There’s something about Erik Spoelstra teams in their regular season debuts. Maybe it’s the way they go about training camp and the emphasis Spoelstra puts on ball movement. Maybe its that Miami’s players have been in the gym together since early August. Maybe it’s just random. But since Spoelstra took over as head coach, the HEAT have averaged 22 assists in their first outing of the season.
Of course how you go about getting those assists is what really matters. Any team is capable of hitting a bunch of shots on any given night. What you want to see is a team getting assists within the context of what they’re trying to accomplish. As Miami put up 27 assists, including 18 on 24 makes in the second half, on their way to beating Orlando in Orlando with 74 points in the paint Wednesday night, the HEAT looked like a team that knew exactly how it wants and needs to win.
“That’s their game,” Frank Vogel said. “They’re a hard-driving team, we saw that the first time we played them [in preseason] and that’s their answer to not having [Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade], is to play a lot of small guys and try to speed it in the paint and force help and take advantage of [Hassan] Whiteside and read on the dump-off pass.”
“That’s who we were tonight, but that’s certainly the identity we’ve tried to create since training camp,” Erik Spoelstra said.
Step One at this stage of the season is always about figuring out what kind of team you are and what kind of team you can be, and on that front Miami doesn’t appear to have any immediate issues.
This is also a group that’s going to look good when things are good. Some teams have to grind their way to efficient offense but when the HEAT are scoring, as they did in a 30-16 third quarter, they have enough athletes and guys-who-do-things that it will typically be an exciting, up-and-down affair. When Whiteside blocks a shot at the rim and it leads to Goran Dragic scoring at warp speed or outlet passes ping the ball up the floor and shooters are getting trail threes, this team has hit a groove.
We have to remember that a team rolling downhill in the second half, as Miami did, isn’t any more instructive early in the season than when a team struggles to find consistent, high quality looks in the first half, as Miami did. We can reasonably write off some issues due to first-game jitters, but the HEAT didn’t look the same when Orlando was getting to the free-throw line and the pace was significantly slower. Especially with threes not falling.
“It’s not always going to work out that way,” Spoelstra said of the second-half offense. “We had a couple of games in preseason where people were really taking away the paint, and we had to take advantage of the three-point line. So, yes we want to be an attack team first. We have a lot of guys that can put the ball on the floor and make plays in the paint. We have guys that can finish at the rim, but we also have to play with what’s given to us. And, I’m sure teams will really try to take that away from us.”
Learning how to adapt and win when you can’t get to your identity will be part of the learning process this season, but the second half offered encouragement in that regard as well. While much of the good stuff was in transition, off turnovers and on second-chance opportunities, there was Dion Waiters simply beating his man off the dribble and reading the help to earn Whiteside a dunk.
Or there was Justise Winslow drawing the focus of the defense with a quick dribble move, creating a cutting opportunity for Tyler Johnson.
“It was one of the keys of the game; to contain the ball,” Evan Fournier said. “They had drives on drives on drives that led to a pocket pass, open 3s, and their lay-ups. It cost us a lot.”
Miami had more drives, with 44, than any team in their opener this season. Off those drives, they scored 23 points and had 6 assists.
The Winslow play we showed highlighted what may have been the revelation of the evening. While there had been much discussion of the backup point guard position during preseason, especially with Josh Richardson injured, it was Winslow who stepped into the primary playmaking role for stretches of the game. Winslow’s four assists on the evening didn’t include some nice passes leading to good looks – we should note here that Whiteside had a few of these as well – and considering the regular flashes he’s shown as a creator and a seemingly improved handle, greater playmaking duties make sense for both the present and the future.
Once the fouling shored up in the second half, the defense started looking a bit more like it’s meant to than it had for portions of the preseason slate. Ball pressure increased, players fought through screens with greater purpose and Orlando began to hurry through their actions. When you hurry with Whiteside on the floor, you can easily hurry yourself into a block.
“We took a lot of bad shots, we just kept going at Whiteside, and he kept blocking shots,” Nikola Vucevic said. “We talked about it in shoot around; we said don’t go at him, make the jump stop, and make the extra pass. We didn’t do that. He kept blocking it and they kept getting easy fast break points.”
Easy won’t always be in the cards. Teams will hold to gameplans for longer than Vucevic says Orlando did. Miami’s assist total wasn’t reliant on The Beautiful Game, on possessions of six or seven or eight passes, but even sharp drive and dish action can and will dry up. Some of those dump-offs in the paint become turnovers. Contested looks fall short. At the same time, the HEAT will find better than 25 percent shooting from three, they’ll foul less and give up fewer offensive rebounds.
That’s the league. It’s about finding different ways to win with what you have. Miami showed one way Wednesday night. The path to the playoffs rests in finding about a dozen more.
You’re also much more likely to find those other ways to win when you’re wired to compete the way this team appears to be.
For now, with contributions across the board from developing youngsters and steady veterans alike, the early returns are nothing but encouraging.