Playing in the NBA is a hard, and often trying experience. Star players sometimes get cut (see anyone who has been amnestied in the past few years), and players who are valuable to a team get traded. But players who don’t perform as they ought, well, they just get cut. Or, they don’t “fit the direction that the team desires to go.”
At this point in the season for the Miami Heat, some hard decisions need to be made, because Miami’s point guards have not performed well at all.
Shabazz Napier
The easiest target to go after is always a newcomer, the rookie. Shabazz Napier was initially picked up so that the Miami Heat could salvage their relationship with LeBron James. You might remember this specific tweet:
No way u take another PG in the lottery before Napier.
— LeBron James (@KingJames) April 8, 2014
Even though the Heat had two point guards in their roster, they decided to pick up Napier so that they would have a shot at getting LeBron back. Mario Chalmers, whom we will talk about later in this article, was on the roster that season, but had become a free agent in the offseason.
The move could have been a good one had James come back, but he didn’t come back. Instead, the Heat re-signed Chalmers and also picked up Napier.
Napier’s season hasn’t gone as planned. His real saving grace has been the times when injuries have plagued the Heat, and they’ve had no real options but to play him in the second unit. A real issue though, has been his lack of ability to defend anybody.
He can’t move down to the two, because he is probably barely scratching the six-foot mark. But when he is playing point guard, he is still playing taller, bigger players who are able to bully him. This has even been the case when he plays second units. He is neither as athletic as other players, nor as big as them.
For these reasons, Napier hasn’t played well on the defensive end. His defensive plus-minus rating is -.042, which ranks him at 27th among point guards.
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His offense doesn’t fare any better, even though I will provide a side note for that. Scouts have always wondered whether Napier could defend at the NBA level, but nobody has questioned his ability to score in the NBA. That is particularly why it has been odd to see him struggle on the offensive end.
Napier can shoot the ball probably better than most of the players that came out of the last draft class, but he hasn’t shot that well this season. That could come down to confidence. There has to be a healthy level of confidence doled out by coaches and players on this team. A player like Napier needs to know that it will be okay if he shoots when it seems like he shouldn’t.
He should be looking for his own shot, because that is something that, outside of Dwyane Wade, Miami is sorely lacking. He is shooting 42 percent from the field on 4.3 shots per game. He is a player that has to be aggressive if he is going to be useful at all, because his lack of production on the offensive end coupled with his defensive woes make him unusable.
Norris Cole
Norris Cole provided valuable minutes for the Heat the past two seasons while they went on a few championship runs. They won the first year while losing the latter one to the San Antonio Spurs. There have been times when Cole has been even better than Chalmers, with Miami fans requesting that Cole start over Chalmers. This year has proven that theory to be somewhat flimsy.
Making the change to start Cole over Chalmers has been a basketball decision because of the team’s need for a player to come off the bench to make plays on the offensive end. That player needs to make plays for himself, rather than any teammates. If you look on their lineup, there isn’t anybody outside of Wade to make his own shot. Thus, Cole has gotten the nod to start. But Cole has also struggled to put any offense up.
He has never been a great shooter, but he is shooting 39 percent from the field this season, and is averaging 6.7 points per game with 3.4 assists per game. For a guy who is Miami’s starting guy at the helm, that isn’t going to cut it. His PER (Player Efficiency Rating) is just a shade over Jordan Farmar, a backup player who is being cut, at 10.07 making him 61st in the league in that stat.
That is incorporating the fact that Cole does not turn the ball over that much. Last year, a big stink in Miami was made about Chalmers’ “stupid” plays. If that is what Miami wants, then they score big here with Cole. His assist-to-turnover ratio is 2.48, right below Stephen Curry at 2.52.
However, just because he doesn’t turn the ball over doesn’t mean Cole has played well. It may just mean that he isn’t taking many chances.
Mario Chalmers
Finally, we get to Super Mario. Chalmers has outplayed the two other point guards, which doesn’t say much. Chalmers was moved over from the point guard position to play shooting guard to provide valuable scoring minutes to the second unit. There was a stretch in the beginning of the season when he looked as though he was going to be the right man for the job, but then fell apart as the season went on and injuries took a toll on the team.
During the first 16 games of the season, Chalmers was scoring 13.8 points per game and the Heat were 9-7. Yes, it is fair to say that that isn’t amazing, but some of those losses came at the hands of the Houston Rockets, Atlanta Hawks, Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Clippers.
But at least Miami had beaten some pretty good teams as well, like the Dallas Mavericks and the Toronto Raptors. Chalmers was shooting 45 percent from the field. Miami would love to have the month of November back. Since then, he has shot 35 percent from the field in December and January combined. During this time, Miami has suffered dramatically, especially while losing Chris Bosh to an injury.
But Miami needs more scoring from Mario Chalmers like Putin needs to feel like he’s in charge. It is a necessity for them, because he is their only option. He was aggressive on offense against the Lakers a few days ago, scoring 19 points. But the team as a whole played terribly, and they only scored 78 points. That was also after Wade went out for the rest of the game with an injury. The next game he went 2-9 from the field and scored seven points.
He is capable of more, the Heat know he is. But he also needs to show it, or the Heat will continue to lose more games.
No pressure.