If you’ve been paying close attention to the Miami HEAT this season, you know that the blitz is over.
What was once one of the most unique defensive systems in the league, the aggressive, chaotic, help-heavy Omega Swarm that helped take Miami to four straight NBA Finals, is no more. It’s been tweaked into a different, more conservative form – one that more closely resembles the schemes the team used to go up against in the playoffs every year.
The reasons for the altered philosophy are complicated, but they stem from the league’s shift towards spacing and shooting – a sea change Miami is partially responsible for – and the previous system’s reliance on help rotations. The more you help, the more vulnerable you are to getting beat by the pass. And the better the floor is spaced, the more you’re going to have to help.
Yet for all the prevailing trends in basketball today, Hassan Whiteside was just as crucial. If you have one of the best shot-blocking big men in the league, do you really want him chasing guards around 30 feet from the rim?
The answer, of course, was no. And the results so far have been very promising with Miami establishing a Top-5 defense. But Sunday afternoon against the Portland Trail Blazers, Erik Spoelstra seemed to test his own hypothesis. If needed, could Whiteside play the sort of defense the team had moved away from?
Sort of.
Miami didn’t go back to blitzing against Portland’s guard duo of Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. They rarely, if ever, have done so this season. But they switched the depth of their coverage in pick-and-roll situations for both Bosh and Whiteside, playing further up on the three-point line rather than sitting back at the edge of the paint. Just a few steps of difference that may seem incredibly minor, but in the insular world of NBA defense just a few steps in any direction can mean everything and anything.
“A drastic difference is five feet,” Bosh said.
In return, the Bosh-Whiteside duo came out a +12 in about 20 minutes on the court as they held Portland to an average offensive rating on a night when the Blazers didn’t seem capable of missing.
“Hassan was terrific in the second half defensively,” Spoelstra said. “That’s why I just played him the entire second half. He was making so many plays. A lot of them that you saw, the blocks, the rebounds, but a lot that you probably wouldn’t see -- the pick-and-roll coverages against dynamic three-point shooters.
“He was really covering a lot of ground. Probably, arguably, as much ground as he’s covered in a game defensively was tonight.”
The concern with Lillard and McCollum is that, as you’ve seen to an extreme degree with Stephen Curry, they can make a pull-up jumper an efficient shot if you give them space. Miami’s base defense now wants to force exactly those shots, but they have to be contested shots. The HEAT were getting Toronto’s DeMar DeRozan, who favors the mid-range, to shoot off the dribble on Friday, but the spacing wasn’t right and he was easing into comfortable looks.
“The game before, even after the loss, we talked about being up on the screen a little bit,” Bosh said. After DeRozan burned us a little bit on a bunch of pullups, it was like OK, today with Lillard and McCollum you have to take that away. It’s going to be long threes, and they’re going to make it in your face.”
Stay too far back, and this can happen.
The adjustment for Bosh is automatic. He’s played every type of coverage against every type of player in the league, and he can dial up different looks without instruction or assistance from the sideline. Whiteside has mostly stayed back, zoning pick-and-rolls from the middle of the floor.
But behind the scenes, Bosh has been working with Whiteside on new variations.
“It’s been a work in progress,” Bosh said. “It wasn’t just today. It’s kind of been going for a long time. Just talking about it, talking about it. Just trying to help him out.”
So while Whiteside started the day off playing his usual style of defense, giving up a jumper to McCollum here or a three to Lillard there, as the game wore on he played closer and closer to the ball. Going from this…
To this…
“He was like, ‘All you got to do is tell me to be up and I’ll be up,’” Bosh said.
“Last game I didn’t step up enough but this time, I told them I could do it,” Whiteside said. “Just let me know if you want me to stay up. I can do that.”
“I was like, ‘Alright, cool. Be up,’” Bosh said.
Up for Whiteside isn’t quite the same as it is for Bosh, as Bosh puts his feet on the line and shows on the ball until his guard fights over the screen and recovers to the ball.
Up for Whiteside is actually a little more complicated. Bosh has a marker in the line and a target in the ball which offers him certain parameters to his positioning. Whiteside is really playing more in the middle, in a grayer area. He has to stay close enough to the ball to deter or contest the shot, but far enough back to still contain penetration and keep the action out of the paint. Manageable when you’re only 15 feet out, but when you’re closer to 20 feet away the paint has that much longer to be empty.
Fortunately, for now and the future, Whiteside balanced that positioning well as he helped force turnovers and put a hand in the face of shooters all while sealing off the paint.
“I just stayed up,” Whiteside said. “Damian Lillard is a phenomenal player, he’s an All-Star. I tried to contest a lot of his and McCollum’s three-point shots and try to force them to make tough threes.”
“I give credit to the big guy,” Bosh said. “He did a great job. We asked him to be up and that’s how he was able to play. Getting up, being aggressive, guarding the screen-and-roll and taking that pass away and then relying on the back-side defense.”
If you want to know why Whiteside played all but 29 seconds in the fourth quarter against Portland, there’s your answer. All the dunks and oops and putbacks in the world are great, but defense gets you on the court. Portland was still running mostly traditional frontcourts down the stretch, and things will be very different against the spacing-heavy Detroit Pistons on Tuesday, but every new coverage Whiteside shows, and keeps showing, he can execute is another option for Spoelstra when he needs it.
“[Teams are] spreading the floor, but now we can see what he can do,” Bosh said. “He’s athletic and he has long arms. He’s a good basketball player. Good defensively everywhere on the court. Nowadays, with the whole spread thing, if you’re a big and you can guard a screen-and-roll, you can play.”
As Whiteside has become quite familiar with, basketball is just different today than it was even five, much less twenty, years ago.
“It’s just something I’m going to have to deal with,” Whiteside said. “It’s not like the old days where bigs can just stay in the paint and block a ton of shots.”
Unless the rules of the game change, those old days aren’t coming back. It’s a new era, and on Sunday Whiteside took a step towards showing how a big man of his ilk can continue to be effective in it.