The Miami Heat is roughly one-fifth of the way through its regular season schedule and it’s still too early to make any firm judgements on what this can team be by season’s end (still mostly likely a playoff team).
But at 7-9 there are some early troubling signs Pat Riley’s decision this summer to bring back 11 players from last year’s 41-41 team and invest large chunks of the team’s salary cap in future years to a handful of players might have been a mistake.
It’s a lot to ask for a team with a couple new pieces to gel from the get-go and pick up where it left off when it finished with the second-best record in the league (30-11) over the second half of last season, but the Heat’s uneven play between the first and second half of games this season is concerning.