Should Heat continue to stagger Adebayo and Butler? A look at recent rotation tweaks made
The Miami Heat’s up-and-down season has left coaches and players searching for solutions to its issues.
One of the Heat’s biggest problems has been its inability to find a rotation that can consistently generate positive minutes throughout the course of a game. The Heat has cycled through versions of a rotation this season, but recently landed on one that might stick for the final weeks of the regular season.
For the last two games, Heat coach Erik Spoelstra has tinkered with the rotation to essentially eliminate the minutes that co-stars Bam Adebayo and Jimmy Butler are both off the court. During the last two games — a pair of wins over the Atlanta Hawks on Saturday and Monday to improve to 2-2 on its season-long six-game homestand — the non-Adebayo and Butler minutes were limited to a total of just two minutes. In fact, the Heat played just 26 seconds with Adebayo and Butler both on the bench in Monday’s 130-128 win over the Hawks.
This comes after the Heat was outscored by an alarming 17 points in 22 non-Adebayo and Butler minutes in the previous two games — a pair of losses to the Philadelphia 76ers on Wednesday and New York Knicks on Friday to kick off the homestand. Miami was outscored by 37 points in 57 minutes without both Adebayo and Butler on the court in the first five games after the All-Star break before this latest rotation tweak minimized those minutes over the last two games.
“The biggest thing we’re trying to find is solutions,” Adebayo said ahead of Wednesday’s matchup against the Cleveland Cavaliers at Miami-Dade Arena (7:30 p.m., Bally Sports Sun). “So if something doesn’t work game to game, obviously you see Spo is willing to scratch it and do something else. So for us, it’s more finding a flow within units and making sure we can collaborate and be as successful in different types of situations, different lineups and continue to keep this winning going.”
This isn’t the first time Spoelstra has used this strategy this season, but he has also gone away from staggering Adebayo and Butler’s minutes at times to instead try to maximize the time that they’re playing together.
There’s a good reason behind that: The Heat has outscored opponents by six points per 100 possessions this season in the 1,141 minutes that Adebayo and Butler have played together.
When only one of them is on the court, the results have actually been negative.
▪ With Adebayo on the court and Butler off the court, the Heat has been outscored by 1.6 points per 100 possessions this season in 1,995 possessions.
▪ With Butler on the court and Adebayo off the court, the Heat has been outscored by 6.3 points per 100 possessions this season in 1,108 possessions.
▪ Without both Adebayo and Butler on the court, the Heat has been outscored by 8.5 points per 100 possessions this season in 993 possessions.
Based on those seasonlong metrics, Spoelstra’s challenge is finding the right balance between limiting the minutes that Adebayo and Butler are both off the court but also trying to find as many minutes that they’re both on the court together. That’s not an easy thing to do because staggering their minutes reduces the time that they’re able to play together.
For example, Adebayo and Butler played together for an average of 24.2 minutes per game in the Heat’s first five games after the All-Star break before the rotation tweak was made, and it probably would have been more than that but two blowout losses to the Milwaukee Bucks and Philadelphia 76ers during this span sent them to the bench earlier than usual. In the last two games that Adebayo and Butler’s minutes have been staggered a bit more, they played together for an average of 22 minutes per game.
“We’ve cycled through a lot of different things,” Spoelstra said. “At this point, it’s by any means necessary. We need consistent play throughout our rotation and that’s the bottom line. When you go into the game, look at the scoreboard. When you go out of the game, it better be a positive. And that’s throughout the roster.”
Spoelstra’s adjustments to the rotation for the last two games have left Butler anchoring the bench units, and Adebayo and Tyler Herro playing nearly all of their minutes together.
All 72 of Adebayo’s total minutes during the past two games have come alongside Herro. Aligning their minutes helps negate fewer minutes for the Adebayo-Butler duo, as the Heat has outscored opponents by 4.5 points per 100 possessions in the 1,387 minutes that Adebayo and Herro have been on the court together this season and their pick-and-roll chemistry has become an important aspect of the offense.
“I feel like that makes sense,” Adebayo said of playing more minutes alongside Herro. “It’s common sense to leave us out there and let us go. But Spo has done a great job of trying to put me, Tyler and Jimmy in the best situations for us to be successful and help this team be successful.”
Sometimes Spoelstra will need to adjust the rotation based on matchups, foul trouble or injuries. Or he could simply decide to again shift the rotation in the coming days or weeks.
But after spending the season searching for the right combination of substitution patterns that maximizes the roster over the full 48 minutes of a game, the Heat may have found a rotation that sticks with just one month left in the regular season as it fights to avoid the play-in tournament that features the seventh through 10th-place teams competing for the final two playoff seeds in each conference. Miami is in seventh place in the East with a 35-31 record.
“I mean we were doing that. It’s not something we started doing right now,” Spoelstra said when asked about staggering Adebayo and Butler’s minutes in the last two games. “You can’t just say because we’ve won, that’s what we’ve done. We’ve been doing that for a while. It’s not like it’s a trade secret. Everybody understands.
“I think everybody sees the plus/minus. Jimmy and Bam, they’re important. For the most part, we’ll try to always have one of them on the court. It doesn’t always work out that way. Regardless of what happens, you got to find a way to impact the scoreboard and impact the win.”
