Miami Heat: What to make of Precious Achiuwa’s Rookie Season?
Miami Heat forward, Precious Achiuwa, didn’t have a traditional rookie on-boarding and it’s showed.
As Achiuwa mentions, his draft class has come into an unprecedented situation. Fueled by the pandemic caused by covid-19, the NBA was forced to re-work a lot of things about their season, traditionally.
While one of those things was, most certainly, the NBA Draft in itself, another was the acclimation process. When you think about rookies in the league and though many don’t think this detailed, they are constantly stepping up, by tier, the level of competition that typically leads to an NBA season.
With no summer league, play against other NBA hopefuls , younger guys, and rookies, and then no real other team activities and preseason, more play against guys that aren’t necessarily regular pros but a step up from summer league competition, it’s really not a huge shocker that he has hit some bumps in the road during his rookie season.
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That’s the first part, as Achiuwa mentioned. This season wasn’t typical and though rookies “learn on the fly” all the time, they aren’t expected to totally have to do so as this crop was.
The second part is all on the Miami Heat. They didn’t do their work prior to the season start, which meant that they were then forced to see if Achiuwa could be a pertinent part of the rotation.
They needed another power player in that particular rotation and Achiuwa was the guy they tried to use there. It didn’t really work out, as he has since seen his time diminish since the arrival of Trevor Ariza and Dewayne Dedmon, especially, for the Miami Heat.
Again though, not a ton of that and if any at all, is on Achiuwa. While he has some things he needs to get better at, such as catching to finish in traffic, most of it isn’t on him.