The Old Soul That’s Giving the Miami Heat New Life
People like to say Jaime Jaquez Jr. “plays like a vet.” But the Heat’s first-year forward is doing more than just the little things. He might be the NBA’s best rookie not named Chet or Wemby.The Old Soul That’s Giving the Miami Heat New Life
People like to say Jaime Jaquez Jr. “plays like a vet.” But the Heat’s first-year forward is doing more than just the little things. He might be the NBA’s best rookie not named Chet or Wemby.
When the Miami Heat, fresh off a trip to the Finals, needed a basket in the fourth quarter of their first game of the season, Erik Spoelstra didn’t put the ball in the hands of proven scorer Tyler Herro or playoff hero Caleb Martin. Instead, he called the number of a rookie just nine minutes into his NBA debut.
The Detroit Pistons had cut Miami’s 15-point lead to eight and were threatening to steal an opening-night win on the road. Before the start of the fourth quarter, Spoelstra pulled out his whiteboard and diagrammed a play. Duncan Robinson was to dump the ball off to Jaime Jaquez Jr. in the low post, run off a screen and settle into the open space of the defense. It was Jaquez’s job to thread the pass through the window and hit Robinson in time for the 3-pointer.
“I was like, ‘Oh shit, he’s running a play for me,’” Jaquez recalls months later.
Standing in the huddle, Jaquez recognized the play as one he used to run at UCLA, but he didn’t know Spoelstra had been prepared to use it. With Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo on the bench to start the fourth quarter, Spoelstra trusted Jaquez to make a play.
“That was one of the pleasant surprises about him was his advanced skill set. His footwork and fundamentals in the mid-post was really advanced,” Spoelstra says. “During summer league, we also found out that he had good vision and could pass.”
It was one possession in a regular-season game in October, but that Spoelstra trusted Jaquez, a rookie who was drafted 18th overall just four months earlier, speaks volumes about the surprising impact he has made on the reigning Eastern Conference champs and the old-school approach that has made him a fixture in the Heat’s battle-tested rotation.
The UCLA play has become a staple in the Heat’s playbook (Spoelstra, always hesitant to reveal anything that could be used against him, declined to reveal the official name of the play when asked). They ran it again out of a timeout against the Wizards earlier this month.
Beyond executing ATOs on his first try, Jaquez has passed every subsequent Heat test with flying colors and has emerged as a key rotation piece and the steal of the 2023 draft. Jaquez was named Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month for November and December and was one of the top rookies in the All-Star Weekend’s Rising Stars challenge. He also showed off a bit in the dunk contest.
But what has turned so many heads is not the flashy stuff. Rather, it’s Jaquez’s throwback style and old-school approach, which is what attracted the Heat to him in the first place. While fellow rookies Victor Wembanyama and Chet Holmgren garner headlines, Jaquez impresses subtly, in between the lines (except, of course, to the untrained eye).
Jaquez’s impact on a seasoned Finals team is surprising because of his age, yet not surprising at all when considering how everything about him seems to jibe with Heat Culture.
“Miami does it again,” Doc Rivers said recently. “It pissed me off. Like how do they keep getting these guys in the 20s? They keep doing it. … They target guys that fit their culture and the way they want to play.”
The Ringer’s own Bill Simmons may have summed it up best when he said, “I love him, and I hate that he’s on the Heat.”
A lot of rival front offices feel the same way.
Basketball players born in 2001 typically aren’t drawn to the low post—the realm where Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant made their names. As the game has moved beyond the 3-point line, this generation prefers to play on the perimeter. What makes Jaquez unique—even refreshing—is that he seems to be the lone avatar keeping the low-post game alive for Gen Z.
“When you’re in an empty gym, or you’re at the park by yourself, that’s the canvas and, you and the ball, you’re the paint brush. You’re just trying to make something beautiful happen,” Jaquez says. “It’s like dance, it’s like jazz music. It’s very cultural. So you make it look good, you feel good, you play good. So it all goes hand in hand.”
Growing up in the Southern California city of Camarillo, Jaquez naturally idolized Kobe. The jaw-jutting confidence and banner-raising made a fan of Jaquez, but he was also attracted to what Kobe created in the post. It doesn’t take long watching Jaquez to notice Kobe’s influence. Jaquez’s game is full of shoulder bumps, spins, and up-fakes, all delivered with the precision and patience that belie his age.
Jaquez was only 9 when Kobe won his final championship in 2010, but Mamba’s prime lives eternally thanks to the magic of YouTube. “I had trainers later in my career, but from the start, in my base, I would literally just try to watch YouTube for an hour, two hours, and then when I was done go to the park and try to do everything I just saw,” Jaquez says. “So that’s kind of how I learned.”
Jaime Jr.’s first coach was his dad, Jaime Sr., who was the coach at Adolfo Camarillo High School. By the time Junior was handling a basketball, Senior had grown frustrated by how his students didn’t know the fundamentals.
“You could see a lot of traveling, a lot of charges because they just didn’t have a basic jump stop,” Jaime Sr. says. “They weren’t even pivoting when they got into trouble. Things like that.”
The Ringer’s Top 100 Players in the NBA rankings are back! Check in throughout the 2024-25 season for updated analysis on the players who are making a splash.
So when Jaime Jr. was in fourth grade, his father started running him through footwork drills. Dribble the ball, jump stop at the free throw line, then pivot. Dribble up to half court and do it again, then repeat at the opposite free throw line, go to the baseline and come back.
“You’ve been taught that from a very young age,” Jaime Sr. says. “Then obviously, it helped us being huge Laker fans watching Kobe Bryant and his footwork.”
But it’s not as if Jaime Jr. was some sort of back-to-the-basket prodigy. Those who coached him as a teenager say it took him a while to slow down and play with the patience that seems to come so naturally now as an NBA rookie. Jaime Sr. used to quote legendary UCLA coach John Wooden in practice: “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”
“All three of my kids, they always go as hard as they can,” Jaime Sr. says. “They’re always going 100 percent. If you see them play, they give you everything, but sometimes that can translate into a turnover. So helping them slow down was key.”
Jaime Jr.’s AAU coach, Jason Crowe, noticed the same relentlessness.
“He played basketball like a middle linebacker,” Crowe says. “He was always in the picture. He was going to get there and try to have some effect on the offensive rebound. He was going to sprint the floor when we got the ball. He just had that competitive nature.”
Going beyond the Kobe highlights, Crowe started talking to Jaime Jr. about Larry Bird and how the Celtics legend dominated basketball games at his own pace even though he wasn’t the best athlete on the floor.
“Larry Bird was extremely smart with his footwork, positioning and understanding how to make the other team react to you and use their speed against them,” Crowe says.
This process of slowing down took years.
Jaime Jr. wasn’t highly recruited out of high school and joined UCLA as a bit player. Head coach Mick Cronin didn’t recruit him, taking over for the fired Steve Alford during Jaime Jr.’s freshman year, so Jaquez had to earn all of his touches. Defend, rebound, and run the floor, Cronin told him.
“It was just based off hustle,” Cronin says. “At that point in his career, he hadn’t slowed down yet on offense. He was just out there because he was rebounding and hustling like a maniac.”
Jaquez came off the bench and played only sparingly through the first couple of weeks until making it clear he was more than a hustle player during the Maui Invitational.
Jaquez went scoreless in 11 minutes in UCLA’s loss to BYU to start the tournament. At halftime of their second game, UCLA led Chaminade, a Division II school, by just six points when a lightly-goateed Jaquez stood up in the locker room. A coach’s son, Jaquez demanded that his teammates play with more pride. Cronin was on his way to the locker room when he heard the commotion from outside the locker room door.
“Before I could get to the locker room, he was going off on the team for our lack of effort,” Cronin says. “Before we went in, I turned to the staff, and I said, ‘We got one guy we can build a program with.’ He did it because he cares.”
Jaquez started the second half and finished the game with 17 points and 12 rebounds in 30 minutes to lead the Bruins to a comeback win. He never came off the bench again for the rest of his UCLA career.
Jaquez wasn’t the fastest, biggest, or strongest player in the Pac-12, but he was willing to learn how to master the in-between parts of the game. He looked at how someone like Jimmy Butler built himself into a bespoke star and sought to replicate the process.
Like Jaime Sr. and Crowe, Cronin and the UCLA staff instructed Jaime Jr. to slow down and allow his skill the time to blossom. Be quick, but don’t hurry.
“I won’t take credit for it because we teach a lot of kids that, but they don’t become as good as he did,” Cronin says. “He was able to absorb it and work so hard on his footwork that he just became a clinic with his shot fakes and his balance and his pivots.”
Staying in college for four years allowed Jaquez to hone his craft before making the jump to the NBA. By the time he was a senior, Cronin was running the offense through him in the low post. It was at that point that all the YouTube deep dives started to pay off. Jaquez had a catalog of moves from Kobe, Bird, and others to draw from.
“You start to realize how much under control you are when you’re on two feet and you’re in the post,” Jaquez says. “You just have so much more control over everything. You have your back to the basket, you’re able to look [at the court]. You have a guy on your back, he’s not gonna be able to see the ball and, if he does, it’s an easy spin. You just see the game so much easier, in my opinion, when you just take your time and get down in that post.”
As a senior, Jaquez helped lead UCLA to the Sweet 16, was named a second-team All-American, and emerged as a likely first-round pick. It was this path from role player to star player that stood out to Spoelstra when he was scouting Jaquez ahead of the draft.
“He had to earn everything,” Spoelstra says. “He started out just as an absolute role player and dominated that role of being Mr. Intangible. And all of those intangibles really impact winning.
“I thought it was really interesting when I was doing my deep dive on him for the draft, his coach said, ‘By the time he was a senior we built our program around him.’ That’s how they want to model the type of players they were recruiting—guys that know how to impact winning. That kind of terminology is stuff that we talk about all the time.”
Jaime Jaquez Jr. couldn’t contain his emotions on draft night. Wearing an all-beige suit, Jaquez put his head on the table and breathed a sigh of relief after Adam Silver announced that the Heat were selecting him with the 18th pick. Jaquez stood, hugged his mother, brother, sister, and father and walked up to the Barclays Center stage to put on his black Heat hat and hug the commissioner.
“I had a feeling,” Jaquez says. “It just lined up so perfectly.”
Jaquez was projected to go anywhere between 16 and the mid-20s, but he and his family desperately wanted to end up in Miami. When the Jazz were on the clock two picks before the Heat is when Jaquez started to sweat.
“I was a little nervous about Utah at 16,” he says. The Jazz took Keyonte George. Next up, the Lakers. “I didn’t think the Lakers were gonna draft me.” They didn’t, instead going with Jalen Hood-Schifino.
“They passed on him,” says Jaime Sr. “And the next thing you know, the ESPN cameras came over to us. And that was the sign that the Miami Heat were going to take us. Nobody had any indication whatsoever that the Miami Heat were going to take him. I remember talking to Pat Riley. He basically said, ‘You know, we don’t reveal to anybody what we’re doing.’ And that was true because our agent said that they had no idea. But Jaime did say he did have his best workout in Miami.”
Jaime Jr. recalls walking into the Heat’s arena in downtown Miami for his pre-draft workout over the summer.
“When I first got here, it felt like this is where I needed to be,” Jaquez says.
Spoelstra was overseas with Team USA, but the Heat’s G League coach, Kasib Powell, ran a group of prospects that included Jaquez, George, Nick Smith, and Brandin Podziemski through drills and had them play three-on-three games in front of the Heat’s front office triumvirate of Pat Riley, Andy Elisburg, and Adam Simon. Jaquez stood out.
“Of all my workouts, this one was one of my better ones,” Jaquez says.
The Warriors, picking at no. 19, were ready to take Jaquez had he gotten past the Heat, according to league sources. They took Podziemski. But Miami was locked into Jaquez throughout the draft process. Heat coaches and executives had called UCLA’s staff multiple times in the months leading up to the draft to ask about him. The Heat didn’t give any hints to the Jaquez family or anyone around him in fear of word leaking out and a team like the Warriors trading up to snag him before the Heat got a chance, but Cronin had long thought the Heat were on the scent.
“You could tell he was somebody that they really, really liked,” Cronin says. “They didn’t say it, but you can tell. I’ve been doing this long enough.”
One of the things that kept coming up in Miami’s research, beyond the footwork and post skills, was Jaquez’s work ethic and where he places basketball among his priorities.
As Jaquez went into his senior year as UCLA’s best player, the team gathered for a seminar about how to build their individual brands in the age of NIL. A UCLA staffer gave a presentation on how the players could market their personalities off the court and leverage their social media following for lucrative sponsorships. Jaquez dozed off.
“He just had no interest in that,” Cronin says. “He’s not gonna be on his phone doing TikTok dances to get attention. He’s gonna be in the gym getting extra shots or in the training room getting extra treatment.”
Jaquez has tweeted 17 times since draft night, and almost every one is a retweet of the Heat, UCLA, or Camarillo High School accounts. (His last tweet was on Dec. 25 of a hotels.com ad that he stars in alongside Butler. His only non-basketball tweet in that time is a retweet of Drake’s “8 a.m. in Charlotte” video from October.) His Instagram account is similar. This qualifies as the bare minimum for an NBA player with sponsorship obligations.
“He’s a coach’s dream,” Crowe says. “When we talk about the modern basketball player, you can’t coach everybody like you coach Jaime. You got to shorten the practice time right now for these guys. You gotta allow these guys so much time to be on their phones. You have to make adaptations for what it is and try to work with them and negotiate with these kids. With Jaime, you didn’t have to do none of that.”
Crowe likes to tell the story of the time he worked out Jaquez when he was going into 10th grade. Crowe tried to wrap up a long session after an hour and 45 minutes. “I wanted to get out of there,” Crowe says, “so I tried to ramp up the intensity.” Jaquez was still going full speed and begged Crowe for more work. “I was exhausted. I was trying to make him quit,” Crowe says. They went for another hour.
Crowe knew Cronin would appreciate Jaquez for the same reasons. During the pandemic, Jaquez retreated to UCLA’s practice gym in between classes to work on his game. “He would eat all three meals at Pauley Pavilion,” says Crowe, who would check on him from time to time.
“Some players, the pandemic was suited for them,” Crowe adds. “He would stay in the gym all day and really hone his skill at his best during the pandemic.”
There was Jaquez, creating his own bubble at UCLA while the Heat were making their Finals run in the Walt Disney World bubble.
Jaquez nearly declared for the draft after his junior year, but a pair of ankle injuries slowed his momentum. Most front offices considered him a second-round pick, so he went back for his senior year. But that meant he’d be 22 when he was drafted. That might bother rebuilding teams at the top of the draft, but not a Heat team in desperate need of cheap rotation players coming off another Finals run.
“They were looking for someone that would be ready to play,” says Chad Kammerer, who coached Jaime Sr. at Concordia College before joining the Heat’s scouting department. “We felt like we needed somebody that would do that, and Jaime checked a lot of those boxes.”
The Heat were confident they made the right pick as early as training camp. Coaches and teammates raved about Jaquez’s impact on winning and decorated their praise with lots of Heat Culture jargon.
“He just plays to win,” Butler said. “He makes all the right plays. He plays like a vet. I think that’s what that experience in the NCAA tournament gets you. He’s very, very smart. He knows where the ball has to go. He’s confident in his abilities and sticks to that, and he definitely plays to his strengths.”
Butler said that in October.
Since then, Jaquez has continued to impress. He has taken each new assignment and ran with it. A low-post play on opening night, more touches when Butler missed 11 games from December to January, anchoring the second unit when Herro got hurt, finding his place in Miami’s zone defense, and on and on …
“It seemed like every 10 days or two weeks that would be a natural progression to add more onto his plate,” Spoelstra said. “And then we had injuries so it made sense to give him more responsibilities and every time we did that he handled it very well—he earned it.”
In Miami, Jaquez has been able to add to his catalog by watching Butler up close. Jaquez considered Butler a role model while in college and now gets to study him like he studied Kobe highlights on YouTube.
“He knows exactly what he’s doing when he’s in the post,” Jaquez says of Butler. “Like, if there’s a double, he knows exactly how to manipulate it to get someone else open and he also knows how to take his one-on-one matchup as well as taking it and drawing two so he gets someone else an open shot.” Jaquez is happy to keep talking about this topic.
It’s all paying off. Jaquez’s post game is quickly gaining attention around the league, with his 1.09 points per post-up possession ranking ahead of All-Stars like Giannis Antetokunmpo and Luka Doncic. He also ranks near the top of Miami’s charts in hustle categories like deflections and contested shots. He’s third on the team in fourth-quarter minutes.
It’s no surprise that teammates like Butler often say Jaquez “plays like a vet.” It’s a refrain meant as a compliment, but one Jaquez bristles at a bit. He had been going fast for so long and only recently started to slow down that he’d like to enjoy being one of the top rookies of his class.
“So what happens when I am a vet, then what are you going to say?” Jaquez says. “I think I just play like a basketball player. Rookie, vet, whatever the hell you wanna call it. It’s just basketball at the end of the day.
“You’re either good, or you’re not.”
Wes Goldberg has written for the Miami Herald, Mercury News, Bleacher Report, Forbes, and more. You can hear him on the Locked on NBA and Locked on Heat podcasts.