It’s hard to blame the Miami Heat’s front office for aiming high with their continuous plans to target a superstar via free agency or trade. However, the contract extension signed by Luka Doncic recently exposes a pretty big flaw in the Heat’s massive long-term plans.
And it’s that superstar players are no longer hitting free agency. Instead, they’re either signing early long-term extensions with their respective teams or they’re demanding a trade. Sometimes even both. With the way the Heat have operated recently, there’s a very real chance they are approaching their plan to land a star player the wrong way.
The Heat’s free agency plan
Despite attempting to land a star player this offseason, it’s become quite clear that a big part of their long-term plan revolves around maintaining financial flexibility. In many ways, that’s what this summer was all about.
However, superstar players are not getting to free agency anymore. In the player empowerment movement, they already have the ability to handpick the situation they want to be in (by demanding a trade) without the need to wait until their contract expires.
If I’m the Heat, I’m asking myself: what point is financial flexibility if there are no superstar free agents to spend the money on?
The Heat are ways away from building up draft capital
You can say, well, Miami could always trade for a superstar player. Sure. That’s the much easier way. However, it doesn’t seem as if this front office has fully realized that the best way to acquire a star player in the modern game is via packaging first-round picks.
The way the Heat has wasted them over the last few years, they clearly don’t realize just how powerful those assets can be on the trade market.
Recently, the Heat has used their first-rounders to dump contracts or to attach to negative assets in an attempt to get equal return (see Kyle Lowery and a first-round pick in exchange for Terry Rozier).
Not great.
The worst part about that philosophy is that the Heat are still paying for many of those boneheaded deals.
Even if the Heat were now willing to go down that route, they’re still a couple of years away from gaining full control of their draft future, and further off from compiling the amount of draft picks that it takes to land superstar players in the modern trade market.
It’s great that the Heat is finally pivoting toward a place where they realize the need to avoid the dubious trades and that they control their draft future. But, at least for now, the Heat does feel like it’s years away from realistically getting into the star trade market.
Unless, of course, they make some pretty uncharacteristic selling moves at this year’s NBA Trade Deadline. If that were to happen, we’d probably be having a much different conversation in a few months.
At least for now, it does seem as if the Heat’s long-term plans are somewhat flawed in their pursuit of a superstar player. And the Luka extension is just another gut punch to this team’s hopes of landing a star player in 2026.
