The Miami Heat will never be a rudderless ship. Not on Erik Spoelstra's watch at least.
They are, however, a team without a guiding star—and have been since Jimmy Butler forced his way out during the 2024-25 NBA season. And that surely explains why the Heat have, per NBA insider Jake Fischer, had internal discussions about Memphis Grizzlies guard Ja Morant, who has booked a pair of All-Star trips and authored some massive playoff performances.
While he'd be a curious choice for Pat Riley's next preferred whale, the fact this franchise is even considering him highlights how massively important it is for Miami to find an elite.
The Heat need a star to crack the contending ranks.
Momentum has suddenly stalled in Miami. The Heat have dropped four of their last five contests, and the same offense that sprinted out of the starting blocks is now struggling to find any juice.
Tyler Herro struggled to find his footing even before being sidetracked by a toe contusion. Nikola Jovic has backtracked in worrisome fashion. And while Norman Powell has been objectively incredible, he's not a carry-on-a-team-on-his-back type of talent.
Love Butler or hate him, he had that in his bag. He had four 30-point outbursts and a pair of triple-doubles during Miami's push to the 2020 NBA Finals. When the Heat pushed their way to the 2023 championship round, he had five 30-point efforts (including a 56-point masterpiece), eight games with at least seven assists and even a six-steal performance.
The Heat would have a hard time counting on this version of Morant to summon those levels of series-shifting dominance. He's having a whale of a time (pun sorta intended) shaking the injury bug, and when he does make it inside the lines, he no longer looks like the same jaw-dropping player.
Before being sidelined by a calf contusion, he was averaging his fewest points since his rookie season (17.9) while posting personal-worst shooting rates from the field (35.9 percent) and from three (16.7). And the player who once kept the poster-printing industry alive was also finishing a career-worst 60 percent of his shots within three feet, per Basketball-Reference.com.
Now, maybe Miami has enough trust in its coaching and medical staffs to believe it could get Morant back to (or at least near) his All-Star form. In a perfect world, though, the Heat would have a much more concrete solution to this problem. So, the fact they're even weighing suck a risky move shows they no don't have that answer in-house.
It's not Herro. It's not Powell. It's not even a three-point-shooting Bam Adebayo or a resurgent Jaime Jaquez Jr.
It's someone they don't have, and someone they clearly know they need to find sooner than later.