We’re three games into the NBA season and the Miami HEAT are the only undefeated team left in the Eastern Conference, having hit the ground running with a dynamic, pass-heavy offense which has led to 72 uncontested three-point attempts, per SportVU tracking.

The most important part of that sentence is that we’re three games into the season.

It was perfectly reasonable to expect the HEAT to need some time to build an offense. They’ve shuffled up the point-guard rotation, expected-starter Josh McRoberts has been recovering from toe surgery and six players who have been given meaningful minutes weren’t even on the team last season. But with those new players being brought in for their particular set of skills, Erik Spoelstra has been able to slot everyone into a tweaked version of an existing system that is producing results closer to what you might expect from the period just before the All-Star Break.

Pick a ball-movement category, and Miami is near the top. Assists, hockey assists, free-throw assists, assist opportunities, points created by assists – so far, so good. Over 80 percent of Miami’s jumpers have been logged as uncontested by SportVU’s player tracking cameras, which is a category the HEAT led a season ago at 76.3 percent. A game ago in Phildadelphia, the HEAT had 33 assists for just the seventh time since the start of the 2008 season. Numbers mean very little at this point in the season, but it’s better to see a team where they want to be than not.

That said, a good start is nothing but a good start. Ball movement is a notoriously fickle beast, and trying to sustain it over the course of an entire season is like chasing the Golden Snitch in a hurricane. Teams move the ball well for weeks only to lose that offensive je ne sais quoi on the second night of a back-to-back and struggle to find it again.

Even the San Antonio Spurs, who have basically turned the concept of ball-movement into a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, go through periods of stagnation every season. It happens to every player and every team.

Fortunately for Miami, it seems to have a group of players built for the marathon. And it’s a group that recognizes the need for ball and body movement, lest efficiency goes the way of the dodo.

“We’re three games into this so it could quickly go the other way if guys start to feel comfortable and try to start to do it on their own,” Spoelstra said, “and that’s not the makeup of this group. That’s not at all a referendum on our personnel, it’s the power of working together that will make us more successful.

“The guys see it. They see how our team will have to play to be successful and to work the game.”

Just as you need players to step up and score each night, you need players to step up and ensure everything is operating as intended – often through sacrificing their own opportunities.

Against the Toronto Raptors, that player was Luol Deng.

In what will surely be a familiar theme this year, Deng – whether this means anything or not, he led the team in running 2.6 miles during the game – scored five of his eight baskets off the passes of teammates.

Deng cuts for himself…

Deng cuts for others, helping to create this Mario Chalmers three…

He creates off the dribble…

And simply keeps the ball moving…

For the evening, Deng scored seven of his eight baskets (five in the paint) off four dribbles, created 8 points via assists and another 6 points via hockey assists. They weren’t all spectacular plays, but a season’s worth of efficient offense isn’t built on spectacular plays. Every night, the HEAT will need players to make these plays – to create, with the ball and without it, in ways both small and large. Passing guarantees nothing in professional basketball. Passing with a plan and a purpose, as a habit, does.

There’s no guarantee that the HEAT can sustain what they’ve started, but for now they have something to sustain. Three games into the season, that’s a victory in itself.