With the game tied on the final possession of the first overtime last Tuesday against the Orlando Magic, it may have raised some eyebrows to see young Justise Winslow with the ball, isolated, at the top of the arc.

Winslow drove. He missed. Miami went on to lose in double overtime. Fans, understandably, were frustrated. Why give a 20-year old the ball with the game on the line?

A few days later, let’s look at that with a fresh, rested pair of eyes. Take out the question mark.

The Miami HEAT gave the ball to a 20-year old with the game on the line.

That’s not something most teams do. Not when they have a scoring, veteran point guard in Goran Dragic or Tyler Johnson setting the team record for points scored off the bench. Even young, developing, rebuilding teams often find a veteran player to run the show in those situations, just to make sure they at least get a shot off. Not every coach is going to trust an unproven scorer in that situation, regardless of whether that player had opened the season shooting 33.6 percent from the field before missing almost a month of play with a wrist injury. It’s tough enough trusting a 20-year old to pick up the groceries much less win a professional basketball game.

Except Erik Spoelstra has always trusted Justise Winslow.

Before Winslow’s career was even two weeks old last season, Spoelstra had him spending long shifts defending the opposing team’s best scorers. LeBron James? Sure. James Harden? Go for it. Kevin Durant? Have at it, young buck. Ready to play power forward? You bet you are. Ready to start at center in the playoffs? Mount up. When it came to winning time, Winslow was in the game.

That team had the veteran players to surround Winslow and keep the bulk of the playmaking off his plate. Most of those players left. So, Spoelstra dialed up the usage for Winslow and asked him to start running offense. The shooting, early in the season, just wasn’t ready. The playmaking was, as Winslow was regularly driving and kicking to open shooters. But he had a wrist injury to take care off. So he did.

“He really works at it,” Spoelstra said. “We have a lot of hard workers in that locker room. Justise Winlsow, for a 20 year old, is as committed than any of them, if not more. He gets in here extremely early every single day. Stays late.

“Even when he was out he was working on his finishes with his right [hand].”

What the end result, of both the aforementioned could-have-been final possession and the game itself, masked on Tuesday was the beginnings of greater diversity to Winslow’s offensive repertoire. Where there was once hesitation in one-on-one situations, or when he caught the ball in space, there were confident moves leading to finishes in the paint.

Winslow finished shooting just 6-of-17, but he had done enough to hint at something more. There was enough success that, when you pull back and look at the performance as a whole, you understand why Spoelstra called his number when he did. Young players need reps in high-leverage situations, but reps aren’t free.

Then Thursday happened.

If the Orlando game offered a glimpse of greater offensive diversity for Winslow, Thursday hit you smack in the face with it. The spin moves showed up again. The aggression in transition was there. The few jumpers he took looked smooth, with quick wrist action. In a team-high 42 minutes, Winslow finished with 23 points, 13 rebounds, 3 assists and 4 steals on 10-of-16 shooting.

Of the two other players to post that same line or better before being able to legally drink (since 1984), LeBron James is one of them.

What was most impressive about the outing wasn’t just that Winslow was hitting shots while doing his usual jack-of-all-trades thing; it was that he was executing a specific plan.

Down a number of big men in Julius Randle, Tarik Black and Larry Nance, Lakers coach Luke Walton elected to downsize and move Luol Deng to the power forward spot while starting rookie Brandon Ingram. This left the Lakers playing with a ton of shooters on the floor, hence their 38 attempts from deep, and it worked quite well for a while. Miami fell behind early to the Lakers hot shooting and it wasn’t until a string of Miami’s own threes in the fourth quarter that the HEAT really took control of things. In the meantime, it was Winslow taking advantage of the Lakers lack of size that kept Miami within striking distance.

There’s nothing complicated to it. Winslow and Dragic have been setting screens for each other all season and Thursday they used it to get D’Angelo Russell switched onto Winslow in position for a post-up.

“Coming in we knew they like to switch a lot,” Winslow said. “So we tried to get the lower half and make them switch. Really force the issue. A lot of the time I had a smaller guy on me, so I just took advantage of that.”

Big deal, you might think, he posted up a smaller guy. But this isn’t an area where he’s had much success to date. Winslow worked a little with Dwyane Wade and Joe Johnson on developing his post game last year, but it’s always been in the pupa stage. He could work on it for an hour after practice, but then you get that one possession in a game, you miss, and that’s it.

Finally, he got his possessions in a game, and it worked.

“You put in the work, you go out there you want to produce,” Winslow said. “You get confidence from putting the work in but going out there and displaying it gives you even more. I felt good out there just executing the things I’ve been working on.”

The post-ups even led to, Winslow admits, what were some of the first double teams he’s ever seen in the big leagues.

As Winslow develops on the block, it will also help the other aspects of his scoring toolkit. The same touch he uses on a hook shot in the post is just as important on a perimeter drive, just as more experience using his large frame to create shooting space can help anywhere on the floor, as it did here…

“I couldn’t shoot long distance [when he was hurt] so a lot of it was getting the touch right in the paint,” Winslow said.

Add in a nice drive here and better-looking jumpers there…

And you can begin to see the total package Spoelstra is seeing develop behind the scenes.

“What you saw was the competitive playmaking that he’s had but now you put the ball in his hands he can make some plays for your team offensively as well,” Spoelstra said.

It is, however, still very early. Remember how there were two players who had the same box-score line before 21 and one of them was LeBron? The other one is Anthony Randolph – once an exciting young player and now out of the league. A fun stat line guarantees little. Winslow can still get a little overzealous challenging multiple defenders in transition and not all the shots he hit on Thursday, including some of the floaters, are high-efficiency shots. The diet will have to continue to expand and improve.

But before you start picking apart a player’s diet, you have to let him learn how to cook. Erik Spoelstra is giving Winslow, or trusting him with, the opportunities to do so. With a performance like Thursday now in the books, that belief should be keeping the question marks at bay.