Your browser does not support iframes.
Turnovers are the scourge of any coaching staff. Sixty percent of the time, a game with turnovers reaching the mid-20s will produce a coach saying his team has to take care of the ball better, every time.
Thats what was coming from Erik Spoelstra and the rest of the Miami HEAT when the team returned from a five-game road trip two weeks ago with three 20-plus turnover games under its belt, and another, against the Denver Nuggets, where giving their opponent free possessions led to the game getting out of hand in the second half.
Naturally, there is randomness to turnovers. As many times as a player makes a bad mistake by sailing a pass over their targets head out of bounds or telegraphing a pass so obviously the defense jumps the lane and gets a clean catch, there are more situations where the ball is tipped or a dribble is momentarily lost, situations where the ball could bounce any which way. As many coaches call them, 50-50 balls.
Over the course of the season, that randomness also plays into certain situations. Teams will turn the ball over more on back-to-backs on the road, with their giveaways often fluctuating as the quality, and aggressiveness, of the defenses they face changes.
But there is also a constant in a seasons worth of chaos. After a stretch containing one egregious turnover after another, coaches arent just going to pay lip service to taking care of the ball. Theyll watch film with their team and attempt to clean up every mistake possible.
Some teams self-correct better than others those teams wind up with better per-game numbers but even squads such as the Boston Celtics, ones that tolerate some turnovers at the behest of their aggressive pass-and-cut offense, will try to tidy up the offense whenever practice time allows.
In two of those three losses we had on the West Coast we had way too many turnovers, Chris Bosh said. And even against Denver Im not saying we would have won if we had taken care of the ball but it probably would have been a different game.
We wanted to specifically focus on a few areas of our game, Spoelstra said. One of them was to become more efficient offensively. To get our turnovers down.
In the nine games since leaving the Pacific time zone, after a 109-95 victory over the New Orleans Hornets, this is how the HEAT have done:
During the trip, Miami averaged 20 turnovers. Since then, just 14.
The teams assist-to-turnover ratio, 1.02 during the road trip, has risen to 1.4.
And the most accurate metric, the percentage of possessions which result in the team turning the ball over, has sunk to 15.1 percent from 19.3.
You see better concentration from our players, with that, Spoelstra said.
Were doing a much better job of taking care of the basketball, Bosh said.
As with the Celtics example, turnovers wont always be a bad thing for Miami. A wayward lob here and an intercepted interior pass to a cutter there are acceptable as long as they signify the team aggressively pursuing efficient shots. But theres a balance to strike, and on the road trip that balance was out of whack.
Now, entering a stretch of eight road games in their next 13 contests, the HEAT are on much better footing, even if a little randomness will undoubtedly cause a rise in some of the aforementioned turnover metrics.
invisionApi.writeCommentsByGuid('https://www.nba.com/heat/news/taking_care_the_ball_120131.html');