Mateo’s Hoop Diary: Assessing the Heat at the season’s halfway point

The Heat are at the halfway point of the year (21-20), and they’ve been unable to sustain prosperity or recapture the vibes from the first 11 games. Securing home court has proven too challenging, and they aren’t any good on the road, either. It will take lots of work to turn the corner, as their three worst shooting fourth quarters have come in January versus top competition.

The offense has been 20th in the league over the last 10 outings, while logging the second-highest pace. There is an element of teams starting to figure them out, but they’ve had nights in which they didn’t show up to play, affecting those numbers as well. 

Norman Powell said their Achilles heel is adversity, and he’s right. They melt as soon as things get hard, and it was no different on Thursday in the washout at home against the Celtics.  They conceded a season-worst 31 second-chance points and were outscored by 15 in the fourth quarter.

Bam Adebayo said that they’ll keep being in the middle of the pack unless they all commit to “doing role player things.”

The problems 

• Suspect defense

The team is logging a top-six defensive rating, but it could be smoke and mirrors. They surrender 36.5 open to wide-open 3-pointers per game because of over-help and reckless closeouts. In fairness, the rest of the league is not that much better at protecting the arc, but too many Heat games hang in the balance of the opposing shooter’s hands.  

•  Too many players are worthy of starting 

The team was without Tyler Herro for 73% of their outings, and incorporating a piece like him is no easy task because he takes about 17 shots per game. Offensively, he has not missed a beat. But coach Erik Spoelstra still has to find the right combinations with him, since they are too vulnerable defensively when running a three-guard set next to Davion Mitchell and Powell. All options should be on the table, even with Herro and Powell scoring at an All-Star level, or with Mitchell being a strong point-of-attack pest who is critical to the transition attack. 

• Adebayo has not been a max player

Adebayo is having his second-lowest scoring season since becoming a starter (17.0) and has not been a fluid offensive player for most of the year. He even had a stretch from Dec. 18 through Jan. 11, failing to score at least 20 points in 11 consecutive outings. He started the year in a funk, too, and he told Five Reasons Sports Network before the fifth game in San Antonio that it wasn’t because defenses were doing anything special; he was just missing shots. Thirty-six games later, and the problems have persisted.

He has been through a pair of injuries since (foot and back spasms), but it’s not the entire reason for his decline. Regardless, he needs to pick up his scoring and aggression because it’s impossible to be a good team when such a large percentage of the salary is going to a high-level role player. If adding more screen rolls into the offense is what’s needed to bring him back to form, so be it.  

• The Ware dilemma. 

The most effective way to send a message to a player is by slicing their minutes. Spoelstra was left with no choice but to bench Ware for the second half of the meltdown against the Celtics because of waning vigor. Then he made the mistake of throwing his developing pupil under the bus for the second time since the Summer League. 

“He’s stacking days in the wrong direction now,” Spoelstra said. Yet he also included the accusation that Ware plays for himself: “I get it with young players. You sometimes subconsciously play poorly to say, ‘Hey, I’ll play poorly until you give me the minutes I think I deserve.’ That’s not how this works.”

If that assessment is correct, he snitched, and that team credo of only keeping issues in-house is a load of drivel, unless they want to send a message. So much for trust, eh. 

But what if he’s wrong, and there’s a misunderstanding between coach, management, and player on where or what Ware should be midway through year two?

Anytime a coach needs to send a message through the media, they’ve failed, and it’s possibly an indication that their word isn’t as strong as others believe it is. 

Adebayo was diplomatic, playing the good cop, offering sage advice to his teammate. As this storyline, which Spo revealed in July, continues, perhaps the coach should take a page from the captain’s leadership playbook.