Heat Notes: Strus, Bryant, Butler, Jovic, Highsmith

Former Heat wing Max Strus, who will face Miami on Wednesday for the first time as a member of the Cavaliers, admitted in a conversation with Anthony Chiang of The Miami Herald that it will be “weird” to go up against his old team. He also acknowledged that it has taken him some time to get used to a new NBA home after spending three seasons with the Heat.

“It kind of took me a while, like when I was in Cleveland for the first couple weeks saying, ‘Well, we did this in Miami,'” Strus said. “You know, I’m not on that team anymore so I got to stop saying ‘we.’ It’s ‘they’ now. I think it was a hard adjustment getting over that.

“… Miami does things different than everybody and I don’t think you really know the extent of that until you go somewhere else,” Strus continued. “So it’s definitely been an adjustment, it’s been different. … There’s definitely some things I miss about Miami and there’s definitely some things I don’t miss. But overall it’s been a pretty easy adjustment. I think the traits and the characteristics that I learned by playing for the Miami Heat, it’s going to suit me very well for the rest of my career. I’ve come to notice that now that I’m in a different place.”

Although they would’ve liked to re-sign Strus when he reached unrestricted free agency this past offseason, the Heat had luxury tax concerns and the 27-year-old generated a level of interest that pushed him out of Miami’s price range. He was ultimately signed-and-traded to Cleveland on a four-year, $62.3MM deal.

“I talked to Spo (Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra) and we kind of knew early on that it wasn’t really going to work financially,” Strus said of his free agency, per Chiang. “It is what it is. You can’t really do anything else about it. The numbers don’t work sometimes. It’s a business at the end of the day and everybody’s got to do what they got to do for themselves.”

Here’s more on the Heat:

• After opening the season as Bam Adebayo‘s backup at center, Thomas Bryant has fallen out of the Heat’s regular rotation. Bryant is attempting to be patient and do whatever he can to help the club – even if it’s just being “a cheerleader for my teammates” – as he tries to make his case for minutes, writes Ira Winderman of The South Florida Sun Sentinel (subscription required). “It’s just different than the last two places he was in,” Spoelstra said of Bryant’s adjustment to Miami’s defensive system. “And that’s fair. So you have to kind of retrain habits, and calls, and different responsibilities. That’s normal when players change teams. It’s probably even more dramatic for bigs, fives.”
• Jimmy Butler traveled to Wisconsin on Sunday’s day off to watch the Sioux Falls Skyforce – Miami’s G League affiliate – face the Wisconsin Herd. According to Winderman (subscriber link), Butler explained on Monday that he wanted to support teammate Nikola Jovic, who was sent to the Skyforce to get regular minutes. “Got to go see my boy, man. I’m a huge Niko fan,” Butler said. “I think he’s going to help this organization well after I’m done here. That’s my dog, that’s my bro, I love him to death. So anytime I get a chance I go to watch him hoop, I will watch him hoop.”
• A journeyman who played primarily in the G League and overseas before joining the Heat in 2022, Haywood Highsmith has emerged as a key part of Miami’s rotation this season, Chiang writes for The Miami Herald. The team has won eight of the nine games Highsmith has started, and in the one loss, he was a plus-20. “There’s just a lot of hard work behind the scenes that’s behind this,” Highsmith said. “Everything that I’ve went through to get to this point is well worth it. It’s made me stronger for anything.”