Heat’s thinking behind rotation changes and how it helps ‘most talented offensive players’
It turns out all the Miami Heat needed was a little space.
The Heat snapped its offensive slump and season-long four-game losing skid with a 123-100 blowout win over the Sacramento Kings on Monday night at FTX Arena behind its best offensive performance in over two months.
Aside from facing a Kings defense that owns the third-worst defense in the NBA, what led to the Heat posting its best single-game offensive rating on Monday since a 124-118 over the Atlanta Hawks on Jan. 14?
“We watched film today and got our spacing right,” center Bam Adebayo said, as the Eastern Conference-leading Heat (48-28) now hits the road to open a three-game trip on Wednesday against the Boston Celtics (7:30 p.m., Bally Sports Sun and ESPN) in a game filled with playoff-seeding implications. “We felt like this was the game that we really needed to work on spacing and getting back to our old habits. So we were moving the ball and everybody felt like they got a touch.”
Players were intentional about improving the Heat’s offensive spacing, but also tweaks to the starting lineup and rotation helped get more lineups on the court that promoted better spacing against the Kings.
Max Strus moved into the Heat’s starting lineup in place of Duncan Robinson, who has made 67 starts this season. The Heat also used a four-man bench rotation on Monday of Tyler Herro, Dewayne Dedmon, Robinson and Gabe Vincent, but did not include forward Markieff Morris or guard Victor Oladipo.
Nobody on the team is blaming Oladipo and Morris for the Heat’s recent struggles after they returned earlier this month from extended absences. But the reality is the losses did coincidentally happen to come soon after the team tried to incorporate them into the rotation late in the year, as Miami is 3-3 in games that Oladipo has played in this season following his return from knee surgery and 2-4 in the six games that Morris has played in following a four-month absence because of a neck injury.
“These are tough decisions and there’s a lot of different things that could work,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “We just felt at this time, this particular time, that these moves may clean up some things with the rotation. But those aren’t easy things. I think we all just have to have empathy and grace for some of these changes for the guys that didn’t necessarily play tonight.”
The most telling line of the night came from Spoelstra, who said the tweaks to the Heat’s rotation ahead of Monday’s win were made “to maximize the strengths of our most skilled and most talented offensive players.”
It worked against the Kings, as Adebayo, Butler and Herro combined to total 69 points on 28-of-45 (62.2 percent) shooting from the field and 7-of-13 (53.8 percent) shooting on threes in Monday’s win.
The Heat’s new rotation helped leverage the strength of its best players by using more lineups that create space for them to attack.
Aside from the new starting lineup that outscored the Kings by two points in 13 minutes, the lineup that played the second-most minutes on Monday was one that featured Dedmon at center, Butler at power forward and shooters around them in Robinson, Herro and Gabe Vincent. The group that played the third-most minutes together against the Kings was a similar look, with Adebayo and Butler in the frontcourt and Robinson, Strus and Herro on the perimeter.
“It corrects a lot of our spacing,” Butler said. “It lets everybody know where the ball has to go and where everybody is supposed to be at on the floor and it just made everybody so much more comfortable just because everybody knew where they were going to be, where the ball was going to go. So there were no questions that needed to be asked.”
The rotation tweaks also led to Butler playing fewer minutes alongside forward P.J. Tucker and guard Kyle Lowry. Butler has played 25.1 minutes per game with Tucker this season and logged just 12.5 minutes with him on Monday, and Butler has played 21.9 minutes per game with Lowry this season and logged just 14.3 minutes with him on Monday.
Meanwhile, the Butler-Herro-Robinson trio played 21.4 minutes against the Kings. They have logged just 8.8 minutes per game together this season.
“This wasn’t a one move thing,” Spoelstra said of the changes he made to the Heat’s rotation on Monday. “We were very disappointed about the last four games and this has been trending really even before that while we were winning. Again, it’s not an indictment on anybody. Sometimes these things can be chemistry things. Sometimes it’s just the flow of certain guys playing off of each other.”
The new combinations could end up solving some of the Heat’s offensive issues by creating better spacing on the court. But the rotation tweaks also bring the Heat back to the players it was winning with before Morris and Oladipo returned earlier this month.
The eventual return of forward Caleb Martin, who missed Monday’s win with a right calf contusion, could force more changes to the Heat’s rotation.
“Adversity,” Adebayo said when asked why the Heat’s offense hit a rough patch last week. “I feel like it was more so that this was our first time really being healthy, one through 15. And I feel like in that stretch of four games, it was hard to get the right lineup for the right spacing. I felt like today, we got our spacing right and we saw that it works and guys start to believe in that.”
Adebayo explained how the Heat’s improved spacing helps him by pointing out that “if there’s four guys in the paint and two of them are our men, we got to force up bad shots.” But there weren’t many bad shots on Monday, as the Heat moved to 17-0 this season when finishing with a single-game offensive rating of better than 120 points scored per 100 possessions.
Miami’s new rotation will face a much tougher test on Wednesday in Boston, as the Celtics stand just one game behind the Heat in the East standings and feature the top-rated defense in the NBA. With just six regular-season games left to play, Spoelstra made clear that different opponents could force more changes to the rotation moving forward because “we feel like versatility and our depth is really one of our greatest strengths.”
But it’s now clear what the Heat will be looking for with any rotation it uses: Space that allows Adebayo, Butler and Herro to be the best versions of themselves.
“I don’t mind these stretches. They force you, if you approach it the right way, to address things,” Spoelstra said of dropping four straight games last week. “These are things that we had been feeling for a few weeks. ... There were some detail things that we needed to address and we’re going to have to continue to address them and try to get to another level, a better version.”
This story was originally published March 29, 2022 at 11:07 AM.
