Remember the Omega Swarm?
Remember watching Miami’s big men stretch out and hound opposing ballhandlers into a full retreat? Remember their guards attacking passing lanes while making full-speed rotations back and forth across the court? With the league trending towards the conservative, mathematically sound hybrid-zone schemes of Tom Thibodeau in the early 2010’s, the HEAT were a chaotic, hyper-aggressive ultralight beam standing out of the crowd.
But time, and the league’s offensive sophistication, seemed to pass that style by.
Now, at the onset of a First Round playoff series with the Charlotte Hornets, the HEAT are going the Full Thibodeau as their opponent struggled to execute shades of Miami’s old scheme.
There’s two ways of looking at all the threes the Charlotte Hornets take. One is that the only team that has a higher percentage of its offense come from threes is the Golden State Warriors. That’s remarkable. But even with Erik Spoelstra and Dwyane Wade calling the Hornets ‘Golden State East’ lately, something has to separate those two teams, one that finished the season with a historically elite offense, the other with a very good one.
The other way of looking at it, then, is that Charlotte depends on those threes. Based on the way Miami defended in a commanding series-opening victory, they’ve decided to take away that which Charlotte requires to thrive. In Game 1, the Hornets team that takes almost 30 threes a game took just 17.
The tactics were clear from early on. Just look at where Joe Johnson is defending Nicolas Batum as a pick-and-roll triggers in the middle of the floor.
“[I’m] just trying to stay out there on the three,” Johnson said. “We know that they’re a three-point shooting team. We didn’t want to give up too many. We made a conscious effort to really stay home with the shooters.”
And later on in the opening period, watch how closely Miami is playing Charlotte’s three shooters while Batum uses a screen.
“We knew the type of team they were, shooting the ball,” Justise Winslow said. “In the playoffs, you just try to take away teams’ strengths. We noticed that and we just tried to do our best to get them off the line.”
It’s worth watching that last sequence again. With Miami so tight on the shooters, particularly in the corners, notice how empty the paint is? This is classic Thibodeau stuff, almost exactly what the former Chicago Bulls coach used to do to Miami in order to neutralize the drive-and-kick game of LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. Thibodeau would trust his guards not to get hung up on screens and heaps loads of responsibility on his big men. For Chicago that was most often Joakim Noah. For Miami, that’s Hassan Whiteside.
Like Noah before him, Whiteside’s paint presence is what will allow Miami to continue defending in this way. Sure, both Batum and Walker are capable of pulling up off the dribble in that little pocket created by Charlotte’s screens, but in Game 1 Miami had a stranglehold on assisted threes.
“We are not going to get the usual number of three-point shots because of the way they play defense,” Clifford said.
If the majority of the Hornets’ threes look like this (as were six of their first 15 before the benches were emptied)…
Then the HEAT, with Whiteside acting the part of enabler, are probably doing something right.
“We play a 2-on-2 defense,” Whiteside said. “It’s not as traditional as having a chuck guy (help in the paint). It makes it tough on a center because it’s always 2-on-1’s. I just try to balance that out and protect the rim. I’m normally 2-on-1 at the rim all night.”
It’s not all on Whiteside, of course. If he were truly being left alone to defend 2-on-1’s in the middle of the floor all game, it would be a tough night as it would be for any other player. It’s on Miami’s guards to fight through screens and shrink the pocket as quickly as possible. That’s a given with a standout defender like Winslow, who hounded Batum most of the night, but when everyone is executing as Goran Dragic does here.
Then you know things are going according to plan.
“They were amazing,” Whiteside said of the guards. “Just getting through the screens. They make my job so much easier. When they bust through the screen, it’s great.”
This is where we have to remind you that Charlotte is really good, and they’ll make adjustments. For two and a half quarters after Miami took a big lead in the first quarter, and before a finally flurry finished off the night, it was a fairly even two-point game. During those 30 minutes, Charlotte managed to make half their shots – while getting to the free-throw line a ton – and for the game Miami still gave up 106.7 points per 100 possessions. So, Charlotte actually came in slightly above its season average (105.1) in terms of offensive efficiency. Even with Miami executing well, the Hornets can score.
They just had to score without catch-and-shoot threes.
“We put them on the free-throw line a bunch of times,” Dragic said. “But at least they didn’t shoot 30 threes.”
As for the other end of the floor, Miami posted an Offensive Rating of 142.6 that was not only their season-high but also the most efficient game in franchise history.
That’s both great and something to keep an eye on. It’s great because all that scoring earned Miami a valuable win, but it’s also worth pointing out that Miami probably won’t have another game with such historically awesome offense. In part due to natural regression on contested jumpers, but also because the Hornets might change things up in terms of their own defense.
“We played defensively a terrible game,” Clifford said. “We were disorganized and not intense.”
Just as Miami was playing tight on shooters from the get-go, Charlotte showed an early willingness to have Cody Zeller trap and blitz the ballhandler in pick-and-rolls.
And early on, it was clear that Whiteside, even when he wasn’t directly touching the ball, was going to be a target as long as Charlotte played coverage that way.
Because once he did touch the ball, with the Hornets’ bigs playing higher up the floor, there wasn’t going to be much resistance between Whiteside and the rim.
Even with Al Jefferson in, the Hornets often showed onto the ball in the same manner Miami used to defend screens years ago. And just as athletic rim-rollers like Kevin Garnett used to give them nightmares when the backline help defenders weren’t on point, Whiteside was given opportunity after opportunity to detonate the rim -- which translated into 56 points in the paint.
“When he sets those screens and rolls hard, he’s really tough to stop,” Dragic said. “I would say there’s no defense. If the big guy doesn’t step up it’s a layup for me or a shot. If they stop me then it’s a lob to Hassan.”
Miami may not be winning with the same sort of defense that carried them to four-straight NBA Finals, but this is as positive a start to the postseason as they could have hoped for.
In the playoffs, however, what worked one game doesn’t always work the next. Now it’s Charlotte’s turn to adjust. If their adjustments work out in Game 2, then around and around we’ll go.