AS RIVAL TEAMS watched the Miami Heat climb out of the play-in muck and into the NBA Finals, many discussed the same question internally: What — if anything — can we learn from this?
For some executives, the answer was very little. The Heat’s run, the thinking went, was some combination of a fluke and a reversion to normal for a team that had gone cold from 3-point range all season. Would they have survived even one round had Giannis Antetokounmpo not injured his back in the first game of Miami’s first-round series against the Milwaukee Bucks?
The Heat won most of that series in crunch time thanks to their own steady play and a series of inexplicable meltdowns from a veteran Milwaukee team that won the title only two years before. Miami for the playoffs was minus-50 in the first three quarters — and an incredible plus-85 in fourth quarters and overtime.
Some of that was the Heat’s own scorching long-range shooting. After clanking away to a 34% mark on 3s in the regular season — 27th overall — they drained 38% in the playoffs. Even their one prolonged slump in three Eastern Conference series was somehow perfectly timed — isolated to the second round against the bricky New York Knicks; Miami shot 31% on 3s in that series and 41% across its other three series.
The Heat rode a heater to the Finals. Skeptics wondered: What can we learn from that? How is “make way more 3s than expected” a replicable strategy?
Others arrived at the same conclusion from almost the opposite starting point. They cited tracking data suggesting the Heat in the regular season had generated almost the same shot quality as in 2021-22 — when they hit a league-best 38% on 3s and finished with the top record in the East. Their luck was bound to turn — and did, in a flood of 3s when the games mattered most. Again: Could rivals inject that into their own team-building strategy?
But for some teams, that was the point — and the worry: What if the Heat’s run was proof that in the era of load management, 3-point shot variance, and the play-in tournament, the regular season now mattered much less? What would it mean if the play-in, the new collective bargaining agreement, and other factors were ushering in an era of unprecedented parity to a sport that had been defined by predictability and the inevitability of dynasties?
PARITY WORKS IN the NFL because there are so few games. The top seeds get postseason byes. Home-field advantage can be immensely important in one-game, winner-take-all formats. The regular season carries huge weight. What might increased parity mean in the regular season for an 82-game league in which 16 of 30 teams make the playoffs and home court doesn’t mean quite as much because of the seven-game series format?
Will teams conclude making the playoffs is all that matters — and pace themselves accordingly? Will the sixth seed — and play-in avoidance — become the most important line of demarcation?
The play-in has succeeded in keeping the lower half of the league more competitive until the end — another force pushing everyone toward the middle. If that race becomes urgent enough — the play-in is an enormous risk compared to a top-six seed — parity and teams valuing the regular season could go hand in hand. In the West next season, there might be zero easy outs; the San Antonio Spurs and Houston Rockets could both make sizable leaps — provided Victor Wembanyama makes a big impact right away and the Rockets use their cap space wisely and get improvement from their young core. (The Spurs have ample space, too.)
Miami’s run could make any future team in the position the Dallas Mavericks were in this season — barely hanging in the play-in race but also facing the loss of a potential lottery pick — think twice about bailing on its season. (The Mavericks kept their pick, and had a successful draft.) The Portland Trail Blazers in trying (for now, at least) to thread the needle of drafting Scoot Henderson and keeping Damian Lillard are betting on the volatility of the West below the Denver Nuggets.
If teams do play the long game, the league could put more teeth into its resting rules. Instituting a 65-game minimum (in most cases) for awards eligibility — and especially All-NBA, which determines supermax eligibility — will push some big names to play more.
(It’s premature to draw any conclusions about how the in-season tournament might factor into this, but I’m skeptical the possibility of winning an amorphous new trophy will really spur teams to go all out all season.)
Of course, much of this philosophizing came before the Phoenix Suns, in acquiring Bradley Beal, put together the kind of three-star team the new collective bargaining agreement — with its harsh penalties for big spenders — was supposed to eliminate. The Suns spent into the dreaded second apron, potentially triggering a host of restrictions: the forfeiture of various cap exceptions; an inability to sign certain players on the buyout market; the freezing of a distant first-round pick; having that pick fall to the end of the first round.
(The league initially wanted the second apron to be a bit lower than where it ended up — $17.5 million above the luxury tax line this season — while the union pitched a higher level, sources said. The Golden State Warriors swapping Jordan Poole and multiple picks for Chris Paul on a semi-expiring deal was in part aimed at giving the Warriors a chance to duck the second apron in future seasons.)
The Suns forked over six second-round picks and four first-round pick swaps in the Beal trade, sources told ESPN. Sustaining superteams was already hard under the old CBA. Those teams tend to be older, expensive, and lacking in trade assets. With shorter player contracts and more superstar trade requests, contention windows were already shrinking. Rising teams stocked with young players have to look ahead now at the reality that the new CBA might one day force them to break their teams up long before they’d ever want to. Is that a good thing?
Teams zooming through the boom-bust cycle can feel like parity, and maybe it is. Some front office executives have theorized that more teams in the past two seasons have been willing to risk trading huge amounts of future draft capital — the Atlanta Hawks for Dejounte Murray, the Minnesota Timberwolves for Rudy Gobert, the Suns now — in part because of the belief that if the team busts out, it will always be able to pivot and trade one of its stars (for a bundle of picks) to another hungry, win-now team hoping to open its own short window.
The new CBA was designed not only to make it harder to assemble three-star teams, but also to increase the downside of building them and make it harder to round them out. The net effect either way might be increased parity.
Was the league already trending that way? Maybe. The NBA has seen five different champions in five seasons, though the core of one — the 2021-22 Warriors — had won three times before. Over those five seasons, Kevin Durant left Golden State; the three-star Brooklyn Nets floundered; LeBron exited his prime; Kawhi Leonard and Paul George suffered injury after injury; several teams with two stars either didn’t or couldn’t acquire third ones.
Moving from two stars to three might become more difficult once the new CBA is fully phased in. Teams over the first apron — set now about $8 million over the luxury tax line — have to match incoming and outgoing salary in trades almost exactly dollar for dollar. (Any trade that takes a team from under that apron to over it subjects it to apron restrictions.) Teams over the second apron cannot aggregate multiple player salaries in trades to absorb one high-salaried player in return.
Getting a third star under the new rules will require teams to retain some cap nimbleness — and to find a trade partner also unconstrained by apron-related restrictions.
No team won 60 games last season. The Boston Celtics’ league-best net rating — plus-6.7 points per 100 possessions — was unusually low. Lower seeds — including two play-in teams in the Heat and Los Angeles Lakers — advanced much further than usual in the aggregate in the playoffs.
Is this a trend or a blip?
WHAT APPEAR TO be lasting trends in the NBA can end fast. Big Threes were dead in favor of Big Twos — until the Nets, with one of the league’s starriest Big Twos, decided to chase a third star in James Harden. Phoenix has now built a Big Three from the remnants of the Nets — and with a third star in Beal whom the Nets considered as a potential final-piece Big Three candidate before pivoting to Harden. Centers were dinosaurs; now they win MVPs.
The NBA will never become the NFL, but a lot of smart people within teams and at the league office think the equilibrium has tilted in a meaningful way toward parity and unpredictability. If that proves true — if teams are closer in quality than ever before — then an uptick in 3-point shooting at the right moment has renewed power to swing postseason series and even title odds.
Reducing the Heat’s run to 3-point shooting — whether you frame it as luck, a reversion to their norm, or both — undersells both what Miami accomplished and what can be learned from it. There is some power in surrounding two-way stars — Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo — who raise their games in the postseason with role players who know precisely what is expected of them.
That starts with Butler, who is plainly a different player — and hungrier scorer — in the playoffs. Behind Butler and Adebayo, the Heat collected players who can shoot and defend, and bring toughness, smarts, and consistency. When their East rivals wobbled under pressure, Miami just kept playing — passing, cutting, screening, defending like all hell. Orchestrating it all was perhaps the league’s best coach in Erik Spoelstra.
The Heat’s hierarchy on offense was set in stone. Their jobs on defense — overall and against specific actions — were clear. They minimized mistakes on that end, and there is greater power in simply doing that — in making opponents earn damn near every basket — than maybe we understood. They took care of the ball, got shots up, and minimized opponent transition chances.
The hierarchy’s clarity was due in part to Tyler Herro‘s absence for almost the entire playoffs. Did that help the Heat — removing a minus defender from the rotation, clarifying roles, freeing Butler to up his usage rate to gargantuan levels? Poll 50 executives and coaches, and a good number — maybe a majority — would argue the Heat were, at least temporarily, cleaner and perhaps better without Herro.
The Heat need shooting around Butler and Adebayo. Herro is a much more dangerous shot creator and passer than Max Strus — his replacement starter in the playoffs.
Butler could not sustain high-efficiency, 30-point-plus games the entire postseason. The Heat missed Herro’s on-ball creation in the Finals. They need one more versatile perimeter scoring threat even if that player weakens their defense — thus their rumored interest in Lillard. But the reality is the Heat were able to withstand Herro’s injury and advance within three wins of the title — further than anyone expected.
How much of that is replicable? Teams can’t just conjure the next Spoelstra. Is there some catalytic power in collecting smart, hungry players from the fringes and tossing them into something like the vaunted Heat culture? How did the Heat ink those players before anyone else? At the Athletic, John Hollinger wondered if their front office’s collective shared experience — no one ever leaves — and clear chain of command helped streamline the acquisition process.
What is Heat culture, anyway?
Part of it is physicality. The Heat practice hard. Part of it is the standard team president Pat Riley has set in signaling that Spoelstra’s authority over on-court tactics and minutes distribution is absolute — that no player is bigger than the team.
Spoelstra can deem certain things — effort, defense, physicality, adherence to game plan details — as non-negotiables. Maybe all of this explains why the Heat (mostly) stayed steady under crunch-time pressure while the Celtics, Bucks, and Philadelphia 76ers often wilted.
But if all this stuff was part of some winning Miami DNA, why didn’t it show up in the regular season? Why did the Heat hover around .500 with a negative point differential and barely escape the play-in tournament? How did they become so much better in the playoffs?
Maybe it was some special brew of a well-timed shooting uptick; a superstar who saves himself for the biggest stages; some kind of collective poise and toughness; expert coaching; and a bit of luck.
At least some of that is transferable to other teams in future seasons. If the NBA really is entering an age of (by its standards) parity, we might see another Heat-style run again in the next few seasons.
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