Here is what he said to Anthony Chiang of the Miami Herald<\/a>, speaking at his annual youth basketball clinic at SLAM! Miami charter school.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s a very good shake up for our team and now there\u2019s a different dynamic to it…<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like Norman is one of those guys that floats under the radar. But as you saw this year, he\u2019s really shown that he can be an All-Star caliber player. You\u2019ve seen what he\u2019s done and you\u2019ve seen him grow in this league. And, obviously, he wants to take the next challenge. Obviously, the next challenge is being with the Miami Heat. So I\u2019m happy to have him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miami has a chance to make some noise in what is projected to be a down Eastern Conference, but it needs to find some more consistent offense this season. Powell helps with that, but the Heat need more: Adebayo and Tyler Herro need to stay healthy and play 65+ games, Andrew Wiggins needs play at his All-Star form from Golden State, Kel\u2019el Ware needs to take a step forward (likely with Erik Spoelstra prodding him), and Davion Mitchell needs to show that how he played in the 30 games after being traded to the Heat were not a fluke, when he averaged 10.3 points and 5.3 assists per game. The Heat bet on Mitchell, signing him to a two-year, $24 million contract.<\/p>\n
\u201cDavion being back, obviously, we\u2019ve been missing somebody that can really play on-ball defense,\u201d Adebayo said. \u201cAnd having him come in and be that guy and understand his role, I\u2019m looking forward to him being here for a full year and all of us being together and getting to know one another and turning this into more of a brotherhood. We were kind of disconnected a little bit trying to figure out everybody\u2019s role and trying to figure out everybody\u2019s style of play. But now we\u2019re going to have a good training camp and then we go from there.\u201d<\/p>\n
A return to the playoffs \u2014 and hopefully a better result than a 0-4 sweep exit in the first round (at the hands of the Cavaliers) \u2014 seems distinctly possible for the Heat, who should be improved over a season ago. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s enough to have Adebayo optimistic. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Miami Heat upgraded this summer, moving on from Kevin Love and Duncan Robinson but adding a borderline…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59046,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":["post-59045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}