Miami Heat needs to address offensive woes to raise itself as championship contender

The Miami Heat has some offensive woes to address

As presently constituted, the Miami Heat are certainly capable of defending its Eastern Conference crown and making another run to the NBA Finals. Who it faces should it get there is another story.

The Los Angeles Lakers were a cut above Miami when the two teams last met in October and the gap grew wider over the offseason when it added two sixth man of the year candidates and Marc Gasol to an already stacked roster.

Across town, the LA Clippers possess an equally imposing roster with two superstars and a very talented supporting cast.

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The task of identifying the Heat’s shortcoming as a legitimate championship contender is quite easier than would be to address it.

Whereas Miami ranks eighth in the league in team defense, it currently stands 22nd on offense.

Comparatively, the defending champion Lakers are 5th on defense and offense.

It has become a regularity when the Heat play that it will go through scoring droughts. Is the answer James Harden?

From a talent standpoint, without question Harden would immediately elevate the Heat’s overall offensive efficiency.

No single player in the league has been as devastating a scorer as Harden since, arguably, Kobe Bryant tore his Achilles in 2013.

There are two problems with adding him, though.

Any package Miami would send to Houston would need to include both rookie sensation Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson, the second most efficient 3-point shooter in the league.

Now, would a lineup featuring Jimmy Butler, James Harden, and Bam Adebayo be enough to unseat the Lakers? Possibly, but it would require Miami to mortgage its foreseeable future as a result. That’s a pretty big gamble.

The second problem is the fit with Harden and the Heat seems less than ideal.

Harden is accustomed to having the ball in his hands for a majority of the shot clock, whereas Miami relies on a heavy amount of ball movement to initiate its offense.

Off the court, his reputation precedes him as a “man of the evening” who has been known to attend a strip club or two. With a burgeoning nightlife like the one South Beach has to offer, could you imagine the level of distraction the Beard would become almost immediately?

People care to make light of the whole “Heat Culture” tagline that was somewhat forced down the national audience’s throat last season in the playoffs, but if there was one thing learned from the pairing of Jimmy Butler-Miami a few summers ago, it is very much a real thing.

It takes a workhorse to thrive in the Pat Riley system.

For every Alonzo Mourning, there is a Hassan Whiteside or Jamal Mashburn who is perfectly content approaching the season in cruise control. Harden seems to fall more comfortably under that second classification of a player.

The easy solution to Miami’s offensive woes would be for Jimmy Butler to distinguish himself as a consistent and dominant go-to scorer. For whatever reason, that hasn’t been the case.

Butler will have his moments, as he did in the NBA Finals, where he can completely take over a game and elicit the type of memories that transformed South Beach once upon a time to Wade county. The following game, however, he falls back into the type of second banana role more befitting of what Philadelphia and Minnesota featured him as during his stops there.

Butler’s current scoring average to date this season is 13.8, leaving him roughly tied with Goran Dragic as the second-best option on offense to leading scorer Bam Adebayo at 18.6.

Miami has a decision to make.

With an equal blend of exceptional young and veteran talent, will the franchise maintain an eye for the future or trade-off its young assets for a player along the lines of Victor Oladipo and really swing for the championship fences?

For now, it appears unlikely the Heat will be able to have its cake and eat it too.

And, if there is one thing everyone knows about team president Pat Riley, it’s that the word patience is not in his vocabulary. It was a fork in the road moment when Miami first learned it lost LeBron James back in 2014 and Riley was left to pick up the pieces.

It was a fork in the road moment in 2001 when the team had just traded Jamal Mashburn and PJ Brown for Eddie Jones and Anthony Mason before getting sucker-punched with the news that team centerpiece Alonzo Mourning had suddenly been diagnosed with a rare life-threatening kidney disease.

Yet again, we have reached another fork in the road moment. What will Pat Riley do?