Fansided

3 trades Miami Heat need to make after missing on OG Anunoby

The Miami Heat weren't able to land OG Anunoby, but Pat Riley and the front office can still engineer a meaningful trade before the February deadline.

By Christopher Kline

Pat RIley, Miami Heat
Pat RIley, Miami Heat / Michael Reaves/GettyImages
facebooktwitterreddit
Prev
2 of 3
Next

2. Heat can add elite floor spacer with Bojan Bogdanovic trade

pistons

There has been a ton of public posturing about the Detroit Pistons absolutely not wanting to trade Bojan Bogdanovic. Detroit "wants to be good" and doesn't want to "trade good players," but let's cut the bull. Detroit is a three-win basketball team entering the new year. We haven't seen a team so incompetently built and managed in years. Maybe decades.

If Detroit refutes offers for Bogdanovic, in the final fully guaranteed year of his contract, it would qualify as malpractice. He is 34 years old. The Pistons are one of the youngest teams in basketball, currently struggling to field enough competent NBA-level players to compete on a night-to-night basis. Maybe keeping Bogey around helps stave off some of the embarrassment, but Bogdanovic has been available for one win and a whole lot of losses. He alone is not tethering Detroit to respectability.

The Heat should take a strong interest in Bogdanovic's services. Even as he ages out of his prime, the 6-foot-7 forward is the perfect weapon to complement Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo on offense. Bogdanovic bombs 3s with extreme confidence. His range extends well beyond the NBA 3-point line and he supplies secondary value as a driver, beating errant closeouts and making smart decisions in the flow of the offense. He's not a self-creator, but Miami can plant him on the wing and generate open looks as defenses collapse on Butler and Adebayo in the paint.

There is concern about giving up both young talent and draft capital for a third or fourth option — the Heat are already hard-pressed to match the going rate for true stars like Lillard. That said, Miami should recognize the inferiority of their assets as well as the pressure to contend now, while Butler is still capable of prodigious late-season output. The Heat get off of Duncan Robinson's volatile contract in the process, while Detroit gets a productive 3-point marksman to keep the floor spaced in Bogdanovic's absence.

Home/Miami Heat