Pieces of the Puzzle are falling into place

By: Pedro Heizer

A week ago, the most incredible feeling in the world came upon every single Miami Heat fan once LeBron James said that this fall he was “taking his talents” to south beach.

With LeBron on board, we had the most amazing big three in the NBA to date. But, with those three superstars, where was everyone else? You surely must know that basketball is a team sport by now. You can’t have those three superstars playing the entire game. So, where was the help going to come from?

At the introductory press conference Pat Riley said that the upcoming week (this week) the pieces of the puzzle would fall into place. And yet again, Pat Riley has delivered on his message.

To kick things off, Riley parted ways with the number two pick in the 2008 NBA draft in exchange for two second-round draft picks and cash consideration.

Now, many people were disappointed in seeing Michael Beasley leave, but I wasn’t. boy was I happy to see him leave. Good riddance, he didn’t do much of anything for us. Let me say this, Beasley is a great player, with potential to be a superstar, but he would have never gotten that by playing fourth best to Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, and LeBron James.. LeBron was clearly going to be the starting small forward and Bosh the power forward. Beasley would have to come off the bench and have a limited role. Why would you want to waste such a great potential like that?

I’m glad he left, now he can become the man in Minnesota and become the superstar he deserves to be. He will be a 20-10 guy every night and will probably be a career 20-10 guy, but not in Miami. Here he would have been a 10-5 career man.

With the Beasley trade, Miami had a little more room to sign players. So what did they do? They went ahead and resigned Udonis Haslem. The co-captain of the HEAT declined offers from the likes of Denver and Dallas in order to resign with the Miami HEAT for less money, now that is love to the team.

Miami also got other good news this week. They were told that Zydrunas Ilgauskas wanted to join his buddy LeBron here in Miami… The City of Cleveland must really hate us right about now… We take their “chosen one” and now we take their beloved center.

So with Big Z wanting to join Miami, that takes care of our center issues, but, don’t forget that Miami is also in talks with Juwan Howard, the 6-9 center that has been wanting to join the HEAT for the veteran minimum in order to take his chances at a ring.

So, assuming those two deals go through, the Roster of the Miami HEAT would be as follows: Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, LeBron James, Mario Chalmers, Udonis Haslem, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, and Juwan Howard.

Don’t forget that they will most likely sign two of their players from the summer league team so that raises the number to nine.

To me, the biggest story of this week has to be Mike Miller finally finalizing his contract with the Miami HEAT. Miller, a career 40% three-point shooter, shot a career high 48% from beyond the arc this past season, will give Miami the much needed long-ball threat they’ve been lacking since Jason Kapono left them in 2007.

Miller will be terrific here in Miami. He will be chilling in the three point line and once everyone goes to guard the three kings in the inside, they will dish it out to Miller to take the three and hit it.

Miller signed a five-year, $25 Million deal on Thursday

With that being said, assuming Big Z, and Juwan sign, Miami will have 10 players in the roster and will only be missing three players to reach the minimum NBA roster requirement.

So to all the haters that said that the HEAT were not going to be able to fill out their roster, this is to you, watch out… Miami is filling in their roster rather nicely so if you are not a HEAT fan, I would be worried right about now.. Unless you are a Lakers fan, you are good for now according to Dwyane Wade.

This is what we can look forward to from Mike Miller….

URL: http://crankuptheheat.net/?p=968

Posted by Pedro Heizer on Jul 16 2010 Filed under HEAT, NBA, Off-Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry