Enough is enough: It's time for the Miami Heat to bench Terry Rozier

In what has been a nightmare of a season for Terry Rozier, Wednesday night’s fourth quarter against the Cleveland Cavaliers may have been the rock bottom.

There doesn’t seem to be a pinch coming to wake Rozier up. With less than 20 games left, the Miami Heat cannot afford to waste time waiting/hoping for Rozier to resemble the player they thought they traded for last January.

The Heat, 29-32, are jammed at seventh in the East standings. They are five games behind the sixth-place Detroit Pistons – likely an insurmountable distance at this stage. The Heat should be more concerned about what’s behind them. The Orlando Magic and Atlanta Hawks each trailing by less than two games. 

Nobody wants to be in the play-in tournament, but if you have to be playing that week, you want the No. 7 seed that comes with two chances to win one game on your home court.

A win Wednesday not only would have provided the Heat with support in the standings, but it also would have marked one of the biggest upsets of the regular season. A Heat team, missing three starters, taking down a fully healthy team with the NBA’s best record riding an 11-game win streak.

And yet, despite the narrow defeat and Bam Adebayo’s starry heroics, it’s hard not to be disappointed. The Heat could have won that game, and the decision to play Rozier a team-high 40 minutes may have cost them their biggest win of the season.

Even in a season that has admittedly not been coach Erik Spoelstra’s best, Wednesday night’s decision to play Rozier for 22 second-half minutes, including the entire fourth quarter, ranks among his most confounding. (Right up there with calling a timeout he didn’t have in a loss to the Detroit Pistons earlier in the season.)

Rozier missed all eight of his shots and turned the ball over three times while playing more minutes than any of his teammates after halftime.

You might think the lowlight package making the rounds on social media is a deep fake. It’s not. This stuff really happened. I saw it.

It’s not just one game, one second half, one fourth quarter for Rozier. It’s been something like this all season. 

ESPN recently unveiled a new catch-all metric called “Net Points.” According to the site, Net Points “uses play-by-play data to evaluate a player's performance. It quantifies every rebound, shot, turnover and free throw and assigns credit and blame to the players on the court. It divides credit and blame based on the difficulty of the players' contributions to the success or failure of the team.”

According to Net Points, Rozier has been the sixth-worst player in the league this season.

It’s time for Spoelstra to bench Rozier for good. 

I know, he only had 10 players on standard contracts available in Cleveland.

Doesn’t matter. Rozier should not have played. And certainly shouldn’t have led the team in minutes. (I still can’t get over this.)

Davion Mitchell, Alec Burks, Duncan Robinson, Pelle Larsson… all of them should be playing over Rozier. At the start of the game. In crunch time. Doesn’t matter. Heck, give Josh Christopher and Isaiah Stevens a shot if Miami is in a pickle.

We’ve seen Spoelstra bench high-priced players before. Robinson couldn’t get off the pine when he was in a shooting slump two years ago. It didn’t matter that he had just signed a new, eight-figure contract. Robinson didn't have it and Spoelstra did what he felt gave his team the best chance to win.

And guess what? Robinson bounced back the next season. The same can happen for Rozier. Heck, it probably will. He’s too talented for it not to. But it’s not happening this season. He and the Heat have run out of time.

Spoelstra recently admitted that he hasn’t made all the right rotation decisions this season. It can be hard with a changing roster and new pieces.

This one, however, is easy.