Five takeaways from the Heat's first week of the season
With one week of the 2021-22 season in the books, here are five early impressions from the Miami Heat first four games, including thoughts on Kyle Lowry's addition and Bam Adebayo's ramped-up scoring.
Let’s jump right in with some thoughts from the Miami Heat’s first week of the season…
1. Kyle Lowry is getting the ball out fast
Some wondered how Lowry would adjust to playing for the Miami Heat, his first new team in nearly a decade. Turns out, it’s the Heat that needed to adjust to Lowry.
“Realizing how fast you have to play with Kyle as your point guard. I think we’ve got to get used to that,” Jimmy Butler said recently. “He’s always looking to pitch the ball ahead… You’ve gotta be in some really great shape to be out there in what we call the ‘Kyle Chaos.’”
Lowry has changed Miami’s offensive identity seemingly overnight. After ranking second-to-last in pace last season, the Heat have climbed to 18th in that category. Not exactly sprinting for 48 minutes in the same way as Charlotte and Houston, for example, but the Heat are opportunistic. Especially when it comes to advancing the ball. Lowry is maniacal about inbounding the ball quickly in order to catch the defense flat-footed. Sometimes even the camera operator is caught sleeping and viewers are left asking WTF just happened.
Like a great scrambling quarterback, Lowry always keeps his eyes downfield. After defensive rebounds, he immediately turns to find leaking receivers.
This accomplishes a few things. First, it creates easier scoring opportunities in transition for a team that often struggled in half-court offense last season. As Mike Prada pointed out, the Heat overall rank seventh in points and ninth in pace when running off misses. With Lowry on the floor, Miami improves to second and first in each category, respectively.
Second, it forces opponents to defend the entire court, an exhausting task during the slog of the regular season. The Heat pride themselves on being the best-conditioned team in the league. In this way, the Lowry-Heat marriage is ideal.
But this tempo is also hard to recreate. The Heat’s pace with Lowry on the court of 106.6 possessions per 48 minutes would rank first in the NBA. When he’s off the court, that pace slows to 98.1, which would again rank second-to-last.
As Butler revealed, teammates are still getting used to Lowry’s breakneck pace. Watch a Heat game and you’re sure to see Lowry clapping his hands and shouting like a maniac to get the ball up. Sometimes Lowry’s receiver isn’t anticipating the pass and the result is a turnover. Most of the time, the result is exactly as intended. Miami is 3-0 in games Lowry has played this season. This is a different offense with Lowry at the helm.
Bam Adebayo’s scoring is up, assists are down
Going into the season, Adebayo vowed to be a more assertive scorer. He’s on track to average a career-high in points.
“Attacking the basket more, being more assertive and picking my spots where I can actually really excel at,” Adebayo said during media day. “And not getting bored with scoring off of that every play.”
After years of being accused of being too passive, too unselfish, Adebayo is posting career-highs in usage rate and field goal attempts, and a career-low in assists. This is because head coach Erik Spoelstra this season is using Adebayo less as a facilitator on the perimeter and more as a low-post presence.
Adebayo is empowered to go to the basket early and often. Having added 15 pounds of muscle over the summer, he is posting up nearly twice as much as last season (up from 11.9% to 20% of his possessions).
Only seven players are posting up more often than Bam, including Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic. Adebayo is making just 38% of his shots on post-ups, per NBA.com data, while Embiid (50%) and Jokic (61%) are shooting at a much more efficient clip. That needs to improve.
Too often, Adebayo gets caught a bit too far away from the basket and forces up a contested jumper, especially when defended against bigger centers. At 6-foot-9, he doesn’t have the size of a traditional post scorer. In these instances, he’s better off reverting to the playmaking skills that make him special and finding an open teammate.
But that’s the balance Adebayo is attempting to strike. Over the last two seasons, he probably erred too much on the side of caution. Now there appears to be an overcorrection. Eventually, he’ll find the happy medium.
3. Tyler Herro’s Sixth-Man-of-the-Year candidacy
Here’s the list of the top bench scorers in the NBA.
Tyler Herro: 21 PTS, 42.7 FG%, 31 3P%, 7.3 REB, 4.0 AST
Buddy Hield: 18.3 PTS, 41.4 FG%, 44.2 3P%, 5.5 REB, 1.8 AST
Montrezl Harrell: 17.8 PTS, 67.5 FG%, 8.5 REB, 1.3 AST
Jordan Clarkson: 17.3 PTS, 42.4 FG%, 25.9 3P%, 3.0 REB, 1.3 AST
(T) Cam Reddish, Eric Gordon and Lonnie Walker IV: 15.3 PTS
In an email before the season, Drew Hanlen, Herro’s skills trainer over the summer, told me the goal was to get Herro’s “swagger back” after an underwhelming sophomore campaign. They worked on his handle, footwork and shooting mechanics, all with the intention to make him harder to guard or, as Hanlen put it, “shifty.”
During the preseason and first two regular-season games, Herro was in his bag. Stepbacks, jabs, hesitation dribbles and pull-up jumpers in transition. He averaged 28.5 points on 47.8% shooting (35% from 3-point range) against the Bucks and Pacers to open the season. Then the averages slipped over the last two games, to 13.5 points on 34.5% shooting (22.2% on 3s).
The counting stats shouldn’t be of too much concern. Scorers go through ebbs and flows. What’s important are the trendlines.
Last season, Herro’s shot diet was pretty evenly distributed. That sounds good, but the problem is that he was taking nearly as many long 2s as shots from more efficient areas on the floor.
This season, Herro is taking fewer of those long 2s, using his enhanced “shiftiness” to get to his floater closer to the basket, a shot he’s making at a 50% clip, according to InStat tracking data. He’s also taking more 3s. That shot will start falling.
This is the evolution of Tyler Herro. If he stays on this track (and the Heat keep winning), he should be in the running, if not the favorite, to take Sixth Man of the Year.
4. Miami’s defense is mostly legit
The Heat have the top-rated defense through the first week of the season, allowing just 92 points per 100 possessions.
This early in the season, randomness and variability can throw off some of these ratings (example: Atlanta has the third-best defensive rating, which doesn’t feel sustainable). Miami’s success isn’t surprising considering the additions of defensive stalwarts Lowry and P.J. Tucker to All-NBA defenders Butler and Adebayo.
The Heat have put the clamps on — just 84.2 points per 100 possessions — in the 45 minutes that quartet has shared the floor this season. On Wednesday, the Heat limited the high-powered Brooklyn Nets to just 93 points, Brooklyn’s lowest scoring output in the regular season during the Kevin Durant era.
Both Lowry and Tucker have been seamless fits and should help improve last season’s 10th-ranked defense. Spoelstra hasn’t needed to change his switch-heavy scheme, which is set up to cut off driving and passing lanes and limit opportunities around the rim. The Heat are giving up just 27% of shots at the rim, a mark of a stout interior defense.
However, that has come at the cost of giving up a bunch of 3-pointers. Last season, the Heat allowed a league-high 40 3-point attempts per 100 possessions. This season, they are allowing 40.6 3s per 100 possessions, third-most in the NBA. It helps that opponents are making just 28.6% of those 3s, but that’s not sustainable.
“I’ll be honest, we haven’t totally wrapped our mind around it. We’re working on it,” Spoelstra said when I asked him about the numbers. “I don’t love giving up that many 3s. That makes the head coach extremely uncomfortable when those are launching up there. But a lot of the other things we do are grading out pretty good."
The biggest improvement from last season has been finishing defensive possessions. After finishing last regular season with the 19th-best defensive rebounding percentage at 73.3%, they are currently grabbing a league-best 81.4% of available defensive rebounds. By doing so, Miami has limited opponents to an NBA-low 6.3 second-chance points per game.
But to maintain a top defense, Miami will have to close the gaps on the perimeter. They are giving up the 13th-most “wide-open” 3s and second-most “open” 3s in the league, per NBA.com data. Eventually, opponents will make those shots.
“I think we’re OK right now,” Tucker said about the defense. “It’s not great, trust me. It’s not perfect… But we play hard, so I think we’re going to get better and better as the season goes on.”
Help wanted: Backup point guard
Miami’s only loss came against the Indiana Pacers, a game in which Lowry wasn’t available due to sprained left ankle. Against Brooklyn, Lowry appeared to suffer an elbow injury. It’s unclear if he’ll miss time for it but, at 35, he’s likely to miss more games at some point this season.
In Lowry’s absence, Spoelstra started reserve Gabe Vincent, who isn’t in the rotation most nights. Next time, Spoelstra could opt to start Herro, but that would take a valuable scoring punch out of a bench unit — one that has been a strength so far this season.
This brings us to John Wall.
Miami still has a roster spot available, making it a potential landing spot for a buyout candidate. Although the Heat are about $400,000 away from crossing the luxury-tax threshold, Pat Riley signaled a willingness to dip into the tax for the right player. The Heat can also avoid the tax altogether by waiting until early March to sign a veteran at the prorated minimum.
Wall, who agreed to stay away from the rebuilding Rockets and could negotiate a buyout of the nearly $92 million remaining on his contract, could be an ideal backup for Lowry. As noted by The Athletic’s David Aldridge, “Wall lives in Miami in the offseason, and the Heat is famous for extending careers of talented guys who’ve been slowed by injuries mid-career.”
The 31-year-old Wall hasn’t played more than 41 games since 2017 and missed all of 2019-20 with an Achilles injury, but he bounced back to average 20.6 points and 6.9 assists last season in Houston. Though far from his once All-Star status, Wall would be a steadying presence off the bench alongside Herro, Markieff Morris, Dewayne Dedmon and, eventually, a healthy Victory Oladipo.
That unit, along with Miami’s starters, would have a real chance to come out of the East.
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