Heat’s Erik Spoelstra makes injury guarantee after recent woes

As the Miami Heat prepare for a new season in a loaded East, one major aspect that they're hoping to turn their luck in is their injury woes the past few seasons. Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra would speak on that topic Monday during the team's media day where he gave a promise about the health of his group.

The past two seasons have seen Miami rank towards the top of the league in missed games and starting lineups where 2023 was the worse of them all as they started over 30 different starting lineups, which is a franchise record. However, Spoelstra would say to ClutchPoints Monday that they spent time looking into the issue and believe it will be much better in 2024.

“We're not going to belabor that. But as you can imagine, Miami, we spent a great deal of time analyzing it, reviewing it, putting things in different buckets,” Spoelstra said. “Things you can't control, things you can't control. We focused on all the protocols and everything we can do better from the things we can control. And we think it will be better this year and sometimes you just have to breathe that into existence too and that's our mind mindset to go into the season.”

Heat's Erik Spoelstra promised before on injury woes

This would not be the first time the long-time head coach speaks on this specific issue with the team as Spoelstra spoke about the injury issue back in the Heat's exit interviews where he spoke about wanting to look into it and find a solution.

“We’re going to look at everything,” Spoelstra said. “Because it’s not all apples to apples. I think what we do in terms of getting guys ready and in shape helps with soft tissue stuff. It’s the other stuff that we have to take a dive into. Two seasons ago, we were good. The last two seasons are a little bit skewed based on guys that missed the entire season that weren’t fully in our rotation. But that doesn’t also absolve it. We want to look at all the different angles on this.”

Player availability was a major talking point for the Heat this offseason as Tyler Herro spoke about it Monday in focusing on staying healthy by putting on more weight. He only played 40 games last season, but he wasn't the only one as others like star Jimmy Butler played 60 contests and missed the entire NBA Playoffs.

Heat's Pat Riley wanted “deep dive” on fixing health

People remember when Heat president Pat Riley spoke about the health of the team back in May and even mentioned they would be doing a “deep dive” into it.

“Until you change the way you go about doing the things that are necessary to win, whatever they are, those things you're doing to try to win, if they aren't working, you must change,” Riley said. “And so that doesn't mean that change is a sinister word here. There's a lot of elements to go into a culture, erosion of a culture, being together for 30 years, generational change, problems in the NBA that our league wide when it comes to health, comes to players missing games and availability.”

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“You take a look at all the the young sort of up and coming they haven't tasted it yet; OKC, Minnesota, Indiana, Boston with a new group, Orlando, etc, etc. You know, for some reason these guys are playing 70-80 games. It's a feeling more than anything else. But that's definitely a deep dive for us this summer and to player availability but so we do have to change some things. But we surely are not going to rip anything apart here.”

Heat's full expectations not met because of health says Pat Riley 

While other players missed a significant amount of time like Duncan Robinson, Terry Rozier, Kevin Love, and more, Riley would focus on Butler and Herro in their injury woes. However, Riley is confident in the Heat saying the injuries are frustrating since they haven't showed their full capability.

“Everything gets diluted what I mean by that, we talked a lot about continuity and consistency. And the players talked a lot about that to me in the my exit meetings with them on continuity, consistency and all that stuff,” Riley said. “Because when you're you're losing a myriad of players for extended periods of time, or even three or four games or whatever, and somebody comes in, like Tyler missed 40 games this year. So somebody came in and all of a sudden became very productive. You know, as Duncan got a lot more responsibility became one of our best pick and roll players and all of that stuff. And so when Tyler comes back, you know, a lot of players lose those minutes, but from from that standpoint, it's sort of hard to really measure your roster.”

Heat looking for some consistency in 2024

It remains to be seen if the promises of Spoelstra and Riley will come true, but there is no doubt that they have been looking into the issue to see if they can limit the amount of missed games and find consistency with themselves.

“I would love to have one through nine or one through 10 or whatever it is available. Give me 72 games I'll take 72 at different times, but the NBA has to address all of this, it's not just us having discussions with the training staff, talking with trainers,” Riley said. “The strength training staff, a lot of players have their own sort of off the court coaches, trainers and therapists and all of this stuff and who knows that somewhere something is conflicting with what we do here in our training room or in the weight room or with nutrition or mental health and whatever.”

“So those are the dives that you have to do and those factors that how much can we control that I'm not going to ever accuse a player who can't play that he doesn't want to play or he's not able to play. But there's no such thing as 100% in the NBA.”

At any rate, the Heat are looking to bounce back after finishing the second straight season at the eighth seed as they are in the midst of training camp in the Bahamas. They open the regular season facing the Orlando Magic on Oct. 23.