Where would the Miami Heat be after these steps?
If the Miami Heat can pull off all these moves – and it wouldn’t be easy by any stretch of the imagination – it would put the franchise in a really great place heading into the offseason. Perhaps more importantly, the Heat would be able to enter the offseason with a chance to retool the roster in a meaningful way.
Miami could be entering the offseason with a top 10 pick (after shutting Jimmy down and entering a soft tanking campaign), a cap sheet that only includes Bam ($32.6M) and Jimmy ($45M) as the team’s big-money players. That’s if they can move Herro, which would give the team even great flexibility depending on what the return would be. But even if they still have Herro on the roster, removing the $50 million that is due to Lowry and Robinson combined next season would be huge.
They would also have a fully rested Jimmy Butler, a more developed Bam, and a flurry of flexibility to fill out the rest of the roster beyond Caleb Martin and Nikola Jovic. Gabe Vincent and Max Strus would be free agents and there’s a good chance that Victor Oladipo would decline his player option.
There’s a chance that the Heat could pull off a soft reset but it will take plenty of work, a little bit of luck, and some bargaining. The question is, will the Heat actually attempt to make it happen?