Watch Game 1 of the NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers live on Sky Sports Arena in the early hours of Thursday morning (1:45am), full replay at 8am
Wednesday 30 September 2020 10:23, UK
The Miami Heat have grown from a team that missed the playoffs to an NBA Finals appearance in less than 18 months and their young center Bam Adebayo is at the forefront of their rise.
One feature of the Miami Heat's front office strategy in recent seasons has been the frequency with which they seemed to trade their draft picks. Certainly, as legendary president Pat Riley comes to the end of his working career, he wants to see the team try and win now, and winning now is usually antithetical to stockpiling draft picks.
Having also only ended up with Michael Beasley the one time they did egregiously tank, the Heat must have felt that building through the draft was not the optimum option.
It is certainly true that while acquiring or retaining draft picks has value to a team that is not in title contention, they are often overvalued. By itself, there is nothing wrong with doing it a different way.
Instead, the reason that it is particularly striking that the Heat have been so willing to give away picks comes from how good they are at unearthing value from less than premium assets.
Duncan Robinson, one of the best shooters in the game and a hugely important role player, was undrafted and signed as a rookie free agent. So too was Kendrick Nunn, and so was Udonis Haslem before them.
Upstart rookie Tyler Herro was picked up with a late lottery pick, Derrick Jones Jr was plucked off waivers, Hassan Whiteside was plucked out of the Lebanese league, and even Tyler Johnson before them was another undrafted rookie free agent.
This Heat franchise has consistently found quality players that other franchises have underappreciated, overlooked entirely or both. And of no one is this truer than their breakout star Bam Adebayo.
This has been Adebayo's third season in the league, and with Whiteside moved out of the way over the summer of 2019, he was given free rein at the centre position. He responded with an All-Star calibre campaign - 15.9 points, 10.2 rebounds and 5.1 assists per game - and in the postseason, he is taking it up yet another level.
In the Heat's closeout victory against the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals, Adebayo flourished with a 32-point, 14-rebound performance, hot on the heels of three 20-10 double-doubles over the series' first three contests, and all paired with his usual excellent passing, dribble-drive game and active defense.
Teams are not supposed to be able to acquire a modern two-way center whose playmaking, skillset and versatility on both ends of the court chimes so perfectly with modern basketball principles, and who pairs so well with the Robinsons and Jimmy Butlers elsewhere on the team, for the comparatively tiny price of a No 14 overall pick.
But they did, and Adebayo continues paying dividends with every passing week, a young star of the game who continues to get better from game to game.
Young and relatively inexperienced headed into his NBA Draft, Adebayo had shown a modicum of skill beyond conventional big man stuff in his one college season at Kentucky, but it was far from decided what type of player he would ultimately become.
Over the course of his first two seasons with the Heat, though, Adebayo went from minimal bit-part player to an increasingly large part of the rotation, in large part through his deceptively smooth handle and passing willingness/vision at the five (center) spot, something that can expand a team's playbook even when the five-man himself is not a great shot-maker.
Indeed, Bam had won the starting spot from the incumbent Whiteside even before Whiteside's departure, with Heat coach Erik Spoelstra moving the more awkward fit of the talented yet flawed veteran in favour of the constant movement and fluidity of Bam towards the end of last season.
This Heat team has subsequently grown from narrowly missing the playoffs entirely to an NBA Finals appearance in less than 18 months, and Adebayo has grown with them - indeed, he has been at the forefront of that growth, and is perhaps as important to the team right now as Butler is.
Notwithstanding the headiness and craftiness of a resurgent Goran Dragic, the Heat have played large parts of this season without a conventional point guard, often having Butler serve as the primary offensive creator and ball-handler. Yet it is the presence of Adebayo alongside him that allows for this.
Adebayo is not yet a spacer himself, hitting a few jump shots from the foul line area only but with nothing outside of that and nothing from any area on a high volume, yet it is his passing ability when facing the basket and his ability to take opponents off the bounce that opens up all manner of pick-and-roll options.
The Heat can and do use Adebayo as a hand-off merchant, a fearsome roller who can get to the rim or pass to the corners and the shooters on the short roll, serving in the middle of the court as a man who can get the ball from one side to the other in but a moment.
Whiteside could not (and would not) do these things. Although he had the advantage in rim protection, the advantages to the Heat overall, particularly on the offensive end, are evident in Adebayo's much better deployments of his offensive skills, as well as his defensive versatility.
Adebayo will willingly step up to defend the perimeter in switching and isolation situations, and when he is down around the paint, while he does not have the above-the-rim burst of someone like Whiteside, he is nonetheless a very good rebounder with good hands who wins possessions for his team in the paint. There really is a lot to like.
If this sounds like a case of talking up an excellent two-way player with very few flaws, and perhaps erring on the side of over-exuberance, that is deliberate. The most appealing aspect of Adebayo's breakout has not been so much his skillset, but more the manner in which he has deployed it. Smooth, heady and largely consistent, especially for his age, Adebayo is an enormous part of the reason that the Heat have got this far.
It is he who was the decisive mis-match in the series against the Celtics. In particular, Adebayo consistently exploited Daniel Theis off the dribble, and his ability to do that, plus his intelligent recognition of when to drive, when to pass and when to just be a decoy, left the Celtics' defense always scrambling to cover all the holes.
You would think that a player without any particularly above-average area of shot-making ability of his own would not be able to make such an offensive impact in this way. Then again, you would also think that a team that never picks in the high lottery would not be able to construct an NBA Finals roster without having had even one starting core talent.
In that respect, in once being underappreciated but now threateningly good at what he does, Adebayo embodies all that is good with Miami basketball right now.
It is a different reality to do it all against Anthony Davis than it was against Theis. Decent though Theis is, the increase in skill level and athleticism that comes with Davis, a man having a historically good playoffs, is striking.
But when his game is already so heavily based around reading and reacting, opening up lanes for both his feet and the ball and taking advantage of them with good decisions, Adebayo will not need to adjust how he plays offensively. On that end, he already has figured it out.
Watch Game 1 of the NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers live on Sky Sports Arena in the early hours of Thursday morning (1:45am), full replay at 8am
