It's been a season of change for the Miami HEAT. Dwyane Wade is in Chicago. Luol Deng is in Los Angeles. Joe Johnson is in Utah. Chris Bosh is not with the team. Losing players with whom you've had success is never easy. Whether you worked with them every day or watched them from afar, there will always be a degree of emotion involved. And when there's nothing happening beyond the doldrums of the NBA's late offseason, those emotions can linger.
That's the best part of seeing players back on the court again. There's movement again. Action. There's little changes happening with every dribble and every jumper. Emotions give way to practical questions and problem solving begins.
This year the first question to ask is pretty simple: where are the points going to come from?
Stylistically, we have a good idea of how the points are going to come. It's been well documented that Miami hit the turbo button on offense after the All-Star break last year. And every indication during the offseason has pointed towards another up-tempo attack led by Goran Dragic. It makes plenty of sense to carry on in that direction with so many young, athletic legs on the roster.
But style does not make a team. The history of the league is littered with tales of those who wanted to play this way or that way and couldn't pull it off. Miami's late season offense worked so well last season – 6th in offensive efficiency after the break – in part because of the pieces involved. If you take those pieces out can they be replaced, or reproduced, to create a similar combination?
Or, should a similar combination even be the goal?
“We don't really have time to think about them,” Tyler Johnson said. “Obviously were a big part of what we did last year, but that was last year. I don't think other teams are thinking about it. They have to play who is in front of them.”
“We look at it in the sense of we just have to be the best team that we can now,” Josh Richardson, currently out with an MCL sprain, said. “It's not a thing where we have to replace Luol Deng, Dwyane Wade and Joe Johnson. It's hard to do that. Nobody can do that.
“We're going to score in the way we know how to. We're not going to try to score in the same way they did, because they're built different.”
It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking, 'Well, who is going to be that guy now? As Michael Jordan reached the end of his career, many in and around the league spent time and resources trying to find the next Michael Jordan. But it was an unnecessary pursuit. The league didn't need the next Michael Jordan any more than it needed the next Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. It only needed more great players to carry the torch in their own way.
Richardson, Johnson, Justise Winslow, Dion Waiters and anyone else that will play wing minutes for Miami don't have to replicate those that came before them. They can find their own path to success.
“It would be foolish to think someone can come in and replace what Dwyane or CB does. It's going to be a collective effort,” Johnson said.
That still leaves us with a bit of a math problem. While Miami's perimeter group shouldn't be expected to turn into one-on-one scorers of Wade and Joe Johnson's caliber over the course of months, the three primary veterans Miami lost from the playoffs have left a void of about 48 points per game. While Erik Spoelstra doesn't have to find the exact same numbers with the exact same efficiency (particularly if this group can double as a top tier defense), those 48 points can serve as a rough guide for what is required to get back to being an above-average offense (assuming a similar pace of play).
So where could those points come from? Let's do a thought exercise.
We've already discussed how the veterans don't have to be exactly replicated. Winslow doesn't have to be a 20-point scorer on his own. Replacement scoring can be accomplished in the aggregate, with each player supplementing their averages a little so that many 'a little' add up to one 'a lot'.
“We know it's a group effort,” Richardson said. “We don't really think of it as one person has to carry us.”
Say, as a hypothetical, Tyler Johnson can slot into the lineup and score 14 points per game. Since he wasn't playing after All-Star last season, those points can serve as a straight replacement total and eat right into the 48 we're trying to account for. As for Winslow, to get him to 14 per game we would need 6.3 on top of last season's 7.7 – a reasonable possibility for a second-year player about to experience a sizeable jump in usage. Add a similar total for Richardson (plus 3.8), including about three points per game each for Dragic and Hassan Whiteside (getting them to 20), and we've already hit 30 points per game of the 48 'missing'.
That's not factoring in who starts at power forward (a discussion we'll have at a later date), a spot which could easily add another 8-10 points into that total. Once there, you could have about eight points to disperse among the rest of the rotation (over what their counterparts produced last season) including talented scorers such as Waiters.
Some loose arithmetic, sure, but this isn't supposed to be an exact science. The point is to illustrate how you can compensate for the loss of individuals as a group. And the more you get from one player, the less you'll need from another.
'More' is where the real problem solving will come into play for Spoelstra and his staff. Adding points on to a player's raw averages is one thing, but doing so with plus-efficiency is an entirely different beast. Wade on his own accounted for (with a shot, turnover or drawn foul) just under a third of Miami's possessions while he was on the court. Both Deng and Joe Johnson were nearly a fifth. Between the three of them, Johnson, Winslow and Richardson's usage comes out to about 15 percent apiece.
Putting it simply, there's a ton of possessions to fill. And the dispersal of those possessions can only be sorted out over time.
“I'm definitely in the mindset of being aggressive,” Winslow said. “Everyone needs to be in that mindset of being aggressive, not selfish but being aggressive and making the right play. I don't know if its going to be me averaging 5 more points, 10 more points, but we have to figure it out. Usually preseason for a lot of teams don't mean too much but for us it's going to mean a lot figuring out lineups and all that.”
Whether that process of figuring it out translates into finding efficiency could depend largely on the skill development of each player – a huge point of emphasis for Miami's staff this and every season. If Richardson can build on his pick-and-roll work as a backup point guard last year, if Tyler Johnson can keep finding ways to get to the rim with increased defensive attention on him, if Winslow can improve his jumper to the point that the floor opens up around him, then the questions of preseason could be soon forgotten.
There just aren't any guarantees.
Winslow, for his part having spent time with Team USA in Las Vegas, appears eager to embrace a new role with the ball in his hands.
“Guys are just built naturally like that,” Winslow said of high-volume scorers. “It's certain scorers in the league that, if you can put them on a team with four other scorers, they're still going to be aggressive. Guys like Westbrook, Damian Lillard, Paul George, Carmelo; guys are going to be aggressive. That's kind of the mindset I've been trying to get into, seeing those guys at USA and talking to them. Taking the next step mentally and being that guy that, night in and night out, each game, the team can depend on and be consistent.”
Paragraphs like that are cause for encouragement for now. It would be a different problem altogether if Miami didn't have anyone who actually wanted to take more shots. But all involved seem ready and willing. As Winslow said, now that players are officially on the court it's just a matter of figuring out how everything fits together.
Things might not play out exactly like a hypothetical exercise thought up on the first day of training camp, but, again, that's the point. They don't have to.
