The Haywood Highsmith trade is a genuinely curious move by the Miami Heat. And it doesn’t tell us much. Not anything good, anyway. But it does represent a big bet on Jaime Jaquez Jr.
This is among the lone reasonable interpretations of the trade. The Heat struck it in order to skirt the luxury tax, even though they had other ways of doing so, and far more time to do it. Defending the logic behind this salary dump—which included shipping out a 2032 second-rounder—is all sorts of difficult.
There are only two ways in which it begins to make some sense.