On eve of first practice, Spoelstra, Adebayo, Butler and Lowry offer thoughts on new-look Heat
Exactly a year ago on Monday, the Miami Heat clinched a spot in the 2020 NBA Finals with a victory over the Boston Celtics in the Walt Disney World bubble.
A lot has happened since then.
The Heat went through the full 2020-21 NBA season after a historically short offseason, was swept by the eventual NBA champion Milwaukee Bucks in the first round of the 2021 playoffs in late May, rebuilt its roster this past offseason and held its annual Media Day at FTX Arena ahead of the 2021-22 season on the one-year anniversary of that Finals-clinching win that was now two seasons ago.
“I think it matters,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said Monday to kick off Media Day about the benefit of having a full offseason following an eventful year. “... You know, Bam [Adebayo’s] block or Jimmy [Butler’s] big game [from the 2020 playoff run]. It really in many ways felt like three years ago. So we’ve experienced a lot as everybody in the world has experienced a lot in the last 16 months.
“This offseason I think was really good for everybody, for everybody in the building, for our players, for our staff to be able to disconnect, recharge but then re-energize for a new season and a new goal. The offseason felt very adequate and it felt long.”
The Heat had less than two months to regroup between the end of the 2019-20 season and the start of training camp last year.
This year, Miami had nearly four months off from its season-ending loss in the first round of the playoffs on May 29. The Heat opens training camp on Tuesday at FTX Arena.
“I feel great,” Heat star wing Jimmy Butler said when asked how he took advantage of the offseason. “A lot of rest, some vacation time, got to be with my family, got to be with my people, see the world, work on my tennis game. I got back to being away from basketball for a little bit, so much that I started to miss it.”
The Heat made the most of the offseason, and not just because of the time it afforded them to rest. Miami’s front office was also active in working to make the team better by adding six-time All-Star point guard Kyle Lowry to a core that already included center Bam Adebayo and Butler.
Miami also added accomplished forwards Markieff Morris and P.J. Tucker in free agency, and re-signed players such as Duncan Robinson, Victor Oladipo, Dewayne Dedmon, Max Strus and Gabe Vincent this summer.
Spoelstra said he’s “looking forward to learning from [Lowry] and seeing how he views the game.”
“He has a unique way of being able to play off of the ball and be just as effective,” Spoelstra said of Lowry. “He’s one of the best dribble handoff guys, he’s a catch-and-shoot player, he can space the floor or he can just control the ball and make sure you get into what you need to get into. Then he can score and make plays during the course of all of that. Defensively, he’s physical, he’s tough, he’s smart. He can play in system defense, he knows how to make key plays in big moments. We’re just thrilled to have him in our building and in the black and red after all these years competing against him.”
But the Heat also lost a chunk of its rotation from last season, as Goran Dragic, Andre Iguodala, Trevor Ariza and Kendrick Nunn all changed teams this summer.
“That’s going to be easy,” Butler said of incorporating the new players into the mix before the Heat begins the regular season on Oct. 21 against the Bucks. “I think we have really good players. We’ve lost some really good players and we gained some really good players. If you put people out there that really know how to play the game the right way and are just in it just to win, it’s going to be easy to pick up and start hooping and play basketball the way we want to play.”
Lowry, 35, said he had not talked much to his Heat teammates prior to Media Day, but noted that he already had built a “good relationship” with Butler, Tucker and Morris before signing with Miami.
“But everybody else, I’ll figure it out,” Lowry said. “We’re going to be together a whole lot. We’ll be together more than we’ll be with our own families. So you don’t forge a relationship, relationships just happen. You understand it’s a brotherhood.”
The Heat enters training camp with the usual questions, but there is a sense of clarity when it comes to the rotation that hasn’t necessarily been there in seasons past.
The expectation is the Heat will open the regular season, if health permits, with a starting lineup of Lowry, Butler, Robinson, Tucker and Adebayo and a bench rotation that will be led by Tyler Herro, Dedmon and Morris.
“If everybody knows their role in training camp, you go from there and then you build off of that and everybody becomes stars in the roles,” Adebayo said. “Once you figure out your role and then become stars in it, you become a very, very great team.”
When it comes to player vaccinations against COVID-19, the Heat “won’t have any issues with the league,” according to a league source. It’s unknown if the entire roster is vaccinated, but at least most of the roster is believed to be.
Unvaccinated NBA players are allowed to play this season, but they will face stricter health and safety protocols.
“I think everybody is going to have to continue to be flexible,” Spoelstra said. “As soon as you try to make absolutes out of this situation, you’re only going to find frustration. Hopefully the worst is behind us, but there will be more of it in front of us. [The pandemic] is not going away immediately.”
But the Heat believes it has a roster this season that’s built to endure the ups and downs of an NBA season. More importantly, the organization believes its new-look roster is built to win in the playoffs after adding veterans in Lowry, Morris and Tucker, who have each won championships in recent seasons.
“It’s hard to win at the highest level, and ultimately you want to have guys that have experienced playoff basketball and experienced that kind of adversity,” Spoelstra said. “Only people that have been through it in a seven-game series and have felt the emotional swings of a win or a loss in the playoffs understand that. We feel that we’ve added that kind of veteran experience and championship level experience that can really help our group.”
This story was originally published September 27, 2021 at 2:19 PM.
