MIAMI — When Giannis Antetokounmpo posted a YouTube video documenting his first day inside the Miami Heat organization, the reaction was immediate and overwhelming.
The footage showed him meeting Erik Spoelstra, shaking hands with Pat Riley, and working through drills in a Heat uniform for the first time. His 13-season run with the Bucks seemed to dissolve into something new on screen, and the basketball world took it as confirmation that Miami’s roster is unlike anything the franchise has assembled before.
But the video did not answer the question the Heat most need to resolve before training camp opens on September 29.
Klay Thompson was at that California minicamp too. He turned 36 in February. He left six million dollars on the table from another offer to sign with Miami this August, and nobody outside the Heat’s training staff knows yet whether the pull-up three that defined his Golden State career still works the way it did when he was 27. That gap, between what Thompson was and what he is at 36 on a new team with a different superstar, is the most honest basketball question in Miami this fall.
The Heat built their roster for a specific version of Giannis Antetokounmpo, the one who plays best with spacing. At Milwaukee, Khris Middleton’s shooting was the mechanism that opened the floor for Giannis’s drives and post-up opportunities. The Bucks never found a permanent replacement for what Middleton provided in his prime, and part of why Giannis’s later Milwaukee seasons produced diminishing playoff returns was the shrinking of available space around him. Miami’s answer is different in kind: instead of one perimeter partner built around Giannis, Spoelstra brought in two veteran shooters, Thompson and Tim Hardaway Jr., alongside Norman Powell, who slides into the starting backcourt, and Bobby Portis, who left Milwaukee with Giannis and already has a working understanding of his tendencies in the post.
Portis is the easiest piece to explain. He spent four seasons in Milwaukee learning how to read Giannis’s positioning, how to set the screens that create the angles Giannis uses off the roll, and when to relocate to give the ball-handler a second option. Spoelstra did not sign Portis for his scoring. He signed him for what he understood.
Thompson is harder to explain in the same terms, because the question about him is not whether he understands positioning. The question is whether he can still punish defenses for respecting it. At 36, with the accumulated miles of a career that included a torn ACL and a torn Achilles in consecutive seasons, the shooting stroke that once required defenses to account for him from 30 feet has become something coaches discuss more carefully than they used to. His statistics in his most recent season did not reflect the version of Thompson who won four championships. The shot was there at moments. The consistency was not.
Adebayo’s role is the other piece the minicamp surfaced. He and Giannis are both best played as the primary option in the frontcourt, but on different terms. Adebayo is the defensive anchor, the passer out of the pick-and-roll, and the finisher at the rim. Giannis is all of those things and the scorer the ball runs through. How Spoelstra manages those two tendencies across 48-minute lineups is something that will not become clear until October, but the minicamp was where the theoretical part of it became physical, where the two men were in the same paint at the same time and had to begin sorting out the geometry.
That is what Miami’s camp will be working through when September 29 arrives at Kaseya Center. The 76ers assembled LeBron James and Jaylen Brown around Joel Embiid and are spending September in closed-door workouts projecting themselves as unstoppable. The Knicks, who eliminated the Spurs last June to win their first championship in 53 years, have the same core returning and Jalen Brunson entering his prime. Neither of those teams, for all the attention they are generating, has the roster construction question that Miami carries into camp.
Giannis, when he released his video, was not performing gratitude. He has made every team he joined feel like he chose them. The Heat got that version on screen, and they got something more useful in the gym: a superstar who arrived early, stayed late, and according to Spoelstra’s staff used the California sessions to begin establishing the habits the team will spend October building upon.
What Klay Thompson did with those same days is the question Miami cannot yet answer publicly. He knows the role. He has been in the room where shots decide championships more than anyone still playing. Whether his body at 36 gives him what his mind already understands is what September 29 will begin to establish.
The Heat believe it will. Six million dollars says they were not alone in that belief. The calculation on whether they are right starts in two weeks.
For more on the 2026-27 NBA season outlook, see Eastern Herald’s full season preview covering key matchups and title contenders.
