Michael Beasley Facing Final Chance to Revive NBA Career with Miami Heat
Michael Beasley is getting a second chance.
Again.
For the last time.
The Miami Heat announced on Thursday that they signed Beasley to a 10-day contract. This will mark his third stint with the team and, overall, will be Beasley's last real shot at reviving an NBA career that peaked more than three years ago.
"I feel great," he said, per Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel. "I'm definitely blessed and humbled to have another opportunity."
Drafted second overall in 2008 by the Heat, Beasley has never truly found his footing. He put points on the board as a rookie and sophomore but became collateral damage in Miami's pursuit of LeBron James and Chris Bosh during the summer of 2010, as he was shipped to the Minnesota Timberwolves as part of a last-minute salary dump.
Beasley would go on to post career highs in minutes, usage rate and points that 2010-11 season while seemingly peaking as a raw, explosive third-year prospect. His per-game averages plummeted through his stint with Minnesota and his later time with the Phoenix Suns.
By the time he wound up back in Miami last season as an emergency reserve, various on- and off-court issues turned Beasley into a prominent cautionary tale. He typified squandered potential as a wildly talented athlete who could never put it together.
Prime-time opportunity had already passed him by. Signing with Miami portended things to come. The team was overrun with superstars and incapable of grooming Beasley into anything more than a hanger-on—a part he seemed destined to play forever after cycling through so many other chances.
Things are different this time. Although Beasley will never meet the spiring ceiling set for him in 2008, the Heat need him now more than they did in 2013 or, frankly, 2008.
Bosh is done for the season with blood clots on his lung, while both Shawne Williams and Danny Grangers—two floor-spacing forwards—were shipped out in the Goran Dragic trade. Shallow to begin with, Miami is even thinner now with serious minutes to spare beyond the starting five.
To wit: Henry Walker—formerly Bill Walker—logged 33 minutes in Miami's win over the Orlando Magic on Wednesday night. He only just returned to the NBA this season after a two-year absence.
Expect the 26-year-old Beasley to be thrown into the fire early and often while receiving minutes at both forward spots. It's a part that, in theory, he's suited to play.
Pacing and spacing issues have plagued the Heat all season. While their offense has been faster and more efficient since Dragic entered the fold, they're still light-years behind the curve. They rank 18th in points scored per 100 possessions overall and check in as the league's slowest team.
The strong three-point marksmanship and general perimeter presence that helped them win championships with James in tow is long gone. Instead, the Heat have found themselves relying rather heavily on the mid-range game, short on looks within the restricted area and paint.
When they do fire away from long range, it's usually to jaded consequence. They're 20th in three-point attempts and 18th in deep-ball success rate.
Bringing in Beasley addresses every possible offensive need. He's athletic and explosive. He's able to get in the lane and create his own point-blank opportunities—a human runaway freight train on Hydroxycut, if you will.
Dragic hails from a Suns team that likes to cover the floor. Beasley is the fast-break partner he doesn't have now. The two played together in Phoenix through the 2012-13 season and yielded lukewarm results. Beasley's shooting percentages were slightly better with Dragic on the floor, but they neither played together long enough (13.1 minutes per game) nor for a team that was good enough for us to draw any sort of conclusion.
Miami ranks 28th in transition points per game, according to TeamRankings.com, and doesn't stand a chance of varying its speed with the half-hobbled Dwyane Wade and Luol Deng as Dragic's primary running mates. Regardless of what happened in Phoenix, Beasley is relief for the Heat's point guard.
Conveniently still, Beasley is more than a self-sufficient scorer. He has range. He drilled 38.9 percent of his long balls last season and really learned to work away from the action as a result. More than 22 percent of his field-goal attempts came as a catch-and-shoot option, of which he drilled 44.2 percent, including a 43.2 percent spot-up clip from deep.
Working off the rock was a prerequisite then with the Heat heavy on superstars, and nothing has changed—except, you know, the "heavy on superstars" part. Dragic and Wade are ball-dominators, and Hassan Whiteside will sap up possessions jockeying for position in the post. The Heat need that orbiting shooter to pair with Deng now that Williams is gone.
Prematurely plugging Beasley into offensive schemes has never been the primary problem, though. Playing time has proved scant and has been provided inconsistently his entire career, but he's always produced when on the floor.
Here's the list of qualified NBA players who began their careers in or after 2008 and have averaged at least 19 points and seven rebounds per 36 minutes since:
- Blake Griffin
- Kevin Love
- DeMarcus Cousins
- Brook Lopez
- Michael Beasley
With his individual potential still painfully obvious, Beasley's latest venture becomes more about fitting in on a team that matters. He wasn't a pivotal cog in the Heat's NBA Finals machine last season and played only a secondary role in Miami's first-round exits in 2009 and 2010.
In Minnesota and Phoenix, meanwhile, Beasley never had a profound impact. The Timberwolves went 43-105 through his two campaigns with them, and the Suns tallied just 25 victories during his one-season stay.
Only once (2010-11) in his career has his team even been statistically better with him on the floor.
Six seasons is enough time to prove you're valuable, if not as a superstar, then as an important reserve. Beasley has played in more than 400 games, a sample size that exceeds a certain special someone, as the folks over at Detroit Bad Boys point out:
With the Heat clinging to seventh place in the Eastern Conference and preparing to make a playoff run without Bosh, the team is Beasley's ticket out of dodge. The Heat are an organization with expectations and with a coaching staff that's trying to extract every last iota of potential from an injury-, trade- and free-agency-ravaged roster.
"The way head coach Erik Spoelstra works, he'll still expect Beasley to take good shots, move the ball quickly and execute his defensive scheme," writes CBS Sports' James Herbert. "If the 26-year-old wants to stay in the league for good this time, he'll do that."
Indeed, he will. The Heat aren't bringing him in to be a savior. He's there, in Miami, to be part of something productive. Not as a headliner, but as a key contributor on a playoff team.
To this end, the Heat do need Beasley. He matters to them. And because he matters, this is a chance for him to to hold one last audition for future roles—in Miami or elsewhere—as someone more than a bench-warming afterthought whose ill-patterned past presides over his present, forever threatening to terminate any chance he has at a future.
*Stats courtesy of Basketball-Reference and NBA.com and are accurate as of Feb. 26, 2015 unless otherwise cited.
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