After a 0-3 start to the season, Erik Spoelstra and the Miami Heat have to be scrambling to find solutions. As they prepare to head into the second full week of the regular season, there's one potential change to the starting 5 that Spoelstra must be considering.
Swapping Klay Thompson for Pelle Larsson may not be the magical solution that Heat fans hope it would be, and it would certainly be quite the gamble, but it's the one realistic change that Spoelstra can make that could make an instant difference.
Listen, the Heat has a laundry list of issues at the moment. There just might not be one bigger than their starting 5.
Erik Spoelstra may need to make a desperate change to their starting 5
Through their first three games, the Heat's starting 5 of Davion Mitchell, Klay Thompson, Andrew Wiggins, Bam Adebayo, and Giannis Antetokounmpo have a -47.1 net rating and a defensive rating of 150. They've only played 31 minutes together this season, but the results have been historically bad.
Realistically, though, there's not much the Heat can do to inject a spark into the starting 5. There's no backup point guard worthy of replacing Mitchell. We all know Bam and Giannis aren't getting benched. And Tim Hardaway Jr. is playing just as bad as Klay or Wiggins right now.
That's why the only real move that Spoelstra has at his disposal right now revolves around throwing Larsson into the fire in place of Klay.
While Larsson may not provide the starting 5 with the threat of an outside shot that Klay does, this is a move so desperate (and may not even make a ton of sense from a schematic sense) that it may be exactly what the Heat needs.
Pelle Larsson could give the starting 5 the inspiration they may be missing
After the Heat's most recent loss against the Charlotte Hornets, Spoelstra said that the team needed to find their "inspiration" to play with the fire that they did in that fourth-quarter comeback on a consistent basis.
There's a lot to read between those lines, but Larsson could be part of that solution. Larsson may not give the Heat the offensive punch that Klay has the potential to. He may not space the floor as well as Klay either.
But he can bring the "inspiration" that the starting 5 may be lacking. After all, Larsson was part of that fourth-quarter lineup that helped the Heat nearly pull off the huge comeback.
Not to mention that Larsson could bring a more capable defender than Klay is and can offer more in the way of playmaking at this point in his career.
It would be viewed as a pretty desperate and quick move on the part of Spoelstra, especially just three games into the experiment, but at this point, there may not be many better options for the Heat.
And Spoelstra just doesn't have a ton of time to figure things out. Most believed that Larsson would eventually win a starting spot by the end of the season; not many expected it to happen this quickly.
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