The Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh-led Heat are winning by keeping the ball moving
When LeBron James chose to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers in free agency this summer, just about every NBA watcher in the known world wondered how the heck the Miami Heat would cope with the loss of the best basketball player in the world. We should know better by now than to doubt Pat Riley, but even after re-upping Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade, and importing Luol Deng and Josh McRoberts, Miami still seemed more likely to tumble toward the East’s second tier than to stay near the top of the conference.
A funny thing’s happened on the way to the middle of the pack, though. While LeBron and his new mates are scuffling and, um, “sharpening,” the Heat have hit the ground running, going 5-2 through seven games and boasting the league’s fourth most-potent offense, scoring an average of 108.3 points per 100 possessions.
After spending four years as a third option, Bosh has thrived as Miami’s top gun, and the 32-year-old Wade is back to serving as Erik Spoelstra’s primary table-setter. The results have been encouraging, and Wade’s happy as a clam for a pretty simple reason, according to Joseph Goodman of the Miami Herald:
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For a basketball player such as Wade, one of the game’s greatest playmakers of all time, happiness can be boiled down and distilled into a much simpler formula.
“I got the ball in my hands,” Wade said. […]
“It’s my job to put pressure on the defense and try to make plays for the other guys,” Wade said.
“It makes me feel good that the other guys are feeling good about themselves by me drawing two guys, kicking it to them and them hitting shots and getting into that rhythm and flow.”
As is the case whenever we take a look under the hood at this stage in the season, it remains to be seen whether the numbers hold up over the course of a full campaign. In the early going, though, Wade certainly has seen more of the ball this year with James out of the picture, and he’s been doing plenty with it.
He’s averaging about 10 more front-court touches per game this season than last, and hanging onto the ball about a half-minute longer (a 3.9 minutes-per-game average time of possession) than last season (3.4 minutes per game), according to the NBA’s SportVU player tracking data. But he’s not just pounding the rock. He’s driving to the basket more often (8.3 drives per game, tied with LeBron for 14th in the league and up from 6.9 per game last year) and, once he draws the defense’s attention with his penetration, looking to dump off more often, too.
Wade’s assisting on a whopping 40.5 percent of his teammates’ buckets during his time on the floor this season, the sixth-highest share in the NBA (behind only point guards Ricky Rubio, Chris Paul, Rajon Rondo, John Wall and Jeff Teague) and Wade’s best such mark since the 2006-07 season. He’s ninth in the league in points created by assist per game (16.4), a quantum leap up from 47th last year (10.7).
The impact of Wade’s facilitating extends beyond just the impressive number of dimes he’s dropping, too. Per SportVU, Wade’s third in the league in “free throw assists,” or passes leading to a trip to the line where the shooter made at least one freebie (1.3 per game) and 19th in secondary, or “hockey,” assists (1.4 per game). It’s great that Wade’s happy to have the ball in his hands, but we’re betting Spoelstra’s more excited by how his increased willingness to get it out of them has bolstered Miami’s attack.
While Spoelstra has limited his star shooting guard to fewer minutes per game than he did last season, Wade has yet to miss a contest after playing just 54 of Miami’s 82 games last year as part of a season-long “maintenance plan” designed to keep his balky knees in good working order for a long postseason run. Whether he can continue producing at this level without needing extended rest figures to be the biggest question facing Miami this season.
Then again, should Wade need a bit more of a breather, the Heat look like they’ll be able to rely more heavily on Bosh, who’s spent the first two weeks of this season alternately reminding folks what he used to be in Toronto and forcing naysayers to acknowledge what he’s become over the past four years.
The 30-year-old big man has been a revelation in the early going, ranking eighth in the league in scoring (23.6 points per game) and 13th in rebounding (10.3 caroms a night). And despite a significant increase in his workload — Bosh is finishing 28.4 percent of Miami’s possessions with a field goal attempt (15.9 per game, up from 12.1 last year), a foul drawn (only James Harden, DeMar DeRozan, DeMarcus Cousins and Rudy Gay have taken more free throws than Bosh’s 59) or a turnover (only 16 cough-ups through seven games), which would be the highest usage rate of his career — he’s continued to score efficiently. Bosh is shooting 48.6 percent from the field and 36 percent from 3-point land on a career-high 3.6 long-range tries per game, helping fuel a career-best 26.8 PER that ranks fourth in the NBA behind only young monsters Anthony Davis and DeMarcus Cousins, and phenomenally effective part-time pogo stick Brandan Wright.
What’s made Bosh’s early-season explosion even more impressive, though, is that despite the increase in touches, shot attempts and trips to the foul line, he hasn’t just become a black hole. He’s averaging a career-high three assists per game, too, notching a direct dime on 15.1 percent of his teammates’ makes, and continuing to look for pressure-relief outlets on the perimeter like Wade, Norris Cole and Mario Chalmers.
“That’s always a challenge when the ball is in your hands a lot,” Bosh recently told DeAntae Prince of the Sporting News. “That’s one of the biggest responsibilities coach gave me, and I’m still trying to get a feel for it. […] I want to make sure that I’m facilitating the ball, because the easiest thing to do is to shoot it every time. And I don’t want to be that sort of selfish guy. I want to make sure the ball is moving and I’m doing what I need to do to make sure I am facilitating like I’m supposed to.”
For generations of fans raised to revere the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later alpha dog work of Michael Jordan — and, too often, to forget that Mike dished at some pretty big moments himself — it seems almost like a dereliction of duty when a player expected to score talks up the importance of sharing the ball and trying to get everybody else involved rather than going it alone. But in a modern NBA populated by grind-you-down defenses like the strong-side overload zone scheme popularized by Tom Thibodeau — and the shut-off-the-3-point-line, funnel-everything-into-a-7-foot-2-behemoth style favored by Miami’s longtime nemesis and Wednesday night opponent, the Indiana Pacers — you’re more likely to find success swinging the ball from side to side, spreading those lockdown units as thin as you can, hunting every little crease and crevice you can find to penetrate and kick, and relying on elite offensive talent in combination with a “many hands make light work” approach to breaking down the D.
Dictating what the defense will give you and then taking it with both hands creates opportunities for Deng to explode for 30 points in 37 minutes, as he did in Sunday’s win over the Dallas Mavericks. Or for scrap-heap pickup Shawne Williams to go from afterthought to big-minutes starter, averaging 10 points per game on 42.4 percent shooting from 3-point land. Or for the occasional forays into heroism of the point-guard troika of Cole, Chalmers and rookie Shabazz Napier. Move the ball, cut hard, be ready and step into it with confidence, and we’ll live with the result.
More than just “get as many top players as you can together,” that was the lesson of the LeBron-Wade-Bosh era that resulted in four straight Finals trips, two NBA championships, and two defeats at the hands of spread-you-out-and-carve-you-up offenses. That’s why, even without LeBron, the Heat rank fifth in the NBA in total passes per game and second in points created by assist per game, and show no signs of slowing things down any time soon.
“It’s a habit you build,” Spoelstra recently told Grantland’s Zach Lowe. “You learn how to play together and make the game easier for each other.”
That, in turn, makes the game awful difficult on the opposition, and gives those who kept their talents in South Beach plenty of reason to smile, even if they no longer suit up alongside the best player in the world.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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