The Miami Heat head into the 2025-26 season seeking a new identity following the departure of Jimmy Butler. They finished in the bottom-third in offense for the third-straight year and tied their worst record (37-45) since the infamous Big 3 split up.
Miami Heat guard Nikola Jovic, who inked a four-year extension with the Heat earlier this week, offered a solution to their offensive struggles on media day: Push the pace.
“We got to play fast,” Jovic told Ethan Skolnick, Alex Toledo and Brady Hawk of Five Reasons Sports in a recent exclusive on Five On The Floor. “We don’t got a guy who’s ‘OK, give me the ball’ he’s going to score 30 (points) every night. We have [Tyler Herro] who can score; we have [Bam Adebayo]; we have [Norman Powell]; and we have [Andrew Wiggins].
“How I look at is, OK, look at (the) Indiana (Pacers). Other than Pascal Siakam, I don’t know who else I would give the ball and be like, ‘OK, go score 30.’ And the way they play is to run, take advantage of every little thing, catch and go, shoot the ball, easy baskets. … It’s going to be easier for everybody to play that way. If we start playing slow and trying to manage things, I feel like it’s hard for us to find that rhythm.”
Nikola Jovic is right. The Heat must play faster:
Earlier this summer, I wrote that the Heat needed to do a better job pushing pace if they wanted to be an efficient offense again.
With Jimmy Butler for five-and-a-half seasons, Butler was excellent at mismatch hunting and exploiting advantages in the halfcourt, where he was able to create easy opportunities for not only himself, but his teammates.
Without Butler, Miami no longer has that dimension.
Erik Spoelstra’s teams have never quite pushed the pace, ranking among the bottom-12 teams in transition frequency in nine of the last 11 seasons — sporting the fifth-lowest transition frequency from a year ago, according to Cleaning The Glass.
Now, the Heat no longer have a consistent advantage exploiter in the halfcourt. Pushing the pace allows the Heat to have more bites at the apple and apply pressure to backpedaling defenses.
They were No. 6 in shot clock violations (72) and T-3 for the most eight-second violations (4) last season. They also finished among the bottom-eight teams in shots attempted in late shot clock situations (defined by attempts with 4-7s on the shot clock) and very late clock (0-4s) situations.
Game flow will dictate whether or not they’re able to push pace — but if the Heat’s offense can put pressure on an already-bent defense in clock situations, it will work to their advantage in the long haul.
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maybe just a bit faster and add 4-6 pts from their average last season to get to the middle of the pack then maintain that top 10 defense. i think that would get this team a game or two over the play-in.
just checked…Heat is top 7 defense last season. actually that was the lowest in 5 years. always top 2-5. crazy!
That was even with the chaos and instability created by the quitter. Not bad when you think about it. With Powell, Wiggins, Mitchell, Bam, Smith and Ware not too bad this year. Jaquez and Larsson also aren’t bad defenders and Jovic is working on his defensive game.
Playing faster is easier said than done. I am not sure the Heat have the right personnel to implement a Pacers like approach. The Pacers started playing fast three seasons ago, and when we first saw them both hfl and I said, that’s the future of the nba. And, it’s somewhat true, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat (sorry for the horrible expression).
Furthermore, going into the season, there will be a lot of speculation about what the Heat can and cannot do. But, until we see this years edition on the floor when the real games start, we can’t really be sure what we have.
My guess is, as the roster stands today, that we are a slightly better team than last year, going from a slightly below .500 team to a slightly above one. That would be, health permitting.
Quitter slowed the pace down considerably. The rest of the team is capable of running when the opportunities present themselves.