The Miami HEAT’s 2023-24 run is a complicated season to discuss. One with bright spots yet also one that fell short of previous and recent highs. One that neither stole away nor emboldened hope. One that proposed more questions than it could answer.
On one hand, so much can be explained by injuries and absences. Miami used a franchise-high 35 starting lineups. They didn’t have a single five-man group together for more than 200 minutes, with only two topping 100 after five hit that mark a season ago. Jimmy Butler and Tyler Herro combined to play 102 of a possible 164 games. Kyle Lowry was traded for Terry Rozier and Rozier dealt with injuries, first his knee and then his neck. Butler was unavailable for the playoffs after suffering a knee injury in a Play-In game at Philadelphia. Teams don’t typically win much without their best players and their best lineups on the court.
On the other hand, we never really found out how good this team could be much less what their best lineups truly were. We could use the previous season’s incredible, somewhat miraculous run as a barometer, but that’s an apples-to-oranges scenario. Herro, Butler and Bam Adebayo played 499 total minutes with each other with a Net Rating of just +3.2, plus only 118 minutes with Rozier alongside that trio at a Net Rating of +1.0. Those minutes came irregularly, as soon as the team appeared to be fully healthy another injury would pop up, opportunities to develop rhythm and cohesion practically nonexistent. This group never got a real shot to prove how good they could be, but they also didn’t have the sort of dominant stretches – their six 20-point victories were the fewest among the 16 teams that made it to the postseason – which would garner contending-level confidence. That confidence existed because of what an iteration of this core had done before, but some relative struggles in fourth-quarter and late-game situations ,after a dominant showing in those minutes the season prior, allowed questions to seep into the even most stringent optimism.
In the end, the only thing that matters is the results. With 46 wins, Miami wound up in the No. 8 seed for the second year in a row after losing a Play-In game, the same path ahead of them as the year before, and now the season is over while eight other teams play out the second round. And yet, as ever, they were just three wins, a few possessions going differently, away from the No. 3 seed. Such is the NBA. Some years are more memorable than others, but each is an important piece of the larger tapestry. For every Finals run, there’s a 2020-21 season – the abbreviated season which ended in a sweep to Milwaukee – that informs what comes next.
If there’s anything specific that this group will hang its hat on, it’s the defense finishing No. 5 overall. Despite lacking a plethora of proven, veteran defenders on paper – Miami only had one player, Adebayo, above +1.0 in Defensive Estimated Plus/Minus, while the other four Top 5 teams averaged 4.5 – Adebayo and, with his ever-changing schemes, Erik Spoelstra pulled everything together after a somewhat rocky start for the fourth Top 5 and twelfth Top 10 defensive finish since Spoelstra became head coach in 2008.
“That was probably the most consistent thing,” Spoelstra said. “Where we weren’t necessarily able to find consistency with our three different offensive philosophies, we were able to find consistency more often than not on the defensive side of the floor. Even though we had a couple different ways of playing based on who was available.
“As long as you have a group that is committed to doing tough things. There’s no easy way about it. If you want to defend in this league you have to guard the ball, you have to take away easy baskets, you have to rebound, you have to do those kinds of things, and we had a group that took pride in that.”
Adebayo, a finalist for Defensive Player of the Year and captain for the first time following Udonis Haslem’s retirement, had maybe his most impressive season on that end in a career full of impressive seasons, embracing Spoelstra’s charge to forgo much of his own individual strengths – switching pick-and-rolls – for the betterment of the whole, toggling into more traditional drop coverages for most of the season while producing comparable numbers to the seven-footers who typically own that coverage. Spoelstra made timely use of his press-zone to flummox ill-equipped opponents, his gap-shrinking man-to-man schemes once again limiting opponents to one of the lowest rim-attempt frequencies in the league. Haywood Highsmith, when healthy, made his name known as a versatile wing defender while Caleb Martin, when healthy, was his usual destructive self chasing around guards. Everyone else filled in and did their jobs, even youngsters like Nikola Jovic finding his footing in the system. It wasn’t a dominant defense, the sort which overwhelmed opponents in a hailstorm of quick feet and long limbs, but it reliably gave them a chance to win every night.
The offense held things back, finishing No. 21 and in the bottom half of the league for the third time in five years despite above-average three-point shooting. Herro had a great start to the season, Butler remained key as a mismatch hunter, Duncan Robinson evolved with the dribble, Rozier offered real on-ball creation once he came aboard, Adebayo refined his approach in isolation and post play and Kevin Love’s five-out bench units were Miami’s most consistent source of punch. The pieces appeared to be in place, but the lack of continuity prevented it all coalescing into something that could produce 2024 levels of efficiency each night.
“We had basically three primary offensive philosophies this season, based on who was available,” Spoelstra said. “All things considered we were making strides in any one of those areas, but the consistency became a challenge to overcome.”
Two players who will most certainly remember this season as crucial steps in their just-beginning careers are Jovic and Jaime Jaquez Jr. A year ago, Jovic was injured, not playing and looking a little turned around when he did get minutes. This season started out much the same, at least as far as opportunity, but after a starting stint in late December he joined the starting group full time just before the All-Star break, shooting 39 percent from three the rest of the way with plus passing while holding his own on the defensive end. In just about three months a player full of potential became a core rotation piece.
“If you would’ve said [last year] that in the First Round series Niko would’ve been our starting power forward and doing the type of scheme things that he was doing defensively, and that we would have to rely on him in a certain way, you probably would’ve said no that’s no happening,” Spoelstra said.
Jaquez Jr. required no time to simmer, starting the third game of his career and scoring 20 in just his ninth appearance. All shoulders and elbows and forearms with soft after-contact touch, he immediately reminded of Butler, burrowing his way into the lane through bigger and smaller defenders alike, ever willing to get off the ball if the window wasn’t there. The culmination of his season happened in Christmas Day against Philadelphia, his 31-point, 10-rebound effort putting him in rare territory among rookies, then an injury kept him out of five games in mid-January. Teams started to adjust to his game a bit, the scouting report detailing his strengths and weaknesses as the final two months of his season proved uneven, 28 percent shooting from three limiting his overall impact.
“I would say sometimes they would try to send two, prepared for the trap especially down in the post is where I think the report was out on me,” Jaquez Jr. said.
Still, he appeared to regain traction in the final two games of the season, scoring 38 across two Toronto matchups at home, and with Miami in dire need of creation against Boston he delivered their most consistent downhill momentum until a hip injury in Game 4. He’s expected to finish First Team All-Rookie for good reason.
“Jaime exploded onto the scene, that was obvious for everyone to see,” Spoelstra said. “Then he got on to people’s scouting reports, it kind of changed for a little bit, he was injured, then when he came back I really felt he was a much better player. He was able to see things at a deeper level.”
Some will use this season as some sort of referendum on Herro after the Boston series, but though he was limited to just 42 games his numbers were right in line with each of his past two seasons. Yes, he shot 38 percent against the Celtics – including 24 points on 13 shots in a Game 2 victory – but like everyone else on the team in Butler and Rozier’s absences he was pushed into a different, outsized role against perhaps the best team in the league.
“The entire gameplan is to take him out. It wasn’t like it was rocket science,” Spoelstra said. “The gameplan for Boston was if you take him out that can take a significant part of their firepower out of their equation. And then to respond in a big way in a big way in Game 2 that really helped drive the win I think is really a massive positive.”
In some ways Herro’s season mirrored Miami’s. He wasn’t always available and there were struggles when rotation options asked a bit too much against certain opponents, but he was fundamentally the same player that he was before. Up and down the roster, just about everyone was who they were expected to be. After a slow ramp up due to a knee injury, Martin was Martin. Highsmith lived up to rotation expectations. Josh Richardson offered two-way value before a shoulder injury knocked him out for the year. Love was reliable as ever, Duncan an impact, on-the-the-move gravitational shooter, and give or take percentages swinging in one direction or another Butler – having the best three-point shooting season of his career – and Adebayo lived up to previously set standards for impact, huge on-off splits following Butler on offense and Adebayo on defense.
That may be the legacy of this season beyond the development of Jaquez Jr. and Jovic and Adebayo expanding his defensive repertoire. Nothing was particularly wrong with the players. They were who they were supposed to be. It just never came together, with Miami’s 22-20 record in clutch games, following an all-time clutch season at 32-22, the greatest difference between the two years. Had Miami been just as injured against Milwaukee last year and just as healthy against Boston this time around, things might look a bit different.
The same could be said for most franchises that maintain a certain level of success. Make the playoffs often enough, you’re going to have disappointments, seasons that leave you asking What If and What Could Have Been – 2016 comes to mind for Miami – just as teams which frequent the lottery will move down as often as they will move up the draft order. You take your good luck, which plays a part in historically great shooting performances during a Finals run, with the bad, which knocks out important players for the playoffs. It’s all in the game.
Where this group goes from here is anyone’s guess, but up to a precious few to determine. Five years ago marked a beginning for the Adebayo-Butler-Herro core, that trio and Duncan Robinson the constants throughout the current build, and there’s been plenty of success – two Finals runs, three Eastern Conference Finals appearances – along the way. But a season full of unanswered and now unanswerable questions can’t help but leave questions for what’s to come.