Bam Adebayo give somany reasons to leave heat today _view to sée….
Miami big man Bam Adebayo has been out with a left hip contusion and has given a concerning update on the status of the injury.
Bam missed his second consecutive game against the Raptors on December 6, and when asked if he will return against the Cavs in Miami on December 8, he was very unsure.
“I have no idea,” Adebayo told Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald. “This is new to me…to be on the sideline. I get re-evaluated when the team gets back from Toronto. We’ll have a conversation then.”
Adebayo initially suffered the injury back on October 28 against the Timberwolves and re-aggravated the injury during the Heat’s 142-132 win over the Pacers on Nov 30.
Bam says his recovery process is slow and Miami are limiting his on court work.
“I haven’t started doing much basketball stuff; no contact. Everything else I’ve been doing, shooting and stuff like that, has been fine,” Adebayo explained. “The best thing for it is rest. That’s what I’ve been trying to do these past couple of days. Very boring. But this is the process.”
Offensively, the center has been very impactful to start the 2023-2024 season, after averaging a career-best 22.3 points per game, which leaves him slightly behind Jimmy Butler (22.4) and Tyler Herro (22.9).
Herro has also been out with an ankle sprain, so Miami’s offense has definitely been lacking.
Bam has also been averaging 9.9 rebounds, 3.9 assists, 1.2 steals and 1.0 blocks per contest while shooting 52.2 percent from the field.
The Heat are 12-9 and seventh in the Eastern Conference and will need Bam’s help if they want to stay in contention, as his impact on the floor on both ends is crucial to their success.
The Knicks aren’t impressing anyone so far this season, and especially not TNT analyst Kenny Smith, who says “they’re gonna stay in the middle.”
After riding a three-game a streak, New York lost 146-122 to Milwaukee in Tuesday and were eliminated from the In-Season Tournament.
The loss was no surprise, considering it is NY eight’s straight loss to the 2021 champions.
Smith didn’t hold back when discussing the Knicks’ troubles.
“This is why the Knicks are gonna stay in the middle,” Smith said on TNT’s Inside the NBA. “Every game that they play, they always have the second-best player. “You play Boston, you’ve got the second or third best player. You play Orlando with [Paolo] Banchero, they don’t have a player that’s better than Banchero. Milwaukee, we know they don’t. Philadelphia, they don’t. The Indiana Pacers, Tyrese Haliburton is the best player on the floor. If you play Miami Heat, Jimmy Butler is the best player on the floor. If you play the Cleveland Cavaliers, you have Donovan Mitchell. You don’t have the best player on the floor any night.
They can play better than you. But they are not walking into the gym and say, ‘[We] have the best player.’”
Fellow analyst Charles Barkley agreed with Smith, and advised the Knicks to make a trade to improve their roster.
“They don’t have a margin for error,” Barkley said. “That’s why the Knicks have to make a trade. They could get a good matchup like last year, they manhandled the Cavs. But they are not gonna beat those top three teams with this team.”
The Knicks are 12-8 to start the season, but haven’t been able to lock away solid against the top teams.
Their next big test will come on Friday against the Celtics, but if it results in another blowout loss, expect the criticism to come hard and fast.
In a parallel universe, Warriors legend Steph Curry could have been a Phoenix Sun and Steve Kerr would have been the reason why.
In a full circle moment, Steve Kerr was actually the general manager of the Suns in 2009 and wanted to secure another Steve Nash-esque player. Queue Steph Curry.
“I was the GM in Phoenix from 2007-10. We were looking at Steph Curry and seeing Steve Nash,” Kerr said on Headliners with Rachel Nichols. “They were so alike in so many ways. We had watched Steve just become 2x MVP. So all the concerns that most of people in the league had about Steph in terms of size, defense, and athleticism, we saw everything we needed to see. Steve had just done so much in the league, and we thought he could be very similar. We tried to trade for him and thought we had a deal done the night before the draft. When he fell [to the seventh pick], our draft room erupted because we thought the deal was in place and Steph was going to be a Phoenix Sun. It didn’t happen, it fell through.”
Warriors fans, breathe a sigh of relief.
When the deal fell through, the Warriors took Steph at seventh overall in the draft.
Kerr and Curry teamed up in 2014 when he joined Golden State as the head coach.
The two of them have done great things together and won four championships together at the Warriors.
They have also enjoyed Hall-of-Fame worthy careers in their time spent in the Bay, since Kerr has won Coach of the Year and Curry has earned not one, but two MVP awards in his time.
