The Miami HEAT Are The FASTEST Team In The NBA 🏀💨

The Miami HEAT Are The FASTEST Team In The NBA 🏀💨

Eric Spolster and the Miami Heat have not only changed their entire offense, they’re running an offense unlike any other in the NBA. Let’s talk about it, but not before. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome back to After the Buzzer. I’m your host, Cooper Morehead, and today we are talking about the Heats brand new offensive system. Look, if you’ve watched any of the Heat’s first handful of games, you’ve noticed something is incredibly different. In fact, I can’t blame you if you’ve unknowingly executed the Patrick Stewart Memorial triple take. It goes something like this. It’s Yeah. See, you’ve probably been doing that a little bit if you if you’re familiar with the Heat and you know how slow they play. Such has been the difference in the style that they’re going with. We’ll start with the most obvious thing, which is the pace, which is up to say the least. You know, the Heat are leading the league in pace. Think about that for a moment. The Heat are leading the league in pace. This is the team that has been bottom four in pace in each of the last six seasons. Considering much of the roster is back, is the same. It’s not like they’ve added some uptempo, high usage point guard who’s really driving the way. This is a remarkable shift, perhaps even an unprecedented one in terms of pace increase with a lot of roster continuity, you know, coming back. Look, so many coaches coming into training camp every year saying they want to play faster. Just the same as players coming in saying, “I added 15 pounds of muscle.” It’s just the thing that people say at training camp. So, when they were talking about it at training camp this year, you know, a lot of it was natural to think, “Yeah, we’ve heard that before.” before and then they come into the season and the pace comes back down and they play the normal heat style of basketball that we’ve seen. Well, turns out that’s not what is happening this time around. You know, it’s uncommon for those words to be put into action, but what we’re seeing is Eric Spolzer didn’t waste a second of training camp and preseason. Even when they were losing every preseason game, they were building out an offensive process that wasn’t about winning that game especially. It was about creating something new, something that would change the way this team approaches offense. Here’s what Eric Spolstra has to say about it. Look, well, I know it’s a a hot topic right now, you know, with this team. We’re we’re trying to create something that makes the most sense for this roster. Where that eventually lands, we’ll find out. You know, it also has to be efficient. Um, but I’ I’ve said it before, we have youth, we have speed, we have quickness who want to try to maximize that. It’s not all about, you know, the pace metric uh by itself. It’s it’s about how fast you do things. That that could be in the the half court as well. And sometimes that’s how how fast you can get to a screen, how fast you can get to the rim, how fast you can cut to create an advantage uh for somebody else. That all falls into our category of pace. So, how is that pace manifesting itself? Okay. Well, they’re leading the league in transition opportunities and they are scoring on them, which is important because in the past, even when they have had fast breaks outside of, you know, pick six live ball turnovers, they haven’t always been very efficient with those fast breaks. So far, they’ve been very efficient with the most transition opportunities in the league. You can imagine how much that is bolstering their overall scoring. Everyone is throwing hit ahead passes, you know, throwing up the the type that when Kyle Lowry was on the team years ago when he came in, he was throwing those hit ahead passes. It felt revolutionary for the team. Now almost every single guy on the roster is doing it when they play. And you’ve got Bigs and Bam and Nico who can grab a rebound, push out, bust out down the down the court, take it all the way coast to coast. They’re getting the ball over the half court line over a second faster than they were last year. They’re shooting earlier in the shot clock. Not just for them, they’re shooting earlier in the shot clock for than any other team in the league. Over two seconds faster, quicker than they did last year. They’re playing fast in all four quarters. They’re sustaining their pace first, second, third, fourth. You know, sustaining your pace in the fourth quarter is not an easy thing to do. And so far, they are doing it. Even though there was kind of a blowout win fourth quarter against Memphis, the stuff all matters. The shot quality is up pretty significantly as are paint touches. Everything that you could really imagine Eric Spoler would have is like, you know, an imaginary checkbox that that he’s trying to go through. I’m sure he doesn’t think things are perfect right now. He’s he said they’re they’re still building. There’s things to work on, but so many of those indicators are probably as far as the first week of the season. Check check check. Right. This is real. There aren’t numbers being inflated by live a lot of live bottle turnovers. It’s not like they’re, you know, I don’t think there’s anything false about what I’m seeing in the numbers. I think everything that is happening is just a philosophical sea change. And we’re getting that from the team. Like the team is all talking about this. They’ve been talking about since camp. So, we know it’s not some random thing. They want to be playing this way. They had 31 fast break points against the Knicks and that was the second second most fast break points they’ve had in a single game since 2012. Probably not going to happen just by accident, right? In fact, they’re actually playing, you know, this maybe for the stats nerds out there, but they’re playing so fast that for the first time in forever, we actually have to adjust their offensive rating down. Offensive rating is points per 100 possessions. Typically, they’ve played so slow that they could score 100 points and I’ve had to say actually they had a really good scoring game. They just played, you know, they might have had 88 possessions in a game, but they scored 100. So, they scored really efficiently. Well, now there so many possessions that, you know, even when they had the highest scoring half in history, 86 points in the first half against Memphis, their overall offensive efficiency for that game was only would have been seventh highest last season. It was still really good, but it wasn’t like astronomically good in a way that you’d expect given the scoring totals. It’s just speed, speed, speed, speed. And we have to adjust the entire way we have to think about this team as long as they’re playing like this. Now, that is all the easy part. It’s easy to see pace. It’s easy to talk about pace, but pace is just one aspect of it, right? That’s, you know, maybe 20% of your possessions are going to are going to happen in transition if you’re really pushing for it to be that way. So speed is one thing and then there’s quickness. You have to be quick. You have to, you know, when the initial option, that first fast break or the secondary break, the second guy you hit to, when all that gets shut down and you’re playing real NBA halfcourt basketball, that’s where you have to still find the pace, find the flow, find the quickness. And that’s where this gets really, really interesting. I’ll just put it out there right now. They have almost completely done away with pick and rolls and handoffs. I mean, not entirely. They still exist in dead ball situations. You know, Spo is great about drawing up an empty empty corner pick and roll that turns into a lob. They still do that stuff. There’s still some picks pick and rolls and there’s still some few handoffs in their game. But they aren’t only dead last in pick and rolls per 100 possessions right now. Their pick and roll rate is almost half that of the number 29 team. Let’s slow down, digest that for a moment. I’m not saying their pick and roll rate is half that of the number one team. Their pick and roll rate is half that of the number 29 team in the league. I mean, it is shockingly low when you just look at the numbers. It’s, you know, everybody else in a relatively normal range and then there’s a heat all the way down here. The NBA has long been a pick and roll league, especially since the advent of the spread pick and roll, you know, the late mid to late 2000s as everybody adjusted to the rule changes around then. It’s the breadandbut action for just about everybody. And this season, Spo has decided, I’m moving away from it. Okay, that’s that’s not even that’s no small thing that it’s almost unfathomable to to consider until you really start to digest it and listen to what they’re talking about and the reasons why. And there have been also fewer growing pains than you would expect when you just take out, you know, everybody half the half the league comes down, calls up a guy, let’s run a pick and roll. They’re not doing that. And for the most part, these guys have all done pretty well. you know, there there have been instances as far as an adjustment period where they’re in camp and they’re kind of fighting their own instincts as to, you know, calling up picks when they get into to half court basketball. And they have said, you know, they’ve had to they huddle up. But something Drew Smith told me the other day was it’s actually really easy for them to adjust, you know, to correct themsel to self-correct because they know immediately when things aren’t working right. You need so much. You need precise exact spacing to make this stuff work, which is a lot of it’s triple drive, right? Cutting motion, ball movement, triple drives. You need space to make that work. If the spacing isn’t that isn’t there, they feel it immediately. They huddle up. They say, “Hey, we need that cut here. You need to be standing here.” And they can come out right out of a huddle and correct it there. And it’s it’s maybe not second nature yet, but it’s starting to look like it. in part because, you know, these guys are bought in, which again, not a small thing and it’s very possible, it’s very realistic for guys to resist this much of a change to the offense that they know. But these guys are all bought in and Bam is leading the way on that. Bam was a major part of the team’s pick and roll handoff game for years. You know, their DHOs have also fallen off and he’s the captain of the team and everybody follows him and he says, “This is what Spo wants to do. Let’s do it. We got a great group, man. And uh we all bought into the system and you see it. You know, everybody’s involved. You don’t know who’s going to shoot the ball or who’s going to catch and go and uh that’s how we like it. That’s how we want to play. We want to play where there’s all five guys feeling involved and they’re active. So, how are they doing this? How are they eliminating pick and rolls and still scoring? Well, after the New York game, Bam also said they didn’t run a single play all game. They probably still ran a couple plays, but the the spirit of his quote is very accurate because what this is is now a read and react dribble drive system. Guys are cutting, guys are moving, players are breaking down their guy off the dribble. You have to for to have a dribble drive offense, you have to be able to drive by your guy right off the dribble. And preferably you’re creating all that movement and that ball move is creating advantages so that when you’re catching the ball maybe your guy is rotating is still in the process of ro rotating or recovering. So you’re not just not it’s not just a stagnant boom boom boom boom I’m going to break my guy down. I’m going to find this mismatch. You know their isolations are up a little bit but it’s not isolations like we’ve seen before. They’re very different kind of isolations. So you’ve got, you know, Bam catching the ball up tight up up top beyond the arc, taking his guy off the dribble, getting to the rim. You’ve got DaVon Mitchell who’s incredibly quick with the ball. When he gets the right spacing, he’s at, you know, elbow extended. He can just break down his guy, get to his little flo floater in the lane. You’ve got Yoic, as mentioned before, busting out full court using his side to size. If he gets a mismatch, he can get it right to the rim. You know, doesn’t need a pick. And you’ve got Haime Hake Jr. who has been absolutely nails so far through the first handful of games. He comes down the court, he’s bringing the ball up. Not let’s not call it point guard. Let’s just say he’s bringing the ball up because he gets the first opportunity to to attack if the spacing is right. His first read gets the rim. Second read turn. See, is there a cutter there? Is there a guy behind me at the arc who’s now open because I’ve collapsed the defense. Hime has been really great at that so far and he’s getting back to that that interior packaging package that he has as one of the better finishing wings in the league. You know, there’s the bench unit led by Hime and with Drew Smith playing great as well and Nico’s coming off the bench. The bench unit is leading the league in bench scoring. That’s been a huge part of their start. When it’s flowing, when this offense is flowing, it is beautiful. It is beautiful stuff to watch. And I want you to just to kind of process what it looks like and start understanding indicators when the guy’s bringing the ball up and let’s say it’s a slower break. So you can kind of expect him to get into some offense. I want you to take your eyes off the ball, identify the guys on the wings because what we’re seeing already is like a guy on a wing as the ball’s coming up. He’ll make the cut. He’ll cut through the angle across the paint and then the guy in the corner that was behind the guy on the wing will lift up in that space. There’s like a vacuum of space that cut created and in that space there’s opportunity for a guy to catch and make a quick play. And there’s far because of this there’s far fewer opportunities. You know, teams can’t bring two to the ball as quickly. They can’t switch. They can’t really stagnate your offense because you’re moving you’re move you’re dictating the terms the tempo of of engagement, right? And everybody when they make a catch, they have to make a quick decision. Pass, shoot, put the ball on the floor before the the defender can get settled. And Norm Powell has been the poster boy for all of what they’re trying to do. He’s one of the best quick decision makers in the league. Every time he catches, he’s making a quick read. And there are still screens, right? But you’re almost simulating a pick and roll off the ball. like Norm will lift up from the wing, curl around a high BAM screen, and if he catches it at the right time, as he’s curling around the screen, you know that his defender is still trying to get around Bam. So, it’s almost like a high-speed simulated pick and roll without there being an actual on ball pick and roll. And the second Norm catches it, he is either go mode or he’s making the right right move, shooting the ball incredibly well, but he finishes in the paint. He’s got a beautiful floater package. Pretty much everything Norm is doing fits what this team wants to do to a te perfectly. Now, there are, of course, caveats. It’s first couple weeks of the season. Nothing is ever really quite what it seems. Sometimes, sometimes it is, but we just we just don’t know, right? There’s we need the sample size to grow. And there might be a bit of shock and awe happening right happening right now. As much as you or I are, you know, getting whiplash watching this team going back and forth, other teams are probably just a surprise. I mean, you can hear about it, but until you get on the court and see a Miami Heat team running this fast, it’s probably a little hard to to conceptualize it, to process it, to really get into what you know your preparation for the game. So the the other teams will get them on tape. They’ll dig digest all of this. They’ll start to adjust to what the Heat are doing. That will probably cut off, you know, a few of the easier hit ahead passes are trying to trying to throw. Teams will try and slow them down a little bit. The league will adjust. Miami’s offensive rating. Their efficiency is up, but it’s not drastically up. You know, it’s it’s a modest improvement so far. Again, pace is up, the point totals are up, but efficiency matters about how you score per possession. The New York game I thought was good for seeing how they can adjust to things being hard against teams, you know, Orlando was like this too, too, is teams with bigger wing defenders who can stop and contain those one-on-one or, you know, recovery dribble drives that the Heat are trying to create. And, you know, against both New York and Orlando, there were times where it looked a little clunky, and that’s okay. We’re a couple weeks into the season. I think what we’ve seen is incredibly encouraging so far, but there will be times where they’re gonna have to figure it out on the fly without resorting to, you know, old ways of doing things. You got to push through with the new style you’re trying to play. They’re also going to have to reinccorporate Tyler Herro at some point in the future. And he Tyler is traditionally a higher usage pick and roll guy. So, you know, we’ll see how how his role how he adapts to the offense, how the offense adapts to him. Tyler’s obviously incredible scorer and he’s an efficient scorer. So, I don’t know if they’re going to want to change too much about what he does, but we’ll see how it all fits together. Point is, you want your offense to be peing in April and May. The good thing is is is that it’s October. They have time to have their second, third, fourth times to the order with the league with a bunch of these teams they play multiple times. Those teams can adjust and the Heat can take those adjustments, see what they need to tweak and adjust from there. I mean, the season, the marathon of the NBA regular season is just a series of adjustments. All those caveats aside, I want to leave you with this. Here’s a here’s the thing. Look, I I know I’m a bit of a NBA basketball sicko. I appreciate a grinded out defensive game. Slow, fast, doesn’t matter to me. If it if the teams are doing, you know, meeting their intentions on the court and executing those intentions, then I’m usually a happy camper. But I also have the self-awareness to recognize that people watch these games for entertainment. And that’s why it matters that this is fun. Fun matters, right? You want to tune in. You want to watch a game and you want to have a good time, win or lose. You know, sometimes you can have a game where you lose like the Orlando game and people still had fun watching it. So, and and it gives you encouragement because you you know that style might repeat in the next game. So, again, I I identify with all styles of basketball, but I think people are having a lot of fun so far. The fan base reaction has been very, you know, positive to the style of play they’re seeing. And all that stuff matters, right? It’s not just about X’s nose and efficiencies and optimization and and all that kind of stuff. Sometimes you just, you know, the game can just be fun and that’s what we’ve seen so far. So, we’ll see where all this goes. You never, you know, you don’t know what’s real or not in October, but the changes that Spo has instituted, the philosophy he’s instituted, it’s all clearly real. Whether or not it’s spectacular, we’ll just have to see and let things play out. Time will tell as everything progresses. But what we’ve seen so far has been a remarkable change and shift in the team’s offensive approach and philosophy. One that I think is going to garner some national attention because you just don’t see teams that have played slow all of a sudden start to play faster and change their entire offensive system like this. It’s pretty cool stuff if you ask me. So we’ll talk about it when there’s more to talk about. Until then, thank you for joining me for another edition of After the Buzzer. I’m your host Cooper Morhead. We will have more content coming your way. Remember to like and subscribe on YouTube for notifications of everything we have coming down the pipeline. And until next time, take care.

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HEAT Insider Couper Moorhead shares his key observations on the new-style offense Erik Spoelstra has implemented for the 2025-26 season.

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0:00 Introduction
0:50 The PACE Is UP
3:04 How They’re Doing It
6:30 Speed Is One Thing, And Then There’s Quickness
9:38 These Guys Are Bought In
14:40 There Are Caveats/Herro On The Horizon
17:20 Fun Matters
18:35 In Conclusion…

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