The Miami Heat, like a few other teams around the league, have a lot to prove as the second half of the year begins on Thursday. However, there is this notion that this Miami Heat team won’t be capable of proving such, as they are, somehow, a worse team than they have been across the rest of Jimmy Butler’s tenure.
However, that notion is one that is well deserving of being challenged and to get right to the point, here is why.
When you look at this Miami Heat team, it goes Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo, Tyler Herro, perhaps now even with Kevin Love in the mix as the third option at times, and then the rest of their ensemble.
And in the past, the only thing that you could really count on when the time was nigh was Jimmy Butler to become a top-five player in the NBA once the bright lights of the playoffs were on the brightest.
While Bam Adebayo would still be his same all-around self, giving you pretty good production offensively, while still being elite on defense, and then the other stuff associated with the game, he hadn’t really shown “number two guy “stuff.
The Miami Heat have a lot to prove in the second half of the year, but they are set up to do it. With new additions and improvement from within, they’ll be fine.
That type of stuff that you can go to when your main guy is bottled up my multiple-coverage from the defense.
But this new version of Bam Adebayo, the more assertive one who is a mid-range assassin seems to have figured it out. And based on all you see, you have to assume that he’ll be that same guy in the playoffs.
Looking for chinks in his armor or for him to revert back to his old self, Adebayo has overwhelmingly been consistently aggressive thus far this season. And though Tyler Herro still has consistency issues to get over in the playoffs, he has also improved this year.
While, again, you still need to see a lot more from him in the playoffs, he’s shown you that he can be a high-level scorer before now. However, the nuance and overall effectiveness of his game have a look of more polish, which is improvement in itself.
So with all that, the absolute improvement of the second and third-best players on this team from any of the previous seasons that Jimmy Butler has been in Miami, along with what he has constantly shown in the playoffs across his tenure here with the Miami Heat—how can this be a worse team than the ones that have challenged for the Eastern Conference title and the NBA Title in the two of those three years?