Part of what makes this iteration of the Miami HEAT one of the more fascinating teams of the preseason is that for as highly talented as this group of players is, it’s not immediately clear how they’re going to fit together.

It’s not necessarily a good or bad thing not to know how a team is going to play together. For now, it’s just a thing – one specific to a team of veterans ready to win. Were this a younger cast, most of the discussion during training camp would revolve around skill development. With a large percentage of the roster in the middle of or very near their prime years, we’re already quite familiar with the skills and abilities on hand.

This knowledge has led most observers to two questions. The first, concerning the defense, we won’t be able to properly address until the team gets on the floor and shows off it’s new scheme. The seconds deals with floor spacing.

The HEAT have some of the league’s best attacking guards, some of the best finishing big men and some of the most versatile players across all positions. What they don’t seem to have, going by historical volume and percentages, are many true-blue three-point shooters outside of recently-added Gerald Green – at least not the ones that defenders have to go out of their way to practically hug.

“There may not be the type of three-point shooting that will be competing in the three-point shooting contest,” Erik Spoelstra said. “But you don’t want to leave some of our guys open.”

While the league is certainly trending more and more toward emphasizing threes, there’s no steadfast rule that says you have to get a huge chunk of your offense from beyond the arc. The ultimate goal is to be efficient with every possession at your disposal, but the actual scoring can come from anywhere on the floor as long as you’re good enough from those spots.

The key in Miami is finding ways to make those spots as spacious as possible.

The first solution is to take your current shooters and find ways to make them better. Some of that comes from simple math, as Mario Chalmers is likely to experience a good chunk of positive regression from last season’s sub-30 percent mark, while also putting players in the best position possible. And Erik Spoelstra tends to have a good nose for finding player who can excel in the corners.

“I played with Ray Allen, I played with Jason Kapono, Mike Miller, James Jones,” Dwyane Wade said. “You would love to have those guys, but when you don’t have them, you got to have a guy like [Quentin Richardson and Dorell Wright] who can make threes.”

Both Richardson and Wright featured heavily as corner shooters on Spoelstra and Wade’s 2009-10 playoff team – shooting well above their career averages – just as Chalmers and Luol Deng (exceptional in the right corner) could this season.

“We’ll try to feed our guys as much confidence as possible and see if we can have some career high shooting levels,” Spoelstra said.

Even if those career-high levels don’t come – three-point shooting suffers from high degrees of variance no matter how many things you’re doing right – it’s almost more important for Miami to have highly willing, if not always highly effective, shooters. NBA players, after all, tend to defend the arc not just by how likely you are to make a shot, but by how often you are to take it.

“We have to make sure guys are shooting wide-open shots,” Bosh said. “I feel that they’re going to give us those shots. We have to anticipate those outside shots coming, especially those corner threes.

“The stigma of this team is like, ‘Oh, we don’t have any outside shooters, guys aren’t going to respect that’. So, kick it out. Shoot it. Then when we make a couple. Now we get the space that we need.”

It’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg predicament. Generally, the thinking goes that you need shooters giving you space in order to drive, but you also need to be driving in order to create open shots for shooters. Which comes first?

Court action is never so arbitrary.

In Charlotte two years ago, Josh McRoberts played on a team that similarly didn’t have many proven 40-percent threats from downtown. But under Steve Clifford that team still found plenty of space to help Al Jefferson have an exceptional season in the post. It wasn’t rocket science, according to McRoberts, how they did that.

“I just shot a lot of threes if I remember right,” McRoberts said. “Just to keep the defense honest. [Michael] Kidd-Gilchrist played in the post a bit more, where he could bully threes, and I would step out. We would invert our spacing a little bit.”

Sound familiar?

That Charlotte team may have two answers for us. Clifford would often have Kidd-Gilchrist, who has attempted just 18 threes in his entire career, along the baseline while McRoberts played at the top of the key to create paint space for Jefferson and Kemba Walker – just as Wade and Deng can use their exceptional cutting talents along the baseline while Bosh spaces from the top of the floor. Charlotte also ran a ton of Walker-McRoberts pick-and-rolls that started near the middle of the floor and had McRoberts flare out to the wing. With the other three players stationed on the opposite side of the court, Walker would either get space to drive, McRoberts would get an open three or Jefferson could flash across the paint for an entry pass.

Now imagine the same thing with Goran Dragic, Bosh and Hassan Whiteside.

“Spo puts a really good system in,” Dragic said. “Playing two-man game on the left side, and on the right you have three guys, with a guy coming over from the top, occupying the defense. Then on the left side you can do something.”

That’s a pretty basic floor alignment, but having an effective offense doesn’t require you to reinvent the wheel or, in this case, the pick-and-roll. Most teams in the league are all running constant variations on decades-old themes. What separates the good from the bad and the great from the good are the teams that execute.

When coaches talk about pace in the preseason, it’s easy to assume they’re talking about trying to up fast-break opportunities. While that’s often the case, pace also has a lot to do with the half-court. The quicker you get down the floor and into your spots, the quicker you can get into your offense. The quicker you get into your offense, the better chance you have at creating a good shot. Every team in the league shoots better in early and middle sections of the shot clock than late. Every team in the league scores more efficiently the less time the shooter has spent holding the ball.

“We want to play at a pace that gets us up the court quickly, that takes advantage of the strengths of this roster,” Spoelstra said. “How that translates necessarily to what other people think pace is, I don’t know. I don’t really care. I don’t necessarily know if that’s going to translate to fast-break points. I know we have to get the ball up the court, get to attack positions as quickly as we possibly can, get to some spacing and play out of the strengths of our offensive players.”

“You jog into your spots, you’re standing next to a teammate, that can destroy our offense,” Spoelstra later added. “So being very diligent about where you are on the basketball court in relation to your teammates is critical to this team.”

Also playing in the HEAT’s favor is the number of skilled players on the roster. Even though Wade has never been a prolific three-point shooter, ESPN’s Tom Haberstroh used SportVU data last season to show that Wade actually draws as much defensive attention as someone like Manu Ginobili simply because Wade is a threat to do so many things when he catches the ball.

The HEAT might not have all the shooters of Dragic’s 2013-14 Phoenix Suns team, but they have more than plenty playmaking threats.

“In Phoenix [that year], we had me and [Eric] Bledsoe as the only ballhandlers. Here, you have almost everybody,” Dragic says.

Are the HEAT going to be competing with the Warriors for threes made in a season? Probably not, but that’s not the only way to play. Between Spoelstra’s emphasis on pace and corner threes, the depth of talent and all the pressure Miami’s players are capable of putting on the rim, it’s more than reasonable to expect the HEAT to find a brand of spacing that works for them.

It might not look conventional. But in the modern NBA, conventional might not exist anymore.