As the opening bell rung on the Miami HEAT’s season in Orlando Wednesday night, Josh Richardson had the opportunity every player wants. On the road. Down one. Four seconds left. It’s on you.

He didn’t even get a shot off.

The eventual loss would be remembered for Richardson fumbling a catch and stepping out of bounds, but Game 1 was just that. Far more important to Miami’s season outlook, and future, than a single game was the mere fact that it was Richardson with the ball in his hands. Win or lose, he had the trust. In losing, Richardson’s teammates offered a reminder.

“I love the guys for staying in my ear to stay aggressive, especially after last game,” Richardson said Thursday night.

Aggressive he was. Having the ball in his hands at the end of the game was one thing, but that wasn’t uncommon last year. What had never happened before was Richardson taking 21 shots in a game which he did both Wednesday and Thursday night, when he scored 28 in Washington. After expanding his on-ball role last year, creating for himself more than ever and developing a signature scoop shot at the rim, the next logical leap for Richardson – for any player ready to take the next step – was going to have to be a jump in usage.

One year ago, Richardson used 17.5 percent of Miami’s offense. That was eighth on the team. Through two games, Richardson has been responsible for a team-leading 25.5 percent of Miami’s possessions while on court, ahead of All-Stars in Dwyane Wade and Goran Dragić.

“He’s starting to realize what he’s capable of doing on a basketball court,” Erik Spoelstra said.

Does that mean he’s taking The Leap? It’s far, far too early to tell. The Leap is about more than taking the most shots, it’s about taking the most shots and also doing it efficiently when teams know you’re coming. Richardson’s true-shooting percentage has dropped from 55.1 to 52.3 – a number that’s nigh meaningless this early, as far as predictive value – and there’s has been a noticeable Good Angel-Bad Angel predicament happening with regards to shot selection. All of that is normal. For now we know that The Leap could be, and that, perhaps most importantly, Richardson hasn’t allowed a growing role to stop his game from doing the same.

A typical Richardson pick-and-roll a year ago was a fairly formulaic affair. He would run his man off the screen, take a hard dribble at the defending big and either dart into the lane to finish with his length or step into a mid-range shot. He became a little more daring with his passing as the year went on, which has carried over, but for the most part Richardson’s actions were very ‘If X, then Y’.

One offseason later, he’s taking shots like this.

This is entirely on purpose, and by design.

In Richardson’s 52 game rookie debut, he took four three-pointers off the dribble. Total. In 80 games last year he took 20, less than half an attempt per game.

Two games into the 2018-19 season, Richardson has taken 12 such shots, hitting four. That’s six deep pull-up jimbos a night. Thy name is volume.

“That’s the way the league is going. More threes. I was usually a pull-up mid-range guy before. I had to figure out how to change that,” Richardson said.

The league’s three-point revolution has been well-chronicled, but there has been a subset of that sea change that has occurred only in the past five years or so. While teams spent much of the 2000’s learning the value of and prioritizing the corner three, growth in that shot slowly tapered off in the next decade as teams tuned their defenses to preventing the game’s second-most valuable opportunity (after dunks). Five years ago, with more and more teams starting to play smaller and smaller, you couldn’t have a discussion about defense without addressing how a team defended the corners. Teams kept hunting for threes, and on the wings and up top the attempts continued to rise, and the worldwide goal was preventing them.

Defenses stuck to shooters and in pick-and-roll bigs sunk low into the paint to encourage the worst shot: the mid-range jumper. Please, teams said, take this shot. We beseech you.

The natural reaction? Steph Curry. If the defender was going to sag, why dribble in? Over the last five years league pull-up three attempts have risen 69 percent, per tracking data, as overall attempts from deep have gone up just 30.5 percent (still a lot). With Curry came Damian Lillard and Kemba Walker and Kyrie Irving and James Harden. The dribble three has become one of the most valuable and dangerous shots in the league, and it’s even led to defenses switching more often so as not to allow that shooting cushion.

“Coach said I was going to start looking for that every time down. Threes are better than twos,” Richardson said.

‘Have to be able to shoot those’, Richardson remembers hearing from Spoelstra. ‘Have to be able to knock those down.’

While Spoelstra is a major believer in analytics, league trends weren’t the only reason he was in Richardson’s ear about stretching out his game. The pull-up three is an elite skill and not everyone can add it to their repertoire. In Richardson, Spoelstra saw a worthy candidate.

“He has range for days,” Spoelstra says. “It’s an easy shot. Not everybody is a good pull-up three point shooter, but by the very nature of his habits that’s in his game. He just needed to have the confidence to be able to step it out, literally, less than two feet. But that was his game in college as a pull-up shooter. It’s an easy transition for a player to develop that. It’s harder for a player that’s never been a pull-up jump-shooter to be able to be able to develop [the pull-up three].”

Richardson couldn’t have done this three years ago, however, says Spoelstra. There used to be a big dip in Richardson’s shot that he had to smooth out before his mechanics would get to the quick, efficient place they are today. His handle, too, had to tighten up before he could embark upon step-back crossovers into long jumpers, so Richardson proposed his own plan for ballhandling improvement to Spoelstra at the end of the last season. Spoelstra gave the go-ahead and Richardson proceeded into the laboratory with assistant coach Chriss Quinn.

“He and Coach Quinn spend so much time together,” Spoelstra said. “Half the stuff I have no idea what they work on. But I like it.”

None of it, none of the thousands of shots or dribbling drills or workouts, matter at the end of the day if the player isn’t confident. A play like Richardson’s slip-up in Orlando could derail an entire summer’s worth of work in a player’s mind. But with a head coach preaching assertiveness and growth, that didn’t happen. A career-high in attempts was followed by the same career-high in attempts.

His coaches and teammates already believe. They want to make sure Richardson does, too.