Miami Heat’s Jaime Jaquez Jr. shows off his skills
Among the reasons prognosticators expressed a degree of surprise about Jaime Jaquez Jr. going among the first 20 picks in the NBA draft was the thought that the 22-year-old out of UCLA had limited upside after four college seasons.
Among the notions in the immediate wake of the Heat selecting the 6-foot-7 wing at No. 18 two weeks ago was that what you see is what you’re going to get, a finished product.
And then came Jaquez’s first exposure in Heat colors.
While summer-league statements often can be overstated, what cannot be embellished is touch, athleticism, aggression, basketball IQ.
It is a lesson summer-league coach Caron Butler, the Erik Spoelstra assistant, received first hand as the Heat began drilling for Monday night’s summer-league opener in Sacramento. It is a lesson the Los Angeles Lakers’ summer roster received amid Jaquez’s 22-point debut in the Heat’s 107-90 Monday victory at the California Classic.
“We started off one of our drills 4-on-0, where I just wanted to see what guys can do, going left, going right, pivot, back to the basket, you name it,” Butler said of the Heat’s initial work upon their weekend arrival in Sacramento. “His versatility was amazing. Not even using him as a screener yet, but just using him just handling and getting downhill in his reads, seeing. I didn’t even tell him the coverages. I just wanted to see what type of reads, his basketball IQ, just testing it.”
TRIPLE J CAME TO PLAY 😤@jaquez_jr // #HEATSummer pic.twitter.com/4v4OUhf0W1
— Miami HEAT (@MiamiHEAT) July 3, 2023
Having missed Jaquez’s pre-draft workout, with the Heat occupied by a postseason run to the NBA Finals, Butler was eager to explore.
“So I just wanted to see what it looked like,” he said. “And he was just off the charts. And I knew that he was immediately someone that I could pair with Niko (2022 first-round pick Nikola Jovic) and get him out there and he can just figure it out. Because they just have the high basketball IQs.”
Jaquez completed his summer debut 8 of 15 from the field, including 3 of 7 on 3-pointers.
“In college,” Jaquez said, “you always got to run a lot of sets in the flow of the offense. But I think in the NBA because of the shorter shot clock, there’s so many opportunities for broken plays and for things not to go as planned. You got to think on the move.
“I think, to me personally, that’s where my game really elevates, I think, because that’s the game I like to play. I like to play free. I like to make fast decisions and quick decisions, and try to get guys open.
“And I think my game’s going to grow a lot when I get to the NBA just because of the freedom and the spacing. There’s just a lot of opportunities during the game.”
Jaquez will get plenty more opportunities over the next two weeks, with the Heat to close out the California Classic with a 10 p.m. Eastern game Wednesday against the Sacramento Kings’ summer roster and then move on to the larger Las Vegas summer league for at least five more games.
The game’s leading scorer with 22 points… Jaime Jaquez Jr. 😎@jaquez_jr // #HEATSummer pic.twitter.com/IRzy07W1rn
— Miami HEAT (@MiamiHEAT) July 3, 2023
“This is a team that obviously believes in the pecking order,” Butler said. “And he’s a high draft pick for us. We know that we’re going to exhaust him on the offensive end and teach him the principles of terminology defensively. And he just did a remarkable job of just staying with it. He doesn’t lack confidence.”
So whether it was calls for after-timeout plays or mundane sets, there was a Jaquez-first approach in Monday’s game.
“I told him mostly the ATOs, things like that, I’m going to feature you, I’m going to go right to you and I’m going to rely on you,” Butler said. “And over the last couple of days in scrimmages, he’s just been so efficient. I knew that he had a little jitters hearing the crowd when he got announced, heard his name. And I knew he had high expectations on his performance first time out, and he did a hell of a job.”
With much of the pre-draft evaluation process a teardown process, emphasizing what players aren’t, Jaquez immediately showed explosive athleticism with a variety of emphatic dunks in his debut.
“I didn’t go in with that intention,” he said. “I’ve always trusted and been confident in my ability to, I guess, get up and dunk. It’s nothing that I’m not accustomed to.
“In college, like I said, it’s a much different game. It’s a lot more fast-break, and I’m really going to flourish in this type of style. College, I’m telling you, it’s a lot slower pace. We didn’t have the fastest pace. We got up and down a little bit, but nothing like it is in the NBA. So I think I’m going to have a lot more success in my future.”
