Ahead of the festivities and potential fireworks that could play out on NBA Draft night, the Miami Heat quietly made a few no-brainer roster moves. These three moves will almost certainly keep Keshod Johnson, Davion Mitchell, and Dru Smith on the Heat's roster heading into the 2025-26 NBA season.
According to Anthony Chiang of The Miami Herald, the Heat exercised their team option for Johnson and issued qualifying offers to both Mitchell ($8.7 million) and Smith (two-way). In no way are these moves going to be considered "sexy" heading into the offseason, but they were all completely necessary.
Both Johnson and Smith are two intriguing prospects that the Heat would love to continue developing in hopes that they can both crack the rotation sooner rather than later. In fact, before his season-ending injury, Smith was beginning to do so with Miami. It's hard to imagine how he'll recover from the knee injury, but it would've been foolish for the Heat not to give him another look. Johnson averaged 15 points, eight rebounds, and three assists in 19 games played for the Heat's G League team (Sioux Falls) this past season.
The expectation is that Mitchell, who will enter restricted free agency, is going to be re-signed by the Heat. Mitchell played well for Miami down the stretch and emerged as one of the team's best supporting players this past season.
The Heat's draft night will be telling
Even though these three players are likely to be back on Miami's roster this upcoming season, the direction of this franchise heading into the offseason is still a mystery.
How they operate on draft night could give us a strong indication of what may lie ahead for the Heat. To be quite honest, there are no easy answers for this team. There are no easy moves that can or will be made. And the more moves opposing teams make, the more complicated Miami's future gets.
They're stuck in the middle and have yet to make a definitive decision on how they plan to move forward. That could be viewed as both a positive and a negative. The positive point of view is that they continue to maintain future flexibility, or at least the possibility of that. The negative, of course, is that the longer they wait to make a decision on their path forward, the harder it will be to completely embrace it this offseason.
Even as the Heat have begun to make a few decisions this summer, some pretty big ones still await them over the next few days.