Miami’s Biggest Weakness Isn’t Three-Point Shooting…

Every conversation I’ve had about this Heat roster since June eventually arrives at the same place. Can they shoot? Is there enough spacing around Giannis? Who replaces what Tyler Herro and Norman Powell took with them? I guess they are fair questions and I’ve written about them myself. But I want to make an argument that runs against the grain of almost everything I’ve heard this offseason. Sure, this team hasn’t played a game yet and has yet to fill its last roster spots. A move or two and they could look meaningfully different by October. As it currently stand though, Miami’s biggest weakness next season won’t be three-point shooting, it’ll be free throw shooting.

The free throw is the one possession in the sport where the only variable is the shooter. A trip to the line with two attempts is worth about 1.56 points for a league-average shooter. For a team shooting 70 percent, it’s 1.40. That gap sounds small but it really isn’t.

Spread across roughly 25 attempts a game, the difference between a 70 percent free throw team and an 80 percent free throw team is about 2 1/2 points every night. Two and a half points is the margin in a stunning number of NBA games, and it’s very close to the entire margin of some playoff series. Miami will be a team that is going to be at the line constantly. Giannis Antetokounmpo is one of the most relentless downhill forces the league has ever produced. Bam Adebayo lives in contact, Andrew Wiggins and Pelle Larsson both attack closeouts by design.

The whole offensive architecture that has been built this summer is engineered to pressure the rim, and rim pressure produces fouls. Getting to the line was never going to be the problem, but converting is.

Free-Throw Percentage for the current Miami Heat roster Per Basketball Reference — Coach Geo

Giannis shot 65.0 percent from the free throw line last season and his career mark is 69.1 percent.
He also made 232 free throws in just 36 games, which works out to roughly ten attempts a night. That’s the primary issue, the player taking the most trips to the line on this roster is not the most reliable once he gets there. At ten attempts a game, the difference between 65 percent and league average is about 1.3 points per game.

Across a full season that’s more than a hundred points left on the floor by one player, at a shot with nobody guarding him. This isn’t a knock on him as Giannis is a two-time MVP and the single biggest reason Miami is a contender at all. But an honest evaluation will show that he hasn’t been as efficient as he was earlier in his career there. More on that later!

Mar 18, 2025; San Francisco, California, USA; Golden State Warriors fans attempt to distract Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo (34) as he shoots a free throw during the fourth quarter at Chase Center. Mandatory Credit: D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Bam Adebayo, who absorbs a heavy load of contact as well, is a 75.9 percent career shooter — respectable, but not scary, and not the first person you think of having at the stripe with your season on the line. Pelle Larsson shot just under 80 percent from the line last season, which is genuinely good, but his free throw rate sat in the 22nd percentile.

Although I forsee a bit of a jump, he just doesn’t get there enough. Davion Mitchell’s rate was in that same neighborhood and he converts under 70%. Bobby Portis also converted around 70 percent while his attempt volume sat in the bottom fifth of the league. Of the 4 guys on the roster that shoot above 80% at the line, one is a rookie in Ryan Conwell, Dru Smith whose main value is on the defensive side of the floor, and the other 2 are shooters that won’t spend much time in the paint (Tim Hardaway Jr, Simone Fontecchio).

That’s the shape of it. The guys who will get fouled often, aren’t considered great FT shooters. And, the guys who can shoot, don’t get fouled enough. This is a very different problem than three-point shooting, and I’d argue a harder one to solve. Spacing is solvable with personnel as you can go sign a shooter, and Miami rosters plenty of them. Free throw shooting isn’t something you can add to a roster, because the attempts go to whoever draws the most contact, and contact usually goes to your stars.

The Miami Heat's Bam Adebayo (13) defending the Milwaukee Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo (34). | Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images

Why it could bite hardest in the clutch

Put this in a fourth quarter where late-game basketball is free throw basketball. In a scenario where the trailing team fouls intentionally, the leading team has to close by making them. Playoff officiating tightens, physicality increases, and possessions slow until the game becomes a sequence of half-court trips and trips to the line. A 65-percent shooter could at certain points be a strategic vulnerability in that environment.

Although Giannis isn’t bad enough from the line to warrant the hack-a-Shaq treatment, Miami could face a version of it if the opponent prefers to put the ball in the hands there instead of in the paint and take their chances. I belive that Miami’s half-court offense in the clutch will be fine, because Giannis generates rim pressure and Bam is a legitimate hub that together will create just enough open looks for those spaced beside them. The question that I believe will need to be answered is, “can they convert enough of the free ones?”

There’s a popular idea I’ve heard for years, and as someone who works on bodies for a living, I’ve been sympathetic to it: that as players add muscle, their touch from the free throw line and from the perimeter suffers, even as their paint scoring improves. The mechanism is plausible as shooting is what we’d call a motor skill and it’s calibrated to a specific body. Add significant mass and it could require more muscle force to start moving or change direction.

Also, the part of your brain that determines how much force to use and how to move in space can change the shooting stroke that was built. The rate and intensity of signals sent from your brain and spinal cord to your muscles shifts too, so the same perceived effort produces more force, which is why athletes often shoot long after a serious strength block. It’s the same reason growth spurts scramble coordination in teenagers.

So it should show up in the data. And when I went looking, it mostly didn’t.

Jayson Tatum bulked up substantially and remains an 83.9 percent career free throw shooter, at 82.3 percent as recently as last season. Although I must add that his shooting mechanics aren’t as fluid since and 3PT % have dipped some. Whatever dip exists there is small, and better explained by shot difficulty and role.

Giannis is a messier case than people assume as he was shooting 72.2 percent from the line as recently as 2021-22 and shot over 70% from the line in 5 of his first 6 seasons. If the mass were the culprit, the decline should have arrived with the mass but it didn’t. Giannis mid range efficiency had improved from 18.2% his rookie year to a career high of 44.2% in 2024-2025.

And then there’s Russell Westbrook, who is a curious case. Westbrook shot 82.3 percent from the line across his first 9 seasons. Then he fell to 62.1 percent, one of the most dramatic collapses by a good free throw shooter in modern league history. His paint scoring stayed intact but his jumper cratered.

The explanation, reported at the time, had nothing to do with his body. The NBA had introduced a rule barring players from walking beyond the three-point line between attempts. Westbrook’s routine, the one he’d used since he was eight years old, was to shoot the first, walk back toward half court, gather himself, turn around, walk back and shoot the second. The rule took that ritual away and would support that the drop-off had little to do with muscle mass or mechanics. I believe that free throw shooting isn’t primarily a strength or a mass problem. The percentage being lower for some I believe is more closely related to either being a shooting mechanics issue, a routine problem, or a mental block.

It’s a closed skill that lives or dies on the consistency of a rehearsed sequence, and it is fragile in a way almost nothing else in the sport is. Which is bad news and good news at the same time. Bad, because it means it can break for reasons that have nothing to do with talent. Good, because routines are the single most trainable thing in that entire field.

So what can Miami actually do about it?

Build the closing lineup around it. During clutch time, in the last 5 minutes of a close game, the floor should hold as many 78-percent-plus shooters as the defense allows. Larsson and Tim Hardaway Jr. become more valuable in those minutes specifically because of what they do at the line, independent of everything else they offer.

Miami Heat president Pat Riley, left, with free agent signee Tim Hardaway Jr. as they hold up a No. 10 jersey — (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun Sentinel)

Use the last roster spots on it. Miami still has spots to fill. When weighing the remaining shot-makers on the market, free throw percentage deserves far more weight than it normally gets. A 80-plus percent free throw shooter off the bench is worth more to this specific roster than to almost any other team in the league, purely because of what surrounds him.

Crash the glass on misses. Teams with poor free throw shooting can recover a chunk of that lost value by attacking the offensive rebound on the second attempt. Miami has the size and athleticism to make that a live weapon. It won’t fully erase the gap, but it converts some misses back into possessions.

Although there doesn’t seem to be many solutions other than acquiring better free-throw shooters, none of this means the season is doomed. Every team that wins a championship has a weakness that nearly beat them, and the ones who win anyway are usually the ones who identified it in August, or the trade deadline at the very least, instead of April. Everyone’s staring at the three-point line. I’d be watching the one fifteen feet from the rim.

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