Welcome to our new off-season mini-series: Minimum Monsters. In a game where cap space is limited, the best teams are the ones who can stretch a dollar the furthest. Generally speaking, players on minimum deals don’t move the needle too much. But every year, there are always a few cases where a team hits a salary cap home run – landing a real contributor on a cheap deal. In this series, we will highlight a few players who signed minimum contracts this offseason that could end up vastly outperforming their expected value.
It’s easy to criticize the Miami Heat for their 2023 offseason. After missing out on the Damian Lillard sweepstakes, they also let their conference rivals, the Boston Celtics, scoop up Jrue Holiday. On top of that, they lost two of their starters from their Finals run (Max Strus and Gabe Vincent) to free agency (Strus to the Cleveland Cavaliers and Vincent to the Los Angeles Lakers) with no obvious replacements in sight.
As you can likely infer from the title of this article, the last statement in our opening paragraph is not exactly the case. Yes, losing Strus and Vincent stings, but the Heat did find someone to fill the void they left behind, and they did it at a great price.
At the beginning of free agency, while Strus and Vincent were on their way out the door, the Heat quietly signed Richardson to a 2-year, 5.9-million dollar deal. In 2023-24, Richardson will make 2.89 million dollars – the veteran minimum for a player with eight years of NBA experience (which Richardson has under his belt).
Despite playing on five different teams in four years, Richardson provides the perfect skillset to appropriate the production lost by the departures of Strus and Vincent.
For the last couple of years, Strus has been one of Miami’s premier off-ball marksmen. According to the Thinking Basketball database, Strus shot 45% on wide-open threes over the last three seasons (95th percentile). He also shot 38% on his catch-and-shoot threes (50th percentile) during this time on volume that put him in the 98th percentile league-wide.
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Juxtapose this with Richardson, who has converted on 41% of his wide-open threes (67th percentile) in the last three years and 37% of his catch-and-shoot threes (49th percentile) on volume that ranked in the 76th percentile. These numbers are a clear notch below Strus’, and they come on a lower degree of difficulty (Strus attempts more movement threes). But they aren’t astronomically far off, and they are better than Vincent’s numbers in these categories (more on this in a moment
