NEW YORK – Sometimes coaching brilliance gives way to practicality.
So for all the benefit that the Miami Heat have realized with the shift of Kyle Lowry to a reserve role, it’s not as if Erik Spoelstra woke up one day in the void of other factors and said the heck with those 677 consecutive appearances solely as a starter by the six-time former All-Star.
Actually, the concern was how the 37-year-old point guard would be waking up following five weeks away due to knee pain.
“It just made the most sense, initially, to bring him off the bench,” Spoelstra said earlier during the Eastern Conference semifinals against the New York Knicks. “That was to protect him, protect me, and to just get him ready for this time.”
With the knee soreness having dissipated with the extra rest, there remained the option of returning Lowry to his traditional role in the interim.
But the one thing Spoelstra did not want was to have to potentially deal with Lowry being in and out of the lineup, having to then reacclimate replacement starter Gabe Vincent.
So he decided to buy time.
What he ultimately purchased was a payoff.
“We stayed with it,” Spoelstra said, “and he’s been fantastic about it.”
The compromise was in the minutes.
At the start of the season, when injuries decimated the Heat lineup, Lowry had been forced to play far more minutes than expected, standing among the league leaders at the time. If you didn’t know better, you might have thought he was being coached by Tom Thibodeau.
With those minutes came the knee pain.
And then the layoff, hardly optimal for a team with only two point guards on the roster.
So now practical minutes, in a role that has revitalized the rotation.
“He’s playing starters minutes, and he’s smart enough and experienced enough to get it,” Spoelstra said, with Lowry, before this run, having last played as a reserve in 2012-13, his first seasons with the Toronto Raptors. “He’s wrapping his mind around what we need from this team right now, for this playoff run. It’s an incredible luxury. We’re not taking it for granted.”
The approach created headaches for the Milwaukee Bucks in the first round, as the Heat eliminated the playoffs’ top seed 4-1.
Then came the Lowry-as-reserve angst for the Knicks.
“They’ve got Lowry on their bench. That’s a lot to deal with,” Thibodeau said, with the teams meeting Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden. “Whether you ask him to start or come off the bench, he’s gonna be really effective.”
As, indeed, he has been.
“I’m playing to help my team win, and that’s all that really matters,” said Lowry, who has one remaining season on the three-year, $85 million deal he signed to join the Heat from the Raptors in 2021 NBA free agency. “As long as we win basketball games, I really don’t care.”
While part of the uptick in productivity has been the role readjustment, part of it has been out of necessity, with Tyler Herro (hand) and Victor Oladipo (knee) sidelined by recent surgeries.
So while the Heat starting lineup remains with the playmaking of Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo, the second unit otherwise would have been decidedly short on such distribution.
“He is an ultimate winner,” Spoelstra said. “So what drives him more than anything is winning. And there were just unfortunate circumstances how we got to this. His injury shut him down for five weeks and the plan, as we’ve talked about quite a bit, it just made the most sense initially to bring him off the bench.
“And then it just got so late, we didn’t have a lot of time. He’s been fantastic about it. One of the things we found, you’re bringing a Hall of Fame mind off the bench. And our second unit was struggling for much of the year. You shift him into there, a lot of these things that we were working on endlessly just kind of get taken care of.”
All with respect given.
“Everybody wanted to criticize him because he went to the bench,” Adebayo said. “But to me, that’s a grown-man move, to let an undrafted player start, and you figure out your way to impact winning off the bench.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean Lowry’s time as a Heat starter is over. Spoelstra often reassesses rotations from series to series, with Herro still possibly to return this postseason. And with Vincent an impending free agent and the Heat hard up against the NBA’s new onerous luxury-tax thresholds, there is not much in the pipeline at point guard.
But those are decisions for another day.
For now, it’s simply a matter of experience on call in reserve.
“I think just at this point,” Lowry said, “it’s all about the team and figuring out what the team needs and what’s best for us.”
