Why deal for Andre Iguodala is latest coup for Heat and gloriously impatient Riley | Opinion
When they called Patriots coach Bill Belichick’s name in honoring the NFL‘s all-time greatest 100 players and coaches before the Super Bowl at Hard Rock Stadium on Sunday, he held up two hands full of championship rings in a brazen showiness utterly earned.
Miami Heat president Pat Riley has done the equivalent this week, though somewhat more subtly, with his maestro’s work ahead of Thursday’s NBA trade deadline.
The greats have a way of reminding us how they got that way, lest we forget.
It can be the bling on the fingers. Or it can be a midseason trade you didn’t have to make — but one that looks like a master class in how to get more than you give.
Wednesday night into Thursday the Heat was working a three-way trade with Memphis and Oklahoma City that tilted so favorably for Miami you wondered if Riley had quietly developed hypnotic powers.
It turned out to be a two-team deal, with Miami getting elite wing defender Andre Iguodala from Memphis along with starting-caliber small forward Jae Crowder and reserve Solomon Hill, and the Heat sending to the Grizzlies injury-prone Justise Winslow and two seldom-used pieces in James Johnson and pouty, oft-suspended Dion Waiters.
The Heat had been trying to package a three-team deal that also would have brought versatile 19-point scorer Danilo Gallinari from Oklahoma City, but talks broke down.
Miami has a team option on the second year of Iguodala’s two-year, $30 million deal, meaning the Heat can part with him after this season and still have the salary-cap wherewithal to take aim at a major max-salary star in the bounteous free agency sweepstakes coming in the summer of 2021.
That’s when the Greek Freak, Giannis Antetokonmpo, will grand-marshal the parade of available talent.
Riley turns 75 next month. He ain’t playin’. He doesn’t have all day to whip Miami back into championship contention and add another NBA ring to the eight he has won as a player, head coach or executive, including the Heat’s crowns in 2006, 2012 and 2013.
And this week’s deal moves his Heat closer to that.
Iguodala entered the league one year after Dwyane Wade. He just turned 36. The evolution of his game finds him not much of an offensive threat now. But oh what he can do. Iguodala is a top-tier defender and a great passer . He has been an NBA Finals MVP. He was the essential, do-the-dirty-work piece of the Golden State Warriors’ recent dynastic run.
Winslow has barely played this season because of injuries and Johnson and Waiters have played even less. So essentially Miami gave up three expendable pieces to get three that includes two likely rotation guys and, in Iguodala, a difference-making defender and distributor.
Getting Gallinari too would have been great. But adding Iguodala and Crowder to a core with 2020 NBA all-stars Jimmy Butler and Bam Addebayo and the likes of Goran Dragic and ascending stars Kendrick Nunn and rookie Tyler Herro make Miami a bigger player now in the NBA East.
Even better, the Heat swung this deal without having to part with a guy such as Herro and without sacrificing the ability to be a major player in 2021 free agency and go after a seismic acquisition such as Antetokonmpo.
Riley likes to refer to superstar free agents as “whales.” Then the Greek Freak would qualify as a blue whale, the largest in the ocean. It would be Miami’s grandest catch since LeBron James took his talents to South Beach in 2010.
We are getting ahead of ourselves here, but, see, Riley does that.
He cultivates hope.
The Heat don’t do tanking. The notion is anathema to Riley, nowhere in his DNA. Unlike the Dolphins and Marlins, the Heat don’t detonate, start over and ask years of patience of their fans. The Heat maneuver and add and relentlessly compete.
Last summer, seemingly with no money to spend, Riley somehow worked a four-team deal that brought Butler to Miami.
Now it’s a deal led by Iguodala.
Miami Heat fans have come to expect this and count on it from their franchise and its godfather leader — this wonderful, strategic impatience.
“Pat is obsessed with winning,” as Adebayo put it, simply. And accurately.
There is always a bigger, better version of the Heat out there, and Pat Riley keeps chasing it.
This story was originally published February 6, 2020 at 11:28 AM.
