Hoops Tonight - NBA Team Rankings: How do Heat & Jimmy Butler recover after losing out on Lillard?

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See Sportsbook dot Draft, Kings dot com, slash Football terms for eligibility terms and responsible gambling resources. Bonus bets expire seven days after inch issuance. Eligibility and deposit restrictions apply. All right, welcome to tonight here at the Volume. Happy Friday, everybody. Hope all you guys are having a great week so far. We are live on AMPS. If you're watching on YouTube, we're listening on our podcast feeds. Don't forget that AMP is the very first place that you guys can get

these shows. Continuing our Power rankings today with number seven The Losers, the Damian Lillard Trade Saga, the Miami Heat, got a season preview for them, and then I've got three mail back questions for the end of the show as well. You guys are the drill. Before we get started, subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow me on Twitter, Underscore Jason lt don't forget about our podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts under Hoops Tonight and I need more

mail bag questions. Keep dropping those in the YouTube comments so we can keep hitting them at the end of the shows. Also last minu at least before we get started. The start of pro basketball is only a few weeks away, but there's no shortage of events to attend in the meantime. Obviously, all summer long we've had baseball going on, as well

as concerts and comedy shows touring around the country. But now we have the return of pro and college football, and the best way to get tickets to any of these events is on game Time, the fastest growing ticketing app in the United States. For amazing last minute deals on tickets to see your favorite baseball or football team, Download game Time. And again, it's not just sports. There are several huge concerts and comedy shows still on tour, and game Time has your tickets to these as well.

Download the game Time app and or deem code Hoops for twenty dollars off your first purchase. Again, download game Time and interercode Hoops. That's hops for twenty dollars off. No matter where you live, get out and have some fun this week. Download the game time at last minute tickets lowess price guaranteed. All right, let's talk some basketball. So the Miami Heat they lost a lot of players. Actually,

Eudonis Haslim retired finally. Victor Oladipo obviously was injured at the end of last year, but he's gone now to Max Struskay Vincent elsewhere, Omer your seven, and Cody Zeller as well elsewhere. They added Josh Richardson a good replacement

at guard. He's an excellent point of attack defender. I was going back the other day when we were covering the Thunder and I was watching that Pelicans Thunder game, and really the one time they got SGA kind of sort of under control was when Josh Richardson was on it. He's just a pass to. He can navigate screens well. He's good with bal denial as well. Just a good defensive guard. He also shot the ball pretty well last year with the Pelicans, and he has him off the

dribble pop view. Heat fans already know him pretty well, but this will be a better example this time around of getting him to see what it's like working with this version of bam Adebayo and the excellent jubil handoff fulcrum that he's become. Thomas Bryant the backup center for the Lakers and Nuggets last year. I covered him pretty closely when he was with the Lakers. Very gifted offensively, he catches and finishes well around the rim. He's super

active on the glass. He's gonna sprint up and down the floor and transition every single time. And he can shoot the ball pretty well like a legitimate pick and pop through at As a matter of fact, he converted rollman possessions at one point three to five points per possession when he was with the Lakers, which is really really good. But he struggles to guard and pick and roll and he offers no rim protection. So he's fine regular season player, but you probably don't want him in

your playoff rotation, and Denver did not use him. That said, Eric Spolser has a gift for We're going to talk about this more later, but he has a gift for finding defensive roles that players can thrive in, even limited defensive players. So I am curious to see what Eric Spolster can do with him. They also brought over Schek Tialo, who played in Japan last year. He'll be competing for a spot in camp. RJ. Hampton a backup guard for the Pistons. Jimi hack has Junior. I covered him in

summer League. Really versatile wing that I actually really like, and I think he's gonna be a good pro right away. Just a good basketball player does a bunch of little things. Well. I think he's gonna be a perfect fit with the Heat. And then Cole Swider, I covered him with the Lakers last year. Really can shoot it, but struggles to do everything else, which again I can think of no better place than the Heat to try to figure out if

there's something else there. So the depth chart as of right now at guard Kyle Lowry, Tyler Harrow, Josh Richardson, Caleb Martin, and RJ. Hampton. At Ford Jimmy Butler, Duncan Robinson, Himeh hake As, Junior, Nikola Yovitch, who we're gonna talk a lot about today, and Heywood high Smith and then the bigs bam Adebayo, Thomas Bryant, Orlando Robinson and Shakyallo

the Dame Trait. So the Blazers obviously yesterday were able to turn Damian Lillard into Drew Holliday DeAndre and draft compensations. So the Athletic had a big report that came out this morning that basically broke down the path way that led to Dame ending up in Milwaukee, and it was pretty informative about just how little of a chance Miami actually had. I know there were a lot of Heat fans that are frustrated with pat Riley, and I get it. It's not even so much Dame as it is the

bigger picture. Like you missed out on Dame, you missed out on Bradley beal right, Like it's just it's been kind of a steady you missed out on Donovan Mitchell, Like it's been a steady train of players that you know, the Heat could have jumped on but couldn't figure out. But the reality is is they don't really have that

grade of a situation to make a star trade. Like many contenders, They can't afford to give away one of their core pieces in that deal, right, Like you can't give up Jimmy Butler, BAM and a Bio in the deal because then you lose your championship ceiling anyway, right, And those are really the only two core pieces, right, But they don't really have a young player of the league once, Like Tyler Harrow is a good player, but he's already on an expensive deal and a lot of

front offices don't think he's that good. Like he's kind of a polarizing player. Nikole Jovitch. Really interesting young player, but not exactly a needle mover. Right. And here's the thing, Like Miami draft picks are some of the least valuable in the league because they're a great organization that rarely loses basketball games. I was pulling this up earlier. Since two thousand and four, the Heat have the fourth most

regular season wins in the entire NBA. A little trivia for you guys, Who do you think are the three teams that were ahead of the Heat since two thousand and four, So that's starting with the two thousand and three, two thousand and four season, call it since Lebron came into the league. Which teams do you think have the most regular season wins? Spurs pretty obvious one, right, Mavericks a third one. I don't think you guys are gonna get but we'll see if you get it. Tell me

in the comments. The Denver Nuggets, or third on that list. They also, the Miami Heat have one hundred and forty two playoff wins since two thousand and four, which is nineteen more than any other team in the NBA, So they're the winningest playoff team over the last two decades and they're the fourth winningest regular season team. So the draft picks aren't worth all that much. I would imagine that port And looks at Milwaukee's draft picks as a

much higher chance of being higher value. Right. So the reality is is like it's easy for us in our chairs to be like, hey, why didn't they make a move on this guy, Why didn't they make a move on that guy? And we really don't know what's happening behind the scenes. And the truth is is that Miami's not really in a position where they can easily beat out other teams in a bidding war. But we even found out from that Athletic report today that they didn't

really have much of a chance to begin with. So the Athletic reported that Dame went to the front office and requested a trade and said he wanted to go

to Miami. And when Portland called Miami, they asked for Jimmy Butler or bam Adebio in the deal, according to this report from the Athletic, Like, that's just not serious, right, And then the Athletic also reported that it was pretty damn contentious between the two sides, So you know, Dame basically is known for a couple of weeks that Miami was off the table, and at that point then he started using his agent behind the scenes to push for

either Brooklyn or Milwaukee, and Milwaukee is what ended up materializing. So it's like, maybe maybe pat Riley could have thrown all of the assets on the table and gotten the deal done. But the truth is we don't know, and I don't think that that's necessarily fair criticism, especially now

that we know the details behind the scene. I was under the impression that Portland wanted to send him where he wanted to go, but was more interested in just kind of like trying to leverage Miami into giving up a little bit more. Judging from this report from the Athletic, it looks like Portland had really no interest in sending him to Miami to begin with. So I don't want to be too critical of pat Riley in this instance. The reality is though, is that the Heat need to

do something. And I wrote down four reasons why. There are four reasons why I think the Heat have to get aggressive in some way, shape or form before the deadline at least if not in the next couple of days. So One, the Jimmy Butler bam Ata Bio combination is easily one of the best playoff combinations in the NBA, and they've proven that, like they've literally been to the conference finals three of the last four years, and they've

won the conference twice. Again, this is the conference that when you think of you think of Jason Tatum, you think of Joe Elmbid, you think of Gianni Santanakompo, and yet Jimmy and bam have won the conference two of the last four years and made it to the conference finals three the last four years. So that is a combination that has proven to be devastating in the NBA playoffs. Two, Jimmy Butler just turned thirty four years old, so there's real urgency to try to get something done in this

season or in the following season. Three. Eric Spolstra is the very best coach in the NBA. In my opinion, We're gonna talk more about that later. That's a real weapon here, right, And then number four. Consistently, the success that we've seen the Heat have in the playoffs has been because of their top tier talent and because of Eric Spolstra, and often they've been overcoming or operating with

a significant talent disadvantage. It's been a firepower issue. So it's a reasonable assumption to think that the Heat are like one legitimate shot creator away from having a real chance to win the title. Not like make the finals and have a couple of scratch he wins against a team that pounds you into oblivion and wins the series, but like actually win the damn thing. I really do think they're potentially one move away, and so I'd like to see them be more aggressive. So the question is

is what specifically do they need now? As we know, one of Eric Spolster's specific gifts, like that we talked about with Thomas Bryant and we're going to talk about here in a little bit as well, is his ability to craft defensive roles in schemes that actually work for personnel that have limitations. Right, Like, each year he kind of just finds a scheme that works for that unit. He picks each player and identifies what they're capable of actually doing well and finds a role for that within

his scheme. Right, So, like, I don't think you need to go after some dude who's like a devastating two way player necessarily, and I would be open to players that have defensive flaws. I think they need a guard. I think they need a guard that can consistently generate high quality shots in the half court against elite playoff defenses, at least a fringe all All Star level player, maybe not a guy who makes the All Star team, but a guy that you think of as like an All

Star caliber type of player. Right, So, guys that keep an eye on Drew Holliday obviously, although the contentiousness between the two front offices might make that impossible. Zach Lavin er Demartin Rosen, if the he at the Bulls go south again, like Levigne, de Rosen and Vucevich each played in at least seventy four games last year, and they were below five hundred and missed the playoffs entirely. So like that, that whole situation feels destined for a blow

up sooner than later. Terry Rogier we all know from what happened over the summer, specifically with them potentially getting involved in the Tyler Harrow discussions, that that the the Hornets were looking for a different two guard to put an Excellamela Ball like, maybe you can engage with them straight up and work out a deal for Terry Rogier and maybe a little bit of four depth there as well. Jordan Clarkson with the Utah Jazz's guy keep an eye on.

And then D'Angelo Russell. I don't I don't think the Lakers signed him with the intention of keeping him long term. I think they just signed him with the intention of keeping the asset. And I actually expecting Angela Russell to

get traded either this deadline or next offseason. So those are guys that those are just examples of guys that keep an eye on, Guys that I think within the heat system could be productive enough defensively and provide enough shot creation flanking Jimmy Butler to push them over the top. And because this is the thing too often when push comes to shove, Jimmy Butler is just their only guy that can create a shot and it's like, Okay, we can run this dribble handoff for Duncan Robinson or for

Gabe Vincent right. But like the bam offensive hub thing has its limitations, and obviously all the guards and wings that they've had in the last couple of years haven't been enough. I think you need just something a little bit higher caliber there on the offensive end. They were twenty fifth in offensive rating last year, twenty third and

half court offense according to Cleaning the Glass. Similarly to Denver with nicolea Jokic or Sacramento with Nicola with Sabonis, they add a lot of the variation to their two man game by using bam At a Bio as a dribble handoff threat. And that's important for two specific reasons. So think of it like this, like, if you have a very skilled big man, it's actually better for you to have the ball in his hands as a as like kind of like an audible to your two man game.

The reason why is, like, imagine this as an example, if I'm guarding a pick and roll and Bamana Bayo is the screener, I don't have to worry about him being a threat. Immediately, They've got to find a way to get the ball to him. So if I blitz him, and I if I blitz the ball handler and push him far out to half court and force a lob pass, I probably can rotate over right. And even if I do throw a pass, like he's got to catch and then turn and face and make a read. But in

a drible handoff situation, he's a threat immediately. And so what that does is it makes it so that the screen defender can't show high on screens right, So like bam ade Bio's defender can't show high on a dribble handoff because if he does, BAM's just gonna dribble right around him and go to the basket. So it just makes it a lot difficult, a lot more difficult to guard from the standpoint of the screen defender. And then second, it allows your limited offensive players that struggle to handle

the basketball. It allows them to get separation without needing to use a live dribble to set their man up for a ball screen or a dribble combination to get separation before they go into the ball screen in any way, shape or form, Like they can just v cut right, like run into their man's chest, like give him a little shove and then cut hard off of the handoff and then they can get separation and get downhill or

rise and fire into jump shots. And that works specifically with their roster really well, because they've got a lot of guys like that that are not super high level ball handlers but do have some offensive polish. Like Tyler Harrow, he really struggles to generate separation with the live dribble. As a matter of fact, Tyler Harrow was the very

worst ISO player in the NBA last year. There were seventy two players in the NBA that ran at least one hundred ISOs, and Tyler Harrow's zero points seventy three points per possession ranked dead last on that list. Handoffs are a great way to help him with that. Although Tyler Harrow did actually have a decent year and pick and roll as well. Duncan Robinson similar type of thing.

He's actually gone up a level in his ball handling and saw that a little bit in this postseason run as he became more of a threat putting the ball on the floor. But he was one point one to two points per handoff last year, which is awesome. So that's an example of a guy who's benefited from that, and then Josh Richardson is another guy that I expect to come in and immediately have some success playing alongside

bam at A Bayo. Josh Richardson was forty seven percent on pull up jump shots last year with the New Orleans Pelicans, so I think that could help as well. One of the biggest keys to this entire heat season, in my opinion, is the development of Nikola Yovic. The team is super thin at forward. Like I said, they desperately need a useful forward to materialize from this group, and he played pretty well with the Serbian team in the FIBA tournament. He shot super well sixty one percent

effective field goal percentage on jump shots. He even went three for four on pull up jump shots. He has like this nice little step back three going to his left that he can make shot seventy four percent at the rim, which is awesome, and he's showing some real polishers. A post up against the Dominican Republic where he caught the ball on the left block and felt the defender overplaying his right shoulder, spun baseline, drew the help through like a behind the back drop off pass to a

cutter like rose up and dunk it. That dunked it. Then there was another play against Italy where he's posting up on the opposite block, on the left block, and like straight up like faked towards a drop step towards the middle and spun into like a nasty fade away over his right shoulder that he made like legitimately has some high end potential there, some high end polished there, and so like he could solve a lot of their

problems just by becoming a useful player this year. And obviously as a rookie he didn't play much, but I would imagine that they're counting on him to play a much bigger role this season. Defensively, last year, the Miami Heat ninth in defensive rating sixteenth and half court defense according to Cleaning the Glass fourth and defensive rebounding percentage fourth and protecting the paint seventh. Best transition defense in

the league. They gave up the seventh fewest total transition points according to Synergy, and they were the third best team in the league at forcing opponent turnovers. They're one week spot in the defense, as they were the second worst three point defense in the league. They gave up the second most made threes per one possessions in the NBA,

so that's gonna be their big area for opportunity. Big part of that, though, is they almost have to, with their lack of size overall, pack the paint in order to have any chance of getting stops there and rebounding. But we know the drill here. No matter what happens in the regular season, the same thing is going to happen regardless of who they face. Spolstra is gonna have a good game plan, Jimmy and Bam are gonna cause all sorts of problems on both ends of the floor.

Jimmy Butler is gonna try to alpha dog your superstar, and they're gonna have a really good chance to beat anybody. But the question is will they run out of firepower again? Every single year, This is what happens all of the fringe contenders, Spolsterra, Jimmy and Bam beat right, but then when they run into the bona fide contenders, the teams that have the veteran presences like the Los Angeleskers in

twenty twenty, like the the Nuggets this year. I mean, even that Celtics team from two years ago that was much more committed defensively than last year's team was. They just eventually run into a point where their lack of talent becomes a problem. Right And I mean even that super talented Celtics teams were one shot away because of Jimmy's ability to alpha dog, because of Sposuer's ability to bring out the worst in his opponents. Right. Like, So my thing is, like, this is a really rare trio.

How often do you see the best coach in the NBA with two of the best playoff performers in the NBA together, Like, you have a real opportunity to get a job done here. They just need more juice, they just need a little bit more firepower. So I'm hoping that pat Riley can make that happen for them this year. Mailbag, first question from Nathan. What do you think is the biggest thing Anthony Edwards can improve on in terms of his game or his approach to the game to move

himself up and make the jump the season. So I actually put down two things. His off ball defense. I think Aint's actually deceptively one of the better on ball defenders in the league. When he's actually trying, he can be a little bit in and out, but that's typical for a primary ball handler. But he can be really unfocused off the ball, and he can leave shooters to

overhelp or not help when he's supposed to. So off ball defense is a big one, I think in my opinion, and that's just your defense is only strong, is its weakest link in a rotation, and so I think it's important really just for the overall mission of that team, for and to be more engaged off the ball defensively. The second thing I put down is looking to pass the ball more. With how much rim pressure he generates, he should be a seven eight assist a game guy,

right and he's about half that. So I really just want to see him take advantage of the way he warps defenses more. Second mail back question, what's your view on Bill Russell and his place in the goat debate. Do you think there's an asterisk next to his eleven rings due to less competition or does his defensive dominance and overall winning impacts put him near the top of your all time rankings. So here's the thing. You know, all of the players from that era say Bill Russell

was the best player in that era. I think that matters. My individual opinion on it is like everything before nineteen eighty is so difficult to compare to the modern game that I just personally don't feel comfortable having strong opinions there. So I have a ton of respect for Bill Russell

and everything he accomplished in the league. I believe that in his era his dominance means something, But like I can't in my I don't even feel right comparing like Bill Russell to let's say Tim Duncan, because the game is just so fundamentally different now, and the league is so different in just the overall scope of what it presents as a as a challenge, in terms of the number of teams and the way the playoff path works, and even just the difficulty of travel in the regular season,

like like even to the medical advantages that we have now compared to what they had back then, and all the other issues that they went up against. And you know, the tools that the players have at their disposal because of extreme wealth that allows them to you know, eat a certain way and to train a certain way and to recover a certain way, like I all over the place.

It's like Apple's oranges. And so the truth is like There's a reason why I did a top twenty five of the last twenty five years, and it's because, like I feel more comfortable talking about the modern era. Personally, I think there's a place in NBA history to talk about the old guys. I enjoy reading books about older eras in NBA history and learning more about these guys. But to me, there's just no point in putting Bill Russell in the same list as a guy who played

sixty years later. Just doesn't make any sense to me. Last question from Juan totally see what you're saying about Harden's performance last postseason. This is from our Sixers video yesterday. But can it be argued that he deferred to the

MVP and thus affected his game? So I did notice at the beginning of the season that James struggled a little bit, and there were some conversations with Doc over you know, him feeling really good going into the season after a good offseason of work and wanting a bigger role, but Doc trying to get him to defer to him bed more. And there's no doubt that that, you know, probably played a role in him only averaging twenty one

points in the regular season. But We've just seen too many examples in his career of him going down a level in the postseason for me to think I played a role in the postseason and go look at those shooting numbers, like we're way too many four six, two for thirteen, two for fourteen three for Like, he just was consistently missing all of his shots. I mean, I pulled up the numbers in the video yesterday, but I can't remember the exact number. It was like thirty five

percent or thirty seven percent. But he literally missed two thirds of his layups in the postseason. That's not on Joel Embiid. That's not on his role. That's him just not having the athletic pop to get to the rim and finish well. So yeah, like, I don't really think that it's you know, if this was in a vacuum and we didn't have the rest of his history, maybe you could look at it that way. But looking at Harden's history, I don't think there's any direction you can

look but at him for his playoff struggles. All right, guys, that is all I have for today. We got six more teams to go over. Probably gonna have a couple of trades as well. We'll hit it all into next week unless something crazy happens. As always, I appreciate you guys, and i'll see you after the weekend. The volume