst, Porzingis could be a decent to good positional defender as well for Miami.
In addition, Porzingis would give Miami some added rim protection besides just Adebayo. Offensively, Porzingis would be in that Meyers Leonard role but it would most likely look like that on steroids.
Leonard was used last year in Miami’s offense as a floor spacer and to set solid screens. Porzingis would be used as a floor spacer in short areas, as a roll man, or what he likes to do the most and the ultimate floor spacing, pop or fade out to the three point line for open looks.
That’s not all though, Porzingis can put the ball on the floor and is an okay driver as well. He can roll to the rim to catch lobs too.
That could be especially this year in Miami’s offense, where dribble handoffs are such a big part of how they operate. Porzingis can do that as well, where Dallas does some dribble handoffs as apart of what they do now with him.
If you’re the Miami Heat, you have to make the call to Dallas to see what it would take to start the discussion, right? With Porzingis’s injury history, you have to take that into consideration as well.
That’s two sided though. The one side is that the Heat have to consider it and be cautious.
The other side is that because of said history, could Miami, relatively, get Porzingis for pennies on the dollar? It’s possible but not likely, as Dallas has always had a solid front office situation.
There’s one more thing with Porzingis though. Before he got traded to Dallas from the New York Knicks, he did have Miami on his “list”, as reported by Marc Stein of the New York Times back in February of 2019.
Take that for what’s it worth. The Miami Heat know they might need something, just like we all think they might, so we’ll see what happens.