Pat Riley landed the big fish. He just couldn’t land the second one. And now the Miami Heat are staring at the leftovers on the free-agent buffet table, three roster spots to fill, and the pickings are about as appetizing as a gas-station hot dog at 2 a.m.
The Heat acquired two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo from Milwaukee in the blockbuster of the offseason — a deal general manager Andy Elisburg closed with a phone call that made Riley scream out loud. “We landed the plane,” Riley said at Antetokounmpo’s introductory news conference. “There’s another one we have to land.”
That second plane never touched down. LeBron James, who Riley reportedly pursued for a reunion with coach Erik Spoelstra, chose the Philadelphia 76ers for his 24th NBA season instead of taking his talents back to South Beach. The LeBron pursuit was never the primary focus — Antetokounmpo was — but missing on James leaves Miami needing to replace his playmaking, spacing, and defensive IQ across multiple players rather than one.
The Heat kept Bam Adebayo out of the Giannis trade, meaning Spoelstra now has two All-NBA talents to build around. But with 12 guaranteed contracts for the 2026-27 season, three spots remain open, and it’s late July. The freezer’s been picked clean.
According to The Athletic, the names Miami is circling are DeMar DeRozan, Russell Westbrook, and Bradley Beal. All three are available because nobody else has grabbed them yet — and there’s a reason for that. All three are scorers by trade, not the playmaker Riley publicly identified as his top priority.
“Everybody talks about shooting; that’s not the main priority right now. It’s another playmaker,” Riley told Dan Le Batard in a prerecorded interview released Monday. He pointed to Tyler Herro and Norm Powell as players who can already “score at the end of games and get their own shots.”
So the Heat need a table-setter. DeRozan, Westbrook, and Beal are guys who shoot first and ask questions later. Westbrook, at this stage, is a turnover-prone freight train who still plays like the engine’s redlining. DeRozan is a mid-range artist in a league that’s moved past the mid-range. Beal’s got the contract history of a small-market GDP. None of them are what Riley says he wants.
Spoelstra, for his part, is focused on maximizing what he already has. He told reporters last Thursday that Antetokounmpo’s gravity forces a third defender — not just a second — and that his improved passing over the years creates scramble mode for opposing defenses. “His willingness and his improvement with his passing over the years gets you in scramble mode,” Spoelstra said. “You have to really be moving and be ahead of things.”
Riley acknowledged the challenge ahead with characteristic bluntness: “You never know that you’re ever going to win a title until you win one. You’ll never win one if you don’t have the talent and the coaching to do it.”
The Heat’s summer has been a rousing success by any reasonable measure — they traded for a generational talent without gutting their core. But the finishing touches are where championships are won or lost, and right now Miami is shopping from a list of imperfect options. Riley knows it. Spoelstra knows it. And the three veterans circling the market know it too.
