Thunder and Heat concluded a deal on Wednesday that will send Trevor Ariza to Miami in exchange for Meyers Leonard and a second round pick in 2027, Miami announced. Ariza hasn’t played a game since the 2019-20 season, when he was still on the Portland Trail Blazers, so it’s unclear when he’ll be ready to prepare for Miami.
However, despite having passed his peak at the age of 35, Ariza is still a decent 3-DE player at the right price. Miami is not giving up anything here, considering that Leonard has played in just three games this season due to surgery on his left shoulder, and the use of an anti-Semitic insult has caused him to be suspended from all team activities for a week. and a $ 50,000 fine.
Leonard has a no-trade clause in his contract, but he must renounce it to facilitate trade, according to Wojnarowski. THE Thunder should also not keep Leonard after the end of the exchange, which would make you a free agent.
For OKC, it was more a matter of obtaining cash compensation and continuing its reconstruction, rather than obtaining anything of immediate value. This 2027 choice is just another draft selection that Thunder can add to its acquired treasure after switching several famous players over the past three years.
As for the Heat, the value of Ariza will determine the version of it that they will receive. In his 21-game spell on the Trail Blazers last season, he averaged 11 points and four hits at 40% depth. But at the start of the season, when he was at Kings, he managed just six points per game and hit 38 percent of field shots in 22 games. He switched from team to team after leaving Houston in 2018 and had varying degrees of success in different environments.
If Ariza is able to perform as it did in Portland, then Miami will add another defensive wing to its arsenal, while Heat continues to climb the ranking in the east after a slow start at the start of the season. In their last 10 games, Miami was 9-1 and is on a winning streak of games, which led the Heat to fourth in the East. After overcoming a COVID-19 outbreak and a few squad injuries, Miami is finally starting to look like the team we saw in the Orlando bubble last year.