The Superstar duo of the Heat, Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo, missed much of the season, but Miami is consistently in the top 4 in the east. In the process, a quartet of undrafted no-names has turned into top performers – and once again demonstrated the excellent work that is being done in player development on South Beach.
“Bring the whole band back,” cheered Chris Bosh a few days ago in response to a tweet that announced another, quite surprising comeback of an aging ex-star in the NBA: Mario Chalmers is back at the Miami Heat.
The now 35-year-old Guard has not played a game in the Association since the 2017/18 season, at the beginning of the 2010s he was part of the Heat Master Team alongside the Big Three around Bosh, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. And even today “we could get the old pick’n’roll out,” joked Bosh. “I’m fit.”
The Heat and Raptors legend is unlikely to have received a call yet. And even Chalmers or Nik Stauskas, who is also returning to the league after two and a half years, will not get beyond a clear role as a corona filler on ten-day contracts.
Instead, Miami is building on its own strength from within in times of a squad that has been severely decimated by corona waves and additional injury concerns. More precisely, a quartet of no-names helps to keep the team afloat while the stars are away. A quartet that has long been working towards this opportunity in the shadow of the big names in Miami.
Miami Heat: Rotation player out of necessity
A few weeks ago, the names Max Strus, Gabe Vincent, Caleb Martin or Ömer Yurtseven probably did not trigger any great emotions among NBA fans. After all, Vincent achieved fame at the end of November for being at the potential dunk of the year drew an offensive foul by Anthony Edwards.
Otherwise there wasn’t much to see from Vincent and Co. in the first few weeks of the season. Apart from Strus, the young bankers only got a few minutes, mostly in garbage time. That was bound to change at the end of November.
Injury concerns first made headlines in Miami, in the person of Bam Adebayo (thumb surgery), the best Big Man since the beginning of December is out – and will continue to do so for a while. In addition, franchise star Jimmy Butler (tailbone) missed twelve games over a four-week period from the end of November to the end of December. In addition, there have recently been numerous corona failures, so that even a game had to be postponed.
The depth of the heat was viewed with concern before the start of the season, so it could be described as a hard blow to the neck if the actual star trio of Butler, Adebayo and Kyle Lowry only appear in 14 of the 36 games. But: Miami was hardly impressed by this, won seven out of eleven games without Butler and Bam, is on course with 23-14 and fourth place in the East with home advantage in the playoffs and belongs to the top 10 of the league both offensively and defensively.
The Heat not only owe that to Lowry, the inconstant Tyler Herro or a long-weakened Duncan Robinson. Instead, it is Strus, Vincent, Martin or Yurtseven who got a chance, seized it and showed their skills over the longer term.
Miami Heat: From no-names to top performers
Need proof? The no-names have blossomed into real rotation players and even more, in some cases even into top performers. Starting with Strus, a highly dangerous sniper who doubled his previous career average in December alone (14.3) and in the last five games before he also had to enter the Corona protocol, 22.6 points with an outstanding true shooting value of 69.6 percent hung up – including game winner against Detroit.
Over the entire season, the 25-year-old hits 40.4 percent of his 6 threesomes per game, sometimes he gets more minutes than Robinson. Most of the time, head coach Erik Spoelstra uses the winger in a very similar way to Robinson, making him whiz around screens or pull the trigger after hand-offs. Its quick release has meanwhile also made the competition sit up and take notice.
“The opposing coaches now point out to their players when I’m in the game. They then scream: ‘Strus! Shooter! Shooter,” he told him Miami Herald. “You are starting to know who I am. That’s nice to hear. It didn’t exist last season.”
Strus worked hard for all of this. In the 2019 draft, he received nothing, in his first season in the G-League he tore his cruciate ligament. In the following offseason Strus fought for a place in the training camp of the Heat and a two-way contract, which was finally converted into a normal two-year contract after good performances in the 20/21 season. It’s not the only case of impressive development in the Heat squad.
