The Miami Heat are coming off a fantastic win against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Friday night. Don’t leave the webpage just yet, hear it out.
Not that the T-Wolves are anything to write home about, at all, it’s more about how the Miami Heat were able to get it done than anything else. Ok, considering they owed the Timberwolves that from an ultra-maddening defeat from a few weeks back, then there’s really nothing else to write home about.
Still though, when you look at the boxscore for the Miami Heat, something stands out. They had two bench players go absolutely cataclysmic in Goran Dragic and the returning Tyler Herro.
With both scoring over 20 points and three three-pointers each, with Tyler actually sinking six triples, this is the type of bench production that can take the Heat to 2020 NBA Bubble type levels. This is the thing that would make the Heat a different team, at least different from the one that has shown up a lot this season.
The Miami Heat’s bench might be coming around and that spells trouble for the rest of the league.
When you look at all bench scoring this season, the Miami Heat currently rank 22nd in the league. Yes, 22 out of only 30 possible teams, which is, needless to say, putrid.
That number is 33.7 points per game, where they got 50, alone, from Goran and Tyler on Friday night. When you combine that with the production that of Dewayne Dedmon, Andre Iguodala, and whomever else Spo decides to pull off the pine, if anyone else, that should be quite a bit more than the 33 points or so they’ve been mustering.
Listen, they won’t score 50 a night (but if they do then we certainly wouldn’t mind), but if they can just be more productive than the 33 points that they have been on a regular basis, then the Heat’s chances to win on any given night go up exponentially. More specifically, if the bench can be that productive as a whole and not just between Herro/Dragic alone, then this team immediately becomes that scary team again that no one wants to face.
If “2020 NBA Bubble type levels” doesn’t make it extremely clear, then here it is plain. The Miami Heat can absolutely make another run if the bench shows up on a nightly basis.
They have been a victim of three-point overload, for themselves and given up to the opponents, and their own lackadaisicalness this season. One can only imagine that the threes won’t fall at quite as high a level, at least, in the playoffs and that the Miami Heat won’t be as bored, uninterested, or willing to allow themselves to play down to the level of the competition so easily once the postseason starts.
With that thought, that is why this version of them can be a scary one. They can be that type of frightening where absolutely no one, including the Nets, Philly, or Milwaukee, wants to see them in a postseason scenario until they absolutely have to, if at all.