Gordon Hayward Changed The Heat More Than You Think

The summer of 2017 is a sore subject for Miami Heat fans. Miami was coming off a 41-41 season, but closed the second half of the year going 30-11. They beat the Golden State Warriors. They came within a tiebreaker of making the playoffs. And, we can now definitely say, the Heat believed in what they had achieved.

This wasn’t a group of overachieving misfits who were ultimately going to regress to who they had been for the entirety of their careers. It was a team they were going to build with and around.

And so they gave out the following contracts.

James Johnson: 4 years, $60 million with a player option in the 4th year

Dion Waiters: 4 years, $52 million

Kelly Olynyk: 4 years, $50 million

Josh Richardson: 4 year extension, $41.9 million

These have been well chronicled. It has had Miami in a state of inaction for almost 2 years because the contracts have been impossible to move.

However, this could have been avoided, as Pat Riley said at his end of season press conference

He was prepared to give James Johnson and Dion Waiters two year deals if Gordon Hayward chose to come to Miami. But because Riley was concerned about losing both of those players and not getting Hayward, he offered them four year deals if Hayward didn’t come.

As Ethan Skolnick and myself discussed on the most recent edition of the Five Reasons Podcast, it is incredible how much the Heat bought into 30-11. Riley says at the end of the clip it would’ve been “ridiculous” to lose everyone. That requires you to have believed at least in some part that it was real.

It also requires you to believe that Gordon Hayward meant everything. As with the Kevin Durant negotiations, Miami were at best third favorites. With Durant, the incumbent Oklahoma City and the defending record breakers Golden State were well on top of those negotiations. With Hayward, the incumbent Utah and the rising Celtics who had his former college coach were the likely choices.

Miami did remarkably well to get in the room, one of our favorite phrases in Miami, with those two. Hayward even said at the time that he was close to coming and was really impressed by the presentation. But he chose Boston.

And that sends Miami down their current path. What does it look like if Gordon Hayward came here? We can’t really know. Hayward devastatingly broke his leg in his first game in Boston. Does that happen here?

But we do know that Riley and the Heat organization either became tired of chasing free agents or wanted to see out what that 30-11 team could do.

Now, they’re on their 3rd straight season of hovering around .500 with no end in sight. Riley doesn’t think the contracts he chose to give out on July 1 are an obstacle to improvement.

All we can now say is, they would be expiring this summer if Gordon Hayward chose to come here.