The Season of Many Seasons: The 2024-25 HEAT Did Everything on the Fly
- wgclients01
- 18 hours ago
- 9 min read
In many ways, the Miami HEAT’s 2024-25 felt like three seasons packed into one.
There were the early stages, training camp through Thanksgiving or so, when the build of the previous five seasons continued. There was something to prove after consecutive years spent in the Play-In Tournament, a shorthanded First Round loss to the Boston Celtics still fresh on the minds of many, but with Tyler Herro exploding out of the gates and an influx of youth on the roster, there were reasons to be encouraged.
Then the season took a quick and drastic turn, December and January spent in a state of flux as all parties sorted out the situation around Jimmy Butler.
Closure arrived at the trade deadline, a deal with the Golden State Warriors bringing in Andrew Wiggins, Davion Mitchell and Kyle Anderson. There was clarity, at least as far as the roster was concerned, though the path forward was hardly set in stone. Was this the beginning of a new era, or merely a stop on the way to a destination down the road?
There were moments of hope and levity in each segment, to be sure. A football-play game winner from Nikola Jovic in November. Taking down Cleveland in early December. Bam Adebayo’s buzzer beater over the Spurs in early February. A six-game winning streak in March. Winning two Play-In games on the road to become the first 10 seed to advance to the playoffs.
“What I told the team, and this is not any kind of moral message or victory,” Erik Spoelstra said. “What you want out of a season is to be able to come together for whatever reason and improve and do something. We were all faced with a very uncomfortable segment of the season. There were other segments of the season where it was what it was, but during the losing streak where we were playing great, making progress and losing games, I said it so often that you want to get a team that feels like its worthy to win. We were definitely feeling like we were worthy to win and we were still losing.”
But the one thing all three stretches had in common was that the results weren’t up to snuff, not to the standards of not only the franchise, but of the players on the court. Of the rises and falls on this rollercoaster, it will be the struggles that will linger in the minds of most. The roster uncertainty. The struggles against good teams in the regular season. The 10-game losing streak. The Cavaliers slamming the door shut, completing their sweep in Miami to a historically lopsided tune.
Nobody is going to call it a good season, nor a successful one. Nor should they. Reflections on what went wrong are necessary and, in the long term, healthy. Nobody is too good for or above a year like this. The league works in cycles. No matter your structural longevity, there’s no immunization against time.
“We put ourselves out there,” Spoelstra said. “When you put yourselves out there as competitors you’re going to put yourselves out there for everything, and we deserve it. We deserve the criticism, we deserve the embarrassment of the last two games. It’s not what our organization is about but we put ourselves out there to fight in the Play-In, two road Play-In games, to earn our right to go to the playoffs. And those two games were something. We felt like it was going to lead to lot more and that was irrational on our part.”
The individual players, however, deserve more context and nuance.
The on-court story of the year was undoubtedly first-time All-Star Tyler Herro. A conversation with Erik Spoelstra years in the making clicked with Herro after Miami’s five-game loss to Boston and he came into this year a changed player – new shot profile, new approach as he balanced on and off-ball play. That profile didn’t quite sustain through the latter months as he had to assume more ballhandling duties post-trade, but Herro made a second wave of adjustments, becoming one of the best upper-paint finishers in the league as teams pressured him off the arc.
“Coming into this season thinking I was going to playing a lot off the ball,” Herro said. “That was what I worked on all last summer, trying to change my game into playing off the ball, being a recipient of other guys attacks. I started the season like that, played really well in that role, and then as things changed I started to have the ball in my hands a little bit more. I thought I did pretty well with that.”
You won’t find anyone that would claim Miami was on an even playing field with Cleveland in the playoffs, such an imbalance making it easier for the higher seed to load up on a team’s primary scorer, but it was nonetheless a mixed bag for Herro when it came to translating his gains to a very different style of playoff basketball. His 33 points (on 10-of-13 shooting on two-pointers) in Game 2 was just as much of a proof of concept as his Game 2 against Boston the season before, but 17 combined points in the two games in Miami as Cleveland doubled down on their pressure and showed the HEAT the door fell just as short as everyone else on the roster.
The dark cloud of those final two games will follow everyone for a while, though you suspect nobody will take that experience harder than Adebayo, taking his role as captain as seriously as one could.
In some ways it was an odd year for Adebayo, a bit of a ramp up in the earlier months coming off the Olympics as he was mired in one of the first real shooting slumps of his career while his defensive numbers – still top tier elite in one-on-one situations – took a bit of a hit as he plugged as many holes as he could.
After those first two months or so, it was a typical Adebayo season. Similar usage, similar efficiency, similar impact that all lined up with his role and numbers of the previous handful of campaigns since the team asked him to take on more shot creation responsibility. He still had to navigate the same rotational waters as Herro – rather than balancing on and off the ball, Adebayo’s burden has long been walking the line between creating for all his perimeter shooters with screens and handoffs while still pursuing matchups to attack – and will likewise have to think about leading a team seeking more offense and better late-game finishes after Miami went 14-28 in clutch games.
“I learned closing games isn’t as easy as people make it look,” Herro said. “That’s my improvement this summer is how I can figure out ways to help this team win games at the end of games.”
What shouldn’t go unmentioned whenever Adebayo’s season is remembered is that he did add the three to his game, taking 2.8 a night while making 35.7 percent of them including over 40 percent from the corners. For a first season taking threes at relative volume, that’s wildly successful. Not to the point where defenses were particularly worried about those shots, by the way they defended them – Cleveland was happy to leave Adebayo and Kel’el Ware alone at the arc, and the playoffs tell the most relevant tale – but Adebayo was good enough that teams might also rethink their strategies down the road.
Aside from the Butler trade with Golden State, which brought clear and definitive closure to an era in Miami that lasted five-plus years, the story of the year was the development of Ware, likely to make an All-Rookie team. Specifically, that he developed enough, beyond merely showcasing his clear and natural athleticism and talent, to make the pairing of him and Adebayo viable as an on-court product.
There are degrees to this, of course. Together, Adebayo and Ware had a Defensive Rating that would have ranked No. 2 in the league behind Oklahoma City. That didn’t translate to the postseason when Cleveland put up just about the highest Offensive Rating ever recorded in a playoff series, with Ware running into the steep learning curve of playoff basketball, but the regular season numbers tracked with the film. As the roster is currently constructed, everyone involved appears to be committed to seeing the double-big look out. As Ware develops – his offseason focus, in his words, was to improve his strength – the defense should be rock solid.
It's the offense where questions remain. An Offensive Rating of 113.5 is below average on its own – workable on paper, but well behind what is typically required of the contender class – and even then it might have been inflated a bit by the team shooting over 40 percent from three in those minutes. That can change, but for as encouraging as the minutes were the first foray for the pairing did not dramatically alter Miami’s offense for the better, and Miami’s offense is where they have, by far, the most to gain. The number worth remembering is that in the four-game series against Cleveland, the Cavaliers had a Shot Quality (expected field-goal percentage) on two-pointers that would have ranked No. 1 in the regular season. Miami’s same number would have ranked No. 30.
Offense is a question, too, for Davion Mitchell, probably the surprise of the season after he came over in the multi-team trade in February. Mitchell’s defense arrived as advertised, his on-ball pressure a huge boon to a defense lacking in perimeter options. His offense, however, far exceeded expectations. The speed in transition and the occasional bully-ball drives were helpful, to be sure, as were his snappy passing reads, but shooting 44.7 percent from the arc (plus 7-of-14 in the playoffs) on nearly 100 attempts blew everything he had previously done in his career out of the water. That number won’t stay that high because it doesn’t stay that high for anyone. If Mitchell can retain some of those jumper gains and, most crucially, force defenses to start respecting him more rather than going under on his pick-and-rolls, that’s another element that could add a bit more punch.
The HEAT’s internal developmental program had wins, as usual. Beyond Ware, Pelle Larsson showed more than enough as a rookie that it’s not wild at all to say he could have a 10-year career with his physical, 3-and-D skillset even if both sides of that coin will require improvement. Nikola Jovic again turned more of his promise into production, and his passing may be one of the most important skills on the team moving forward especially when it comes to offering upside against the best defensive units. Building forward will require consistency – you can’t build around a specific skillset until you build the trust that you can be an every-night player – which Jovic spoke to during his Exit Interview, but given he's only 21 years old there’s little reason to expect anything less than a further upward trajectory. It’s too early to say much about Keshad Johnson, Josh Christopher or Isaiah Stevens. Year Two is when players who started with the Sioux Falls Skyforce typically show if they’re ready to start grabbing occasional minutes.
Just as much as Miami’s struggles as a team this season must be acknowledged, so too do those of the players. Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Terry Rozier both had something of a lost year, Jaquez Jr. hitting road bumps every time he began to gather momentum as his jumper stalled out and hindered the rest of his development. Rozier began the season as a starter, the question at that time how he and Herro could coexist in the backcourt with Herro planning to play more off the ball, and ended it out of the rotation as his offense remained stuck in a slump he couldn’t shake. Dru Smith was starting to earn a serious role earlier in the year, after returning from an ACL injury, only to tear his Achilles tendon in a moment that broke a thousand hearts.
The rest of the veterans did what was expected of them. Duncan Robinsson – still one of the most underrated players on the roster for how he, especially when working with Adebayo, causes and forces serous and damaging overreactions from defenses by simply running hard around a handoff – and Alec Burks remained the sniper they’ve always been. Haywood Highsmith is as dependable a role player as you’ll find, incredibly consistent as a shooter and defender on a night-to-night basis. Kyle Anderson’s ability to handle and run offense was a boon for Herro later in the season, some teams fundamentally ill-equipped to handle his unique brand of slow-motion offense. Andrew Wiggins struggled along with everyone else against the Cavaliers but otherwise provided the same level of tertiary usage and efficiency he has everywhere else, his ability to attack mismatches in the post a crucial dynamic in the team’s post-trade landscape.
There is talent here, perhaps more than a 37-win season would indicate, but talent guarantees little these days. The thing about Erik Spoelstra teams is that they have typically already cut as much of the low-hanging fruit as possible. There are no obvious quick fixes or band-aids. Improvement, real improvement that translates into wins and postseason equity, will most likely come from development. And there is plenty of youth and talent to develop.
If nothing else, this season leaves everyone here, with a group that, as Spoelstra often said, proved itself worthy of winning even if the wins didn’t always come, a good though occasionally leaky defense with an offense that could explode in bursts even as it dealt with serious late-game struggles. For the past five seasons, this team earned itself a place in the conversation about championship contenders. Sometimes they were square in the middle of that conversation, sometimes they were on the fringes, the team that many rightfully didn’t want to deal with.
That era is now over, and the last few months weren’t enough to tell us if a new one has begun. This group, every player in a new role or position than they were in eight months ago, will have to prove itself all over again, not only as worthy winners but winners outright, as a team that deserves to be spoken about as a threat to play well into May
The only way you can prove that is to do it. The chance for that, with Adebayo and Herro at the helm, will come. Basketball always returns, always offering more chances. Either you seize them, or somebody else will.
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