The Miami HEAT tied their First Round series with Boston, 1-1, Wednesday night, holding Boston to 40 points in the second half as they shot a franchise playoff best 23-of-43 from behind the arc. Here are the main reasons for how they did it.
BREAKING THE SCHEME
First, the shooting. Before we get to the adjustments Miami made we have to talk about the ones Boston didn’t. Nothing about this is normal, folks. Miami has as many playoff games (5) with 50 percent shooting from three in the past two seasons as two franchises, Houston and Utah, have in both regular seasons combined. The HEAT have four playoff games where they’ve made at least half their threes against Boston alone the past two seasons, and no other team has done it more than once against anyone in that stretch. Miami just became the fifth team, ever, to make 23 threes in a postseason game. This is wild, mythmaking, stranger-than-fiction on-court material
But as with anything there is a reason it happens, and there’s a reason it happens to Boston. You can dissect and analyze individual closeouts all you want, the Celtics are giving Miami’s role players those shots.
Last year, after having success with it in the previous Conference Finals, the Celtics went back to their strategic well and opted to sag off Caleb Martin to allow Robert Williams III roaming freedom on the backline of the defense. In the same spot a year later, Martin knew what scheme was coming his way.
“I just knew from the jump, I automatically triggered my brain to last year and the playoffs and knew exactly how they were going to guard me,” Martin said last May. “So I've been preparing myself the minute we beat the Knicks and we were preparing for Boston. I just automatically started trying to re-circuit my brain to the looks I would get and how guys are going to help off of me and preparing to be ready and confident and assertive.”
Martin proceeded to torch the coverage, shooting 49 percent from three across seven games, including 6-of-14 as Miami took the opening two matchups in Boston.
“One thing Caleb told me was, ‘This is not last year,’” Bam Adebayo said after Game 2 that year. “That really resonated with me because they did the same thing to him last year. I feel like he felt like it was disrespectful.”
As Boston cycled out personnel, bringing in Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, it was worth wondering whether they would adjust their treatment of Martin. During the regular season, nothing much changed. Boston had Porzingis and Horford roaming off Martin. Coming into this series, you could see the same thing coming once again. Miami couldn’t make the Celtics pay in Game 1, shooting 32 percent from three, but the looks were there – Boston was clearly willing to live with giving up some catches in space in order to bring in a third defender on Tyler Herro’s pick-and-rolls, as we discussed after Game 1.
“We’re all smart basketball players,” Martin said after Game 2. “We’re going to take the ones that are there. That’s part of their gameplan, too, they’re going to leave certain guys open. You play into the gameplan if you hesitate to shoot.”
It wasn’t just Martin, either. Boston was treating just about everyone who wasn’t Herro or Duncan Robinson the same. With the paint largely inaccessible, the perimeter looks were going to be there. Herro just had to see them, and guys had to make shots. Instead, they rode historic on that fury road.
“We knew a couple of us were going to get some open shots,” Haywood Highsmith said. “They was leaving us open and stuff, so we just let it fly.”
Just as in Game 1, the help came early on Herro as he cleared Adebayo’s handoffs and screens, Jaylen Brown even helping off the strong side corner to jam Herro up.
Celtics Game 2: Helping To Herro
“Just starting off, the guys that we wanted to shoot,” Jrue Holiday said. “Not that we let them, but it wasn’t like a get out to them and make them put it on the ground, it was kind of like protect the basket and get a good closeouts. They started knocking them in.”
The effect became even more pronounced as the night wore on. Watch the extreme degree to which Holiday, Porzingis and Derrick White help off Martin, Haywood Highsmith and Delon Wright in the fourth quarter.
Celtics Game 2: Shooters Left Open
“That’s how they’re scheming us so far,” Spoelstra said. “Packing the paint and putting an extra defender in front of Tyler or Jaime or whoever was attacking the paint. Those are the available shots you have to trust whether it’s a make or a miss.”
Of Herro’s career-high 14 assists, around nine of them, depending on your definition, were of this variety, making the help reads –third defenders coming his way, often one pass away – and finding his shooters.
Miami’s Shot Quality from three in Game 2 was an expected effective field-goal percentage of 53.4, which would have been Top 5 among all teams in the regular season. But if you take Robinson and Herro out of the equation, the two shooters who consistently saw attention at the arc, then everyone else had a Shot Quality of 55.7. Overall, Miami shot 61.5 percent on 26 three-point attempts Second Spectrum logged as uncontested or lightly contested. In Game 1 that number was 37.5 percent on 24 attempts. Both attempt totals are in the Top 6 for Miami this season, and the HEAT shot 40.6 percent on those shots, lightly contested or uncontested threes, all year, No. 4 in the league.
“Guys that we want shooting the ball was hitting them, we seemingly couldn’t get them to miss,” Jaylen Brown said.
There’s the math aspect to this, of course. Erik Spoelstra noted between games that they needed to be more competitive in that area. Allowing an offense like Boston’s to take so many more threes than you is a tough hill to sled. But, again, these are also the shots being presented. Miami’s shooters were more willing to shoot, but they were also shots they were being given.
“I just did not want to get annihilated in that department the way we did before,” Spoelstra said of the three-point disparity from Game 1.
Whether Boston adjusts remains to be seen given that they’ve applied a similar philosophy across multiple years against Miami. Counting on average-ish shooters to miss some shots isn’t bad science, so to speak, but science doesn’t always account for the magic that can happen in individual games. At some point the things that could theoretically happen are actually happening. And yet Boston also won three straight games after they went down 3-0 last year, with minimal adjustments. If changes are made, less help coming Herro’s way could open up the paint, and with just five makes in the restricted area in Game 2 Miami could probably use a little bit in the paint. Even without many paint points, however, Miami scored 112.8 points per 100 plays in the halfcourt, their fifth highest mark of the season.
On a related note, for years Boston has been the one team that appeared to have a bit more sway than others over opponent three-point percentages, consistently ranking Top 10 in an area that has in many ways been governed, to a degree, by luck and variance. Much of that was due to these same ideas, a willingness to leave certain shooters over others, but a team’s control over that could also be drawn into question. Still, whatever was real or myth, there’s a certain irony in the team that had found answers for one of the more unsolvable aspects of the game being on the wrong side of those same percentages in the games that matter most.
“There are certain guys on the floor that you would rather shoot than others, that’s any NBA game you play,” Tatum said. “But guys are in the NBA for a reason. Everybody is capable.”
Maybe the answer to all of this is Miami’s shooters get more comfortable when they know what shots are coming their way. Maybe this will never happen again. We can’t hand wave this type of performance anymore, though. Magic or not, it’s happening for very practical reasons and the HEAT have spent two years now doing everything possible to take advantage. It might be rare, special, incredibly unique, memorable and even funny, but it’s not a miracle if you’re the one that can make it happen.
THE RETURN OF THE SWITCH
The story of Miami’s defense this season, especially as it relates to Adebayo, is that as their personnel has changed Erik Spoelstra went away from his switch-heavy scheme and dedicated his team to drop coverage as their base pick-and-roll look. You can read about that story here, so we won’t dwell on it too much. One thing was worth remembering about those changes, though. For as much as Miami was diversifying their portfolio to better survive – they turned in yet another Top 5 defense despite 35 different starting lineups, largely due to Adebayo’s multi-coverage capabilities – they never buried their ol’ reliable.
“That’s probably our most comfortable scheme, but we always got that,” Martin said about switching pick-and-rolls earlier this year.
“For us, we think switching is normal,” Adebayo said.
After cycling through just about every coverage in their arsenal in Game 1, giving up 1.27 points per possession across 54 screens while their zone was lightly toasted by three point shooting, Spoelstra returned to the coverage his group once used more than any other team.
In Game 2 Miami switched 41 pick-and-rolls, allowing 0.72 points per possession. The occasion marked the most switches Miami had made in any game all season.
There was a clever wrinkle to the scheme. Rather than putting Adebayo on Porzingis as was the matchup for most of Game 1, Spoelstra went to the same well he did in Miami’s second Play-In Game against Chicago, asking Adebayo to go from defending DeMar DeRozan at tipoff one week to Jayson Tatum the next. Rather than aiming to switch Adebayo on to Tatum, Adebayo started possessions in position to switch off him - Adebayo wasn't logged as the closest defender on any of Tatum's 20 attempts - Nikola Jovic assigned to Porzingis ready to switch should Boston want to run one of their more common actions.
Why is that a good thing? Wouldn’t you want Adebayo on Tatum? Part of what made Boston’s Game 1 offense so dangerous is that Tatum did much of his work early, finding cross matches in transition or running to specific corners against the zone to post up a desirable matchup. That wasn’t going to happen with Adebayo on Tatum, who now had to come get the ball and spend time running a pick-and-roll to find a matchup, time that he couldn’t then use to get off the ball and go get position at the elbow or on the block. Miami would switch a different matchup onto Tatum, sure, but Tatum would then be left attacking from the top of the arc or the wings, much more manageable for a gap-shrinking HEAT scheme that prefers you playing breakthrough-and-conquer with multiple sets of eyes, arms and feet pre-loaded in your path.
Celtics Game 2: Bam On Tatum Switch
Of course the weakness of the switching scheme, and part of why Miami went away from it in the first place over the past year, is that Adebayo can’t literally be everywhere no matter how brilliant his defense is. Boston has plenty of ballhandlers, plenty of pick-and-roll combinations with which to find matchups they want. They found those matchups just fine, they just couldn’t capitalize on them, 32 Celtics isolations – four off their season high – producing just 0.83 points per, 11 Boston post-ups producing 0.80 points per as Herro held up while Porzingis missed shots over the top.
Celtics Game 2: Herro On Porzingis
The other tweak was that Miami brought less deliberate help in general. They still played the gaps as they should, but there were no early doubles coming as they did in Game 1, the defense bending but not tilting, rotating but not in rotation. That’s how you hold the Celtics, perhaps the most prolific shooting team of all time, to just 32 attempts from deep, just their fifth game all season with fewer than 33 tries.
“They switched and they didn’t double as much,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said.
You can’t switch without having some faith in your defenders. In Game 2, Miami went back to their old ways, in a good way, Adebayo was his dynamic self, and Spoelstra trusted everyone else to guard their yard as Boston’s offense stagnated. It worked, and now we see how Boston reacts.
LEFT ALONE, AGAIN
After Game 1 it was clear that Boston had every intention not to bring help on Bam Adebayo’s isolations and post-ups, and we noted that while it can be a bit of a trap to take all that single coverage and make it too much of your overall offense – something you could argue is exactly what happened to the Celtics tonight – there is a benefit to knowing Adebayo will have self-creation opportunities whenever you need them.
And you never need them more than in the fourth quarter, when the game is slow and percentages matter more than 48-minute efficiency.
Sure enough, in Game 2, Adebayo was more of a screener than a scorer – his 36 screens tied for sixth-most this season – sprinkling in post-ups but only using one isolation in the first quarter. But in the fourth, there was that option, Adebayo attacking Al Horford with no help coming as Boston attempted to stage a comeback.
Celtics Game 2: Bam 4th Q Island
“He was great when we needed to get it settled and went right to his spots and was able to get some relief points for us,” Spoelstra said.
And rather than going back to that same look over and over, Miami got out of it just as quickly, the damage done as Adebayo went back to screening for Herro and doing his damage on the pocket pass. Adebayo finished only 2-of-2 at the rim, one of those a lob from Herro, but 7-of-10 in the upper paint and mid-range combined. Through two games, Adebayo has produced 1.42 points-per across 12 post-ups.
“Any time the game gets crazy and they go on a run, we find the ball in Bam’s hands,” Herro said. “He’s just our settle guy. We know he’s going to make the right play or find a hole in the defense to find a shot for himself.”
Any time the game gets crazy and they go on a run, we find the ball in Bam’s hands. He’s just our settle guy. We know he’s going to make the right play or find a hole in the defense to find a shot for himself.
Adebayo (probably) won’t keep shooting this well on tough turnarounds and fadeaways, but the value is in knowing that until Boston adjusts their coverage those shots are always there when Miami needs them most.
TIDBITS
-The HEAT only played three possessions of zone, with Love playing just six total minutes as Jovic played the backup five in the second half.
-Boston wound up scoring 100 points per 100 halfcourt plays, per cleaningtheglass.com, a good number for most teams but well below their own rate of 106.5 during the regular season.
-Bringing it back to math again, Miami and Boston each made 37 field goals, with Boston attempting five more. But the HEAT made 11 more threes, 11 extra points over the two pointers the Celtics made, and won by 10.
-Through two games now, Miami has produced 1.21 points per pick-and-roll and 1.19 points per handoff. Both numbers would have led the league by a significant margin.