When the Miami Heat traded for Giannis Antetokounmpo this past summer, I started to imagine a fourth championship parade down Biscayne Boulevard. Here's a top-five player, a perennial MVP candidate, and he's coming to Miami. Wow, great, love it! Sure, the Heat gave up pretty much every asset it had aside from Bam Adebayo to make the trade work, and there were roster issues galore heading into the season, but still. Giannis! Antetokounmpo! How could this fail? It simply couldn't!
Anyway, Miami lost to the Dallas Mavericks on Monday night and dropped to 0-4 for the season. Worse than that, the team has looked lost and overwhelmed in every single game.
The Heat stink, and a lot of the issues on display are ones that this asset-poor and hard-capped team can't really fix. There are glaring weaknesses on both sides of the ball, and head coach Erik Spoelstra has rotated through 14 players so far in four games. It will take a lot of experimenting and tweaking before the ideal lineup combinations become evident, if they even exist. Every potential issue that was raised in the offseason after the Antetokounmpo trade has seemingly materialized in this opening set of games, and some that weren't even on the radar have arrived as well. It's bad, is what I'm saying, and in a revamped and crowded Eastern Conference, Miami doesn't have much time to fix things.
Let's start with the (slightly) less worrying side of the ball: the defense. In theory, adding a former Defensive Player of the Year like Antetokounmpo to a team that had a player who should have, in my opinion, won at least one of those awards himself (Adebayo) should have made the Heat a nightmare to play against. That's a lot of length and switching ability for teams to contend with, and it felt like the two of them could work together to wall off the paint and force teams into contested jumpers. In practice, though, it's a bit of a "hat on a hat" situation, as both Antetokounmpo and Adebayo look consistently confused about where each should be at any given time.
Antetokounmpo works best as a free safety, sitting back and observing where his freakish wingspan and high motor could be best put to use. Unfortunately, Adebayo also works best hanging back, walling off the paint and jamming up actions anywhere inside the arc. This has led to moments when both players end up making the same choice at the same time, and they end up double-covering one side of the floor while the rest of the team plays 3-on-4 defense. This is especially a problem because the team's most used lineups include some combination of Klay Thompson, Tim Hardaway Jr., and Andrew Wiggins; the first two have not been good defenders in years, and Wiggins has lost whatever ability he had on that end to start this season. This has all combined to have lineups with both Antetokounmpo and Adebayo rocking a ghastly 132.9 defensive rating, which would be eight rating points worse than the worst team defense in the league (the Phoenix Suns).
Part of that, admittedly, comes from the fact that the Heat's first three opponents couldn't miss, even on contested three-pointers: NBA.com's Heat writer Couper Moorhead noted before Monday's game that the Heat were actually giving up the worst quality shots in the league; these teams were just making those shots. That type of variance is a small-sample-size delight, but it does mean that Miami has a decent enough foundation on defense, one that should level out as the season goes on. Even on Monday, the Mavs found it much harder to nail the shots Miami was giving them, at least until Cooper Flagg took over in the fourth quarter (5-of-7 for 12 points). If Antetokounmpo and Adebayo can sort out their conflicting defensive game plans, and if Spoelstra doesn't have the team dropping off of screens against good three-point shooters, then something resembling the meat grinder that was promised might come to life.
The offense, though, will be a much harder challenge for Spoelstra and his charges. Antetokounmpo has been great, at least statistically, but his addition, as well as the departures of Tyler Herro, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Norman Powell, and Kel'el Ware, has clogged up the works for a team that needs to figure out exactly how it plans to get points. The current gameplan is to give Antetokounmpo the ball and have him charge at the rim, where one of three things can happen: He can either try to score himself, he can kick out to what should be wide-open shooters, or he can dump the ball off to Adebayo. This isn't a bad plan per se, but it's an easy one for opponents to scheme against. The Mavericks showed one way to stop Antetokounmpo himself: Just mix in some zone and clog the paint. This is exactly what Spoelstra himself has done against Antetokounmpo in the past.
That should open up more space for those kick-outs, but Miami's "shooters" have just not been making their shots. Of all the issues that loomed heading into the season, the shooting was probably the most obvious. Miami hasn't been a great shooting team in years, but at least Powell and Herro, and even Ware at times, could hoist them up. Those minutes and those shots are now in the hands of Thompson (33 percent on 8.3 attempts per game), Hardaway Jr. (19 percent on 5 per game), Adebayo (16.7 percent on 4.5 per game), and Wiggins (12.5 percent on 4 per game). Only Davion Mitchell (45 percent on 5 per game) and Bobby Portis (47.4 percent on 4.8 per game) have shot above league average so far, and the Heat's 30.6 percent from deep as a team has them in 25th in the league. So, that blocks off another avenue for easy points when Antetokounmpo drives in.
And then we have Adebayo. If there has been one enduring knock on him, it's his passivity on offense. It's what made his 83-point outburst so funny: Adebayo is simply not the type of player to assert his dominance with the ball in his hands. His point totals so far this season are all over the place: He put up 15 against Minnesota, then four against Detroit, 20 against Charlotte, and eight against Dallas. For a team built in the old top-heavy method, one that doesn't really work in the second-apron era, that is just not good enough for the second-highest paid player on the team.
Adebayo was always going to be a tough fit next to Antetokounmpo. They both prefer to do their work closer to the basket; it's a mirror of how they play on defense. With teams packing the paint without fear of Miami's shooters, Antetokounmpo driving in only to dump the ball off to Adebayo doesn't do much, since the opponents already have three or even four players there to congest the lane. And if Adebayo takes a backseat and steps out, well, he's shooting 16.7 percent on his threes. It's maybe too early to say this, but the fit between Miami's two name-brand players might just be incongruent. This is doubly true as Spoelstra clings to last season's high-speed pace offense, which forces split-second decisions and transition opportunities; both Antetokounmpo and Adebayo charge into the paint on transition, which makes those opportunities a lot easier to defend. Dallas gave up only seven fast-break points on Monday, despite the Heat playing at its usual pace (103 possessions per game).
It's not a coincidence that the best Heat lineups have featured only one of the two, as Spoelstra attempts to stagger their minutes. That's not a winning formula long-term, though, and lineups with both stars in them have a minus-31.6 net rating. Unless Adebayo starts hitting some threes in order to force teams to cover him, or unless a two-man game develops as he and Antetokounmpo get more comfortable together, I don't see a pathway for a viable offense with Miami's two most expensive players sharing the floor. I can't say that this wasn't an obvious fit mismatch; even though Heat fans had fully turned on Herro by the end of his tenure with the team, the murmurs that the Heat should have traded Adebayo and kept the haul of useful players they instead sent to Miwaukee have only gotten louder after this start. It would have been much easier to build a workable offense with the players Miami gave up, but it is what it is.
Do I think the Heat are as bad as their 0-4 record and blowout losses look? No, not really. The defense, especially, will get there; it already looked significantly better against Dallas, and it took Flagg going wild to win the game. That will happen, of course, but I'm encouraged by what I saw on Monday. The offense, on the other hand, might be nasty all year long, as the Heat try to ride out this rough transition from a play-in team into one that, at some point in the future, would want to compete for a title with Antetokounmpo. That was never going to happen this year; the roster is too capped out and poorly constructed, relying on players with proven weaknesses.
But there has to be some improvement there, and hopefully soon: Every loss makes it harder for Miami to even get back to the play-in, and there's always the looming fear of an injury to Antetokounmpo. While growing pains were always to be expected, this start has been more demoralizing than even the worst-case scenarios could have forecasted. The schedule doesn't get much easier until a Nov. 4 trip to the Clippers; before then, the Heat play the Hawks, Pacers, and Lakers, all tough games against teams with playoff hopes. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the Heat start 0-7, and the noise about this disaster of a team-building exercise becomes deafening.
