After appearing in each of the season’s first eight games, Butler has missed 12 of Miami’s last 24 contests. ... Miami used its 12th starting lineup of the season. Each of the last five games has featured a different starting five.
How Far Can Culture Take the Heat?
Since coming to Miami, Butler has yet to play 60 games in a season.
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Besides wear and tear, there are other issues with this roster—namely, Miami’s lack of size and top-end talent. The Heat are small (https://en.hispanosnba.com/teams/comparison), with the 6-foot-5 Martin masquerading as a power forward. Only one player in Miami’s rotation stands tall
er than 6-foot-9 (33-year-old Dewayne Dedmon).
A league-leading eight of the team’s 14 players (not including two-way contracts) went undrafted. …The Heat don’t have a single player that has made an All-NBA first or second team. Suffice it to say, this is not a team built around 99th-percentile talent.
All of this amounts to a squad that has to give maximum effort to compete, let alone contend. The Heat need to play like it’s Game 5 of a 2-2 series in May to win regular-season games in December.
“We ain’t that good,” Butler said after a recent loss to the Spurs. “We can’t afford to play a 45-minute game or 47-minute game. We need all 48.”
[601 Biscayne] view working hard as a skill, and they’ve scouted and developed players willing to grind to complement their core.
“We like guys like that,” Adebayo said. “We like guys with those stories of ‘I got cut, this that and the third.’ You know, blue-collar people that had to work for what they got.”
But that approach has an exposed ceiling. In 2020, the Heat lost in the Finals to the Lakers, who were headlined by blue-chippers LeBron James and Anthony Davis. Two years later, despite Butler’s 48-minute effort (https://www.basketball-reference.com/boxscores/202205290MIA.html) in Game 7, the Heat were outlasted by a Celtics team that rostered 10 first-round picks. In both series, the Heat wrung out everything they could from their team but ultimately succumbed to injuries and opposing talent.
This season, the Heat came out unusually flat, starting 0-2 for the first time since Spoelstra took over 14 years ago.
“Sometimes you have a little hangover,” Haslem admitted. “We had a long season last year. One shot away from the Finals.
…a marginal addition won’t address this team’s need for more top-flight talent.
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…To even be here, Miami asks a lot of its players, but that’s sort of the point. Working hard, maximizing potential and self-belief—culture—isn’t enough to win a championship, but it can keep a team in the mix.
