The Miami Heat's new offense is weird. Does it work?

Breaking down what they're doing, how it's working, and where it's vulnerable

[This post was written November 5th, but I’ve updated all the linked stats through November 11th to take into account three more (Bam-less) games.]

If you’ve been following the NBA this season, you’ve undoubtedly heard people mention the Heat’s newfangled offense. The headlines always revolve around Miami putting the pick-and-roll in some Tupperware and throwing it in the freezer, which is broadly accurate, but also leaves some room for a more nuanced discussion. We’ll look at some numbers, discuss a few principles, dive into whether it’s working, and forecast why it might or might not sustain.

Erik Spoelstra promised change after last season’s desultory playoff loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers, and he sure has delivered. The Miami Heat aren’t just attacking differently than they ever have before. They’re playing a new brand of ball entirely.

Years of creaking side-to-side action, arduous pick-and-rolls, and stale dribble hand-offs with suboptimal personnel have given way to north-south assertiveness, minimal wasted movement, and snappy decision-making. Let’s start at the top.

The Heat are playing quicker. It jumps off the screen. Not just in the classic fast-break sense, but in the blinding speed with which they get the ball across halfcourt and moving to the rim even after made baskets and rebounds.

Per Inpredictable, they’re second in total time to shot at just 10.3 seconds (only Portland plays faster). Last year, it took Miami a chelonian 12.5 seconds to get up a shot (third-slowest in the league). That’s a massive difference!

If you want Miami’s new offense summed up in a nutshell, it’s this:

The cameraman is still on the hero shot of Austin Reaves after a Laker bucket when Jaime Jaquez Jr. crosses halfcourt. Juan Wick blurs through an ostensibly set defense for a rapid-fire and-one.

Miami’s coaching staff (which consults former Memphis assistant Noah LaRoche, who implemented a somewhat similar system for the Grizzlies last season) never wants the ballhandler sitting still. Hell, they don’t even like the ballhandler moving side to side. The first rule: Drive straight to the basket. The second rule: If there isn’t room to drive, find it anyway.

Despite not having an on-ball superstar, the Heat are driving 60 times per game (third in the league). That’s about 20% more often than last season. They’re passing less and dribbling more.

And yep, they’ve largely abandoned the pick-and-roll. The Heat’s broadcast team noted that the fewest P&Rs the Heat ran in any game last season was 41 (and they averaged nearly 70 such actions); in the season opener against Orlando, they ran just 29! Synergy says that just 7.4% of the Heat’s plays this season have finished with something off the pick-and-roll; the second-lowest team, Houston, still used 16.0%. In other words, Miami is running fewer than half as many pick-and-rolls as the 29th-ranked team (and there’s a similar, if slightly less drastic, story with dribble hand-offs).

Sure, you’ll see structured plays sprinkled in here and there, but they usually come after dead balls and timeouts, when there isn’t much advantage to or opportunity for sprinting across halfcourt. But during live-ball play, they focus nearly exclusively on drive-and-kick actions. The third rule: Shoot when you’re open, no matter when or where. Only the Knicks generate more spot-up opportunities, which typically result from the many isolations and self-created post-ups Heat players dribble into. It doesn’t always look particularly pretty, but it (*Eric Reid voice*) kabooms:

The Heat run an unusually overloaded offense. They will place three or even four players on the weak side, often emptying the strong-side corner to give the ballhandler as much room to worm his way to the hoop as possible. The cutting that is done is mostly of the sacrificial type to draw help defenders away from the driving lanes.

The Heat coaches have internalized something about the NBA that not enough people appreciate: Almost every rotation-level player is capable of scoring one-on-one against even great defenders. Bad defenders have no hope of surviving island life when their help is dragged away:

The Heat are shooting better than 71% at the rim, a well-above-average mark, despite battling against several good defenses and not possessing an All-NBA-level advantage creator. That’s fantastic proof of concept.

If defenders stymie the drive, the ballhandler kicks it out to the perimeter. If the receiving player isn’t open for the shot, they’re encouraged to pass it quickly rather than dribble to avoid having two drivers in a row clogging the middle (Bam Adebayo explained some basic principles on this excellent segment from the new Amazon Prime crew.) Anyone in the dunker spot is supposed to flow in the opposite direction of the driver; everyone else spaces the floor. Here’s another view:

Much of this offense flies in the face of modern NBA principles. There isn’t a ton of off-ball movement. Players aren’t setting weak-side screens for each other or switching spots. In fact, they’re often relatively stationary until a ballhandler picks up his dribble, after which they flit around to create open passing lanes like a bunch of sleepy pigeons startled into action.

The Heat eschew modern floor balance principles by often having two or more players level with the baseline, at least one in the weak-side corner and one in the dunker spot. Watch as the Heat station four players below the dotted line when Jaquez picks up his dribble on this beautiful, pirouetting layup:

You can actually (sort of) quantify the lack of activity. The NBA website tracks the distance run by all players on offense. Dividing that by a team’s total possessions can tell you how much the average team physically runs with their feet on any given possession, and guess what? The Heat land a shocking 28th in this metric.

They’re moving fast, but they’re not moving much. It’s a surprising amount of standing around. Purposeful standing around, to enable easier decision-making from the drivers, but still!

The system is egalitarian; everyone is encouraged to attack any crease as long as it’s in the direction of the hoop. Typically, the Heat inbound to a receiving guard (usually Mitchell, who’s running like a bat outta hell, or the incandescent Norman Powell), who then looks to throw a hit-ahead pass to a wing near the sideline. (Bam is empowered to do whatever the hell he wants.) From there, it’s off to the races.

But the at-rim stuff is only half the game. The constant threat of rim pressure opens up long-range bombs for a roster full of three-point threats: Miami is canning 38% of their triples as a team so far.

Even the big men are getting in on the action. Before hurting his foot early against Denver on Wednesday night, Bam Adebayo led the team in three-point attempts this season, putting up a whopping 6.4 per game and making 36%. That’s very legitimate volume, speaking to how much more confident he’s become in his shot. Kel’el Ware isn’t putting up quite as many, but he is cashing 34% from beyond the arc on three attempts per game — both above-median marks for a center.

Several players have excelled in this system. The Heat have a lot of solid ballhandlers, but few who are good enough to create advantages in the muck of the half-court. This offense has enabled guys to play in more space and create good looks from range. So far, we’ve seen big years from Powell, Simone Fontecchio, and Jaquez, in particular.

I noted in my offseason trade grades that Powell’s strengths as a player included his straight-line drives and three-point shooting; you can see how that would play in this system. He’s averaging 24.5 points, earning nearly eight free-throw attempts per game, and shooting 46% from three so far. Fontecchio, too, is nailing half of his triples. He looks reborn after a disastrous year for Detroit last season. The shooting from those two has acted almost like an offensive line, opening up monster gaps in the defense for the ballhandlers to rabidly attack.

But Jaquez’s play has raised my eyebrows the highest. Despite coming off the bench, he’s been Miami’s third-best player after Powell and the always-reliable Adebayo.

Jaquez is at his greatest smashing his way to the rim with a running back’s combination of brute strength and fancy feet. The Heat broadcast team said during the recent Cavaliers game that Jaquez has completed the fourth-most layups in the league this season! He looks positively Juggernautian in the long runways Spoelstra and company have created for him:

17.5 points while shooting nearly 64% on twos (and rebounding well, to boot) represents a heck of a bounce-back year, even if the three-pointer has evaporated like South Beach dew. Jaquez is currently just two points behind Nikola Jokic for the league lead in total plus/minus, which is, uh, not a statistic I would have predicted before the year. He is the early frontrunner for Sixth Man of the Year.

To summarize: Miami doesn’t do much off-ball moving, set many picks, or waste any time, using their various three-point threats to open huge driving lanes for their ballhandlers. But is it working?

Add it all up, and the Heat have the 10th-best offense rating in the league. I’d argue that’s more impressive than it sounds, given they’ve had to play several monster defenses with excellent perimeter and/or interior defenders, all while their three most important players (Tyler Herro, Powell, and Adebayo) have missed time. This is not a team with the most gifted offensive personnel, and that 10th ranking is the best Miami has had in six years!

But despite that rosy-sounding paragraph, some structural flaws could lead to long-term problems.

Miami’s tendency to play so flat and overloaded on one side of the floor can lead to balance issues. Particularly when a player misses at the rim, it leaves them vulnerable to transition attacks going the other direction. And when Heat players aren’t mindful of their space, it can leave ballhandlers with nowhere to pass to. Why are Mitchell and Adebayo literally standing on top of one another here?

The Heat are currently 24th in transition defense, the lowest mark of Erik Spoelstra’s entire career as a head coach, and they’re also dead last in offensive rebounding rate. Those two things shouldn’t both be bad, and it’s zigging against league trends that have increasingly valued those things.

There’s also a worry that smart teams can and will eventually figure out how to space effectively to deter the drivers without opening up clean looks from deep. Memphis’ system was effective on the whole before Ja Morant reportedly forced the team to change it, but the Grizzlies notoriously struggled to score against top teams. Detail-oriented squads with the right personnel could stop Miami’s enthusiastic but relatively low-ceiling offensive players, particularly if they have, say, a 7’4” genetic miracle providing help in the middle. It’s no coincidence that the Heat’s worst offensive performance came against the Spurs. I’ll be curious to see how they fare against other top-tier rim protectors in this system (the Clippers’ Ivica Zubac, a different kind of elite paint sentinel, had much less success slowing the Heat down).

The lack of off-ball movement and occasionally awkward spacing feels ripe for counter defensive schemes that zone up and allow a fifth defender, whether the center or someone faster, to live in the paint. While I wouldn’t call this a stagnant offensive system, nor is it dynamic in the way that, say, Indiana’s was last year, with a bevy of off-ball movement. Will the Heat’s ballhandlers be as effective going against two defenders more often instead of one? And can the other team guard three or four shooters with n-1 defenders? Right now, the strategy is to run so fast that the help can’t get set in time; we’ll see if that holds.

But then again, Erik Spoelstra undoubtedly is keeping some things in reserve. (We’ve already seen the Heat throw in one wrinkle: Having a cutter dart in directly behind the driver for a potential dump-off). They can’t throw only fastballs. Whether it takes the league 10 or 80 games to figure out this offense, the Heat will need an off-speed pitch at some point. Perhaps Tyler Herro’s eventual return will introduce more of the classic Heat handoffs and pick-and-roll game. (Theoretically, he should be a great fit in this system, but that very much remains to be seen.) Perhaps we’ll see the team lean into big lineups a little more (if Kel’el Ware can maintain Spoelstra-required intensity). Perhaps they’ll bring in something else entirely (more Bam inverted pick-and-rolls with Powell or Herro as the screener?).

There’s no point in playing those cards until you need them. Unfortunately, that might be sooner than they’d planned. Adebayo’s foot injury against Denver, combined with Herro’s continued absence, could leave the Heat without two of their three best offensive threats for a while. As of this writing, we don’t know what’s wrong with the big man’s poor footsie, but any extended absence will absolutely kill this team on both ends.

Expecting Jaquez or Andrew Wiggins to level up further is unrealistic. Kel’el Ware isn’t ready for an expanded role. And Miami’s upcoming schedule is brutal: After a game against Charlotte, they play four straight games against Cleveland and New York, then host Golden State, then have to play the East-leading Bulls (another thing I wouldn’t have imagined writing before the season!). That’s a lot of pretty good defenses in a row. To top it all off, Spoelstra stepped off the plane from Denver last night to a home that was literally burning down! Real life has to take precedence even for a maniac like Spo. I wouldn’t expect him to be at his best in the immediate future.

So is this a flash-in-the-pan carnival gimmick? Or is it the foundation for something stronger? I’m leaning slightly towards the latter, but don’t be surprised if they need a few more weeks, some injury luck, and a team of crack reconstruction contractors to completely find their footing.