After two of their most putrid offensive performances of the season, the Miami Heat face elimination on the road. Jimmy Butler shot 7 of 32 in Games 4 and 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals, and the duo of Kyle Lowry and Max Strus shot 1 of 28 combined. of the year Tyler Herro has not played due to a groin injury. Is the heat cooked?
I’ll get to that. First of all, I’d like to talk about Boston Celtics guard Derrick White. In Boston’s 93-80 victory Wednesday, White scored 14 points on 6 of 8 shots, with five assists, two steals and a block in 29 useful minutes. Al Horford said it was “amazing”. Jaylen Brown went with “fantastic” and “essential.” White, acquired on the Spurs exchange date in February, is an overqualified bench player, the type of guy who can swing a game or series.
White started on Monday to replace defensive player of the year Marcus Smart in Game 4, and coach Ime Udoka said the opportunity gave him a spark, which he moved to Game 5. White made transition plays for him and the others. He made plays as a roll man and as a base. He created easy shots, made a couple of hard shots and was on the court throughout Boston’s 24-2 run, which began at the end of the third quarter, took just over six minutes.
“He will have a weaker defender with him [Brown] i [Jayson Tatum] a kind of shed, “Udoka said.” I could take advantage of it. A scorer, a pilot, a capable starter and one of our best to make quick decisions, go down and make plays. And so we relied on him to do that, he took advantage of some double teams in Jayson and he’s really good at making the game behind him. We rely on him to put the ball in the middle, whether he has a float or to find guys on the perimeter. ”
The Heat also had an increase in reserve on Wednesday: Gabe Vincent scored 15 points on 6-of-12 shots, plus two assists and a steal in 23 minutes. Vincent made several jumps off the bargain, including a 2-yard pass over Smart that rescued a poor possession just before the Celtics made their big run.
The most significant difference between Vincent and White, however, points to Boston’s greater advantage over the Heat. White is an outstanding defender with the length to protect the wings, while Vincent is too small to handle people like Brown and Tatum. Three times in the third quarter of Game 5, one of the Celtics’ biggest, strongest wings isolated Vincent and knocked down a midfielder. In the fourth, Tatum took him to the post and reached the line.
When it was time for victory, Udoka reduced the Celtics’ turnover to seven players: the starters, the whites and the versatile Grant Williams. After playing 25 minutes in game 5, Payton Pritchard, who has the same defensive limitations as Vincent, only played six, all in the first half. This was possible because, for the first time in the series, all Boston players were available. When neither Pritchard nor Daniel Theis are on the ground, there is no obvious weak link to attack.
That’s not to say Miami scored 59.8 points for every 100 possessions midfield on Wednesday for Cleaning The Glass. That doesn’t mean the Celtics are unbeatable. But being free of weak links is what allows the best of the best defensive teams to close their opponents’ pet plays and make them work for every little advantage they can get. No easy money.
“I think the mental stress and tension we put on some teams with our defense has worked and it has taken us through the playoffs sometimes,” Udoka said. “You saw it in the Brooklyn series, the boys started to wear out. Game 7, it looked like [Giannis] Antetokounmpo slowed some. But having all these bodies to keep throwing at people wears them out physically and mentally, making it difficult. As long as we don’t give them easy baskets in transition. “
Through five games of the conference finals, the Heat have scored 102.3 points for every 100 possessions in minutes of junk-free time, by CTG, meaning Boston has made their offense worse than any team in the regular season. That figure drops to 84.2 percent at mid-track, who was also reportedly killed last season. Neither number is significantly different from the Milwaukee Bucks (102.1 percent, 81.9 percent) in seven games against the Celtics.
(Side note: for all the discussion about Kevin Durant’s offensive struggles during the sweep of the first round of Boston, the Brooklyn Nets, who scored 116.9 points per 100 possessions and 97.6 per cent on average track, they came out much better than Milwaukee and Miami.)
The Heat needed to play with a huge physique, force losses, push the ball and crash the glass to stay with Boston. It’s hard to live like this for a whole series. As soon as the Celtics stopped dribbling in traffic and coughing on Wednesday, they split up and put Miami on the edge.
So is the heat cooked? Surely it looked like it was when Boston, the most complete team in the NBA for months, played with its strengths and took advantage of Miami’s increasingly obvious weaknesses. The Celtics know exactly who they are, while the Heat are clearly still experimenting with lineups and trying to mess things up. Miami used a rotation of nine men Wednesday, even with Wounded Iron and the big Dewayne Dedmon out of the mix.
Of those nine players, Boston hunted down three – Vincent, Strus and Duncan Robinson – relentlessly. And he fooled almost everyone else behind the 3-point line. By giving the Heat a big dose of fall coverage, he was already disrespecting his pull-up shot, but hit them with another touchdown in the second half of Game 5, putting an old man in Butler, instead of Smart.
The Celtics wanted to “keep the shooters closed and score the others,” Udoka said. “Some of the guys who started an offense for them, either in Bam [Adebayo] or Butler too. And then helping [P.J.] Tucker some. And really, with that, Butler didn’t want to score. He was more of a screener and made plays in his pocket. And so he fell behind some of our switches and so we wanted to keep him very strong and play him like a big one and play with more traditional coverage. “
Miami has not come close to making Boston reconsider its downfall. The Heat attempted 45 triples on Wednesday, which would normally be a sign of a good offense, but the vast majority were disputed or caught by snipers alone. That they did 15.6 percent of them is not entirely due to the Celtics defense, but it’s certainly not just bad luck.
The Heat desperately needs something to change. Can Butler get the knee problem out and save the Miami season on Friday? Can Adebayo start harassing Robert Williams III? Lowry, Strus or even a returning Iron?
“I know how flammable ours are,” said Miami coach Erik Spoelstra, using the same word he used after losing the fourth game of the second round in Philadelphia. The Heat won the next two games in this series convincingly, but Boston is a different beast.