The Miami Heat will head into next season with a very different team than the one they ended last season with. Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo will be leading the way. And now that the Heat missed out on LeBron James, they'll need to lean on other guys to handle the ball. Antetokounmpo and Adebayo will be chief among them.
Antetokounmpo has plenty of experience with the ball in his hands, but he’s almost always had a lead guard playing alongside him. Jrue Holiday. Damian Lillard. Same with Adebayo, with guys like Tyler Herro and even Jimmy Butler. But now, those two guys are going to need to have the ball in their hands more than ever.
They may be the Heat’s frontcourt, but they could also have to act as lead ball-handlers for Miami at times.
Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo will have to be ball-handlers
As things stand, the Heat don’t have a ton of depth on their roster right now. They still have time to add pieces, but their roster could look very similar to this heading into the season.
Right now, the Heat’s guard rotation looks something like this: Davion Mitchell, Ryan Conwell, Dru Smith, and Pelle Larsson. They also have Tim Hardaway Jr., Myron Gardner, and Tre Donaldson, but those guys either aren’t point guards or won’t play much.
Mitchell, Smith, and Larsson, in particular, should get a bulk of the ball-handling duties, but none of them are quite good enough to warrant a ton of on-ball reps.
That’s where Antetokounmpo and even Adebayo will come into play. Miami could end up rolling out lineups that utilize one of those guys as the best ball-handling option.
Antetokounmpo will be fine with that. The Heat can have him as the bona fide point guard, which would allow them to play bigger lineups. Those could be some very dangerous groups.
But even Adebayo may have to handle the ball a bit. He’s not necessarily used to that sort of thing, but he’s good enough to do it in spurts. And with the roster shaping up the way it is, he may have to.
Miami sacrificed depth for top-end talent this summer. They traded away a lot of guys in order to land Antetokounmpo. Now, they’ll have to figure things out along the way.
And one of the new changes they may have to make is putting the ball in Antetokounmpo and Adebayo’s hands a lot in a pseudo-point guard role.
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