For almost this entire postseason run, the moments have belonged to Miami.
Whether it was Jimmy Butler sticking jumpers in Jrue Holiday’s face or Caleb Martin torturing the Boston crowd with forceful forays into the paint, the HEAT have been the steady hands forcing their opponents to play on tilt. They found all of your pressure points, stuck their thumbs in them and pushed, wearing on you in ways you didn’t even know you could be worn until your knees buckled and your identity crumbled into the grass as your season drifted off into oblivion.
Derrick White had his moment, sure, one that almost sunk the season, but even that game had gone according to Miami’s blueprint, another fourth-quarter comeback almost completed. The HEAT’s general formula had produced two different flavors, either they rode lights-out shooting to an early eight-point lead that they could use to stiff-arm their way to the finish, or they would come from behind – sometimes also behind hot shooting, but always behind their defense – with a late-game haymaker. The moments were there for both pathways in Games 3 and 4, an 8-0 run from Caleb Martin pushing Miami out front early in the former, an 8-0 run with Nikola Jokic on the bench with five fouls late in the latter, and each time Jamal Murray snatched those moments away with the same crowd-silencing threes that Martin and Butler and Gabe Vincent had just buried Boston and Milwaukee with.
There’s a technical challenge ahead of Miami, down 3-1 with their season on the line in Denver, against a team that has had counters for nearly everything they try. But it’s in those moments where the Nuggets have truly spelled out the difference between this series and those that came before.
The argument was there, quite easily based on regular season resumés, that Milwaukee and Boston were the greater teams – teams that Miami then made into something less than they had been. The HEAT may not have been dominant, but they took the dominance right out of their opponent’s chest, wave after wave of clear eyes and full hearts crashing onto the rocks, an answer always in sight. Denver has been their peer in that regard, just as steady, just as precise, just as tough, taking every faulty step in stride as they march on forward.
And when the hearts and minds are equal, it comes back to the game. Who can get to who, and how often? Through most of these four games, it’s been the Nuggets doing the gettin’, Fairly and squarely, plus-36 in a glacially paced series begetting a plus-9.3 Net Rating.
Miami still has their chance to make history, to become the second team to come back from 3-1 in the NBA Finals after the Cleveland Cavaliers did it in 2016 behind three incredible performances from LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. One last moment to be who they’ve been, floor spaced, lanes shrunk, pressed up and zoned in. They have the weight of basketball history working against them, all of what should happen and what has happened and what everyone thinks is going to happen. Going down like this, on this stage, is a story that ends the same for most teams. The names and logos may change. The NBA script rarely deviates from canon.
But since when has this group cared about any of that? They have their own story to tell, and they only need to tell it once.
THE SOUTH PLATTE TWO-STEP
For everything the HEAT have tried, Denver has had an answer – every bit of push-and-pull stemming from how Miami approaches the pick-and-roll combination of Murray and Nikola Jokic, that which balances all things.
On paper, that combination has been very good, if not as great as it often is, producing 1.05 points per screen across 99 actions per Second Spectrum. That number also doesn’t include the handoffs between the two, which have produced 1.18 points-per across 39 actions – 25 of which have come in the last two games.
In some ways, the Nuggets have exposed the one primary shortcoming of Miami defense this season – they have the best switch defender in the league in Bam Adebayo but not the personnel to switch anything they want at any time. That’s why they’ve had to dip their toes deeper into drop coverage and zone waters, finding ways to move Adebayo around and maximize his skillset without always using his most maximized skill. There have been times where Adebayo has been able to jump out to Murray and induce a stagnant isolation – Murray has hit a couple of tough shots, but those have generally been Miami’s best defensive possessions in this series – but more often than not the result of any switch is Jokic at the nail or in the post with a smaller defender bracing himself to absorb power dribbles. Those situations have been, for the most part, doom. When anyone other than Adebayo or Cody Zeller has defended a Jokic post-up, Denver has produced 1.56 points for every possession it happens in.
That's the reality of Jokic. Most teams struggle when he gets a catch against a switch. The result is the same, though, in that the HEAT have had to look towards other options.
Through two games, the drop coverage was working reasonably well, Murray and Jokic producing just 0.81 points-per when Adebayo played a bit back of the initial screen as Murray found himself with predictable pull-up looks. Then Murray started out Game 3 hot as Denver worked out their spacing. Now the ball was getting downhill, or Jokic was getting free catches at the free-throw line as Murray, taking wide angles, forced Adebayo to commit to the ball.
Finals Game 5 Primer: Murray vs. Drop
“The first half, they really got to that two-man action quite a bit,” Spoelstra said the day after Game 3. “They were getting a lot of traction, so they didn't need to go to any other part of their playbook.”
So Spoelstra did what he does when an opposing guard starts dialing into conductor mode a little too frequently and tried to take the conductor out of the game. In the two games in Denver, Miami blitzed Murray just twice. Over the two in Florida, they did it 13 times. A few times it caught Murray off guard and led to a turnover. But again Murray found an answer, accepting the pressure, and again the result was Jokic finding himself with a free catch, a play to make or a space to draw a defender.
Finals Game 5 Primer: Murray vs. Two
The theme is consistent. If Adebayo concedes too much ground, Murray has a comfortable look – and Miami is not a team that enjoy giving up comfortable look especially not to players who are more than happy to work the mid-range. If Adebayo tries to contain Murray, however the coverage is logged in the tracking data, Murray bursts off the screen and stretches Adebayo out. Even if Murray isn’t outright pushed back by a trap, the result is consistently a Jokic catch against either a closeout or a switch.
“If you put two on the ball, Jamal, and he finds Nikola in the pocket, something good is usually going to happen,” Denver coach Michael Malone said.
Some of that you have to live with. Just because Denver has two players who can do everything doesn’t mean there is suddenly a defensive coverage that can take away everything. You always have to give up something, and the Erik Spoelstra has done well moving his pieces around, being reactive to the moment, and trying to give up something different every time – to force Murray and Jokic to keep making reads, to keep processing the information on the floor. Miami’s best defense hasn’t been any one thing, it’s been cycling through all of their options, including both Butler and Martin on Murray.
“I think we saw everything,” Jokic said after Game 3. “I'm always saying that's why they're so great. They have so many defenses, and they're really good in every defense that they're putting out there.”
That Murray and Jokic have consistently found answers as quickly as they have, within individual quarters rather than requiring film and days off in between games, is why they’re as good as they are.
And yet in Game 4 those two shot a combined 13-of-36 for 38 points, hardly the beacon of efficiency that was their Game 3, 66 points on 43 shots. You can argue the quality of looks they were missing beyond Murray’s one-on-one adventures with Adebayo, but the percentages were there for a Miami win even when the shooting wasn’t touching the heavens.
But Murray and Jokic haven’t just been their percentages. It’s the threat they post that creates the real impact, and that’s where the HEAT found themselves in trouble in Game 4.
For the most part, I thought that that part of the game was okay,” Spoelstra said about defending Denver’s main pick-and-roll combination on Friday. “It's the Gordon dunks or cuts, Porter had a couple cuts . . . those were probably the most costly things.”
GHOSTED
The way Synergy Sports logs things, generally with people logging by hand as opposed to the player tracking data of Second Spectrum, there is no more dangerous play than a cutter who get a catch.
The best spot-up team in the regular season, Philadelphia, scored 1.13 points-per-possessions from those play types. The best pick-and-roll team, Dallas, produced 1.29 points-per when hitting the roll man. The best transition team, Denver, averaged 1.20 ppp on fast-break possessions.
The average cut possession, from the No. 15 Chicago Bulls? That was good for 1.33 ppp.
Now, the way Synergy logs those possessions are pretty strict – they include players getting dump-off passes from the dunker spot – and those strict definitions are partially responsible for the value attributed to those possessions. But this is all important because Denver averaged 10 cut possessions a game this season, No. 2 behind Golden State. Here’s how many they’ve been getting in the NBA Finals.
Game 1: 10
Game 2: 13
Game 3: 16
Game 4: 13
That’s 13 of the most valuable possessions a game. That’s how Denver won two games in this series shooting sub-30 percent from three before coming back around for 14-of-28 in Game 4.
Before Game 2 Malone used one of our old favorite terms, Ghost Cuts, which is how we used to describe how Dwyane Wade would slice through his defender’s blind spot when they turned their head to track the ball. It was fitting, too, because half of Denver’s roster moves as if they’ve watched film on Wade. They don’t just cut to cut. They don’t just cut because the set demanded it. They cut on time and on target, leveraging the attention given to Murray and Jokic with defenders unable to center their cones of vision on two things at once. If you look away, or you step up to help, Murray and Jokic are always looking for their ghosts.
Finals Game 5 Primer: Gordon Cuts
“I think we were up a little higher, trying to make sure that we showed bodies on [them] coming off the pick-and-roll,” Kyle Lowry said.
The Nuggets only have six more restricted area attempts than Miami in the series, but they’re shooting 71 percent to Miami’s 62 in that range largely because of how those shots are coming about in the margins. Even as the HEAT have been getting some easy stuff of their own, Denver has responded with even more plus opportunities, and at other times Miami is playing through contact where the Nuggets are catching the ball at the rim.
Denver is averaging 20 restricted area attempts per 100 possessions. For Milwaukee, missing their main rim generator for part of that series and lacking consistent entry passing, it was 14.9. For New York, all their paint points drying up after the first half of Game 1, it was 14.5. Boston actually had comparable numbers, shooting 76 percent at the rim on 18.3 attempts per 100, but they were a unique case. When they had Robert Williams on the court, they could manufacture similar catches to those of Denver because of the lob. But otherwise, the Celtics and their drive-and-kick machine were playing breakthrough-and-conquer, their drives often becoming problems – turnovers – as often as they did layups, especially for anyone not named Jayson Tatum. The Nuggets have a team full of players working off the ball like Williams did for Boston, and they have a center who can back down through the defense, rather than having to try and split it.
Trying to take away cuts from the Nuggets is a bit like trying to take away threes from the Golden State Warriors. They’re going to get some. For Miami to extend the series to six, they’ll have to mitigate the damage. They’ve shown they can limit the interior passing, in Game 2, and contest the threes, in Games 1 and 3, but those two areas were the difference in Game 4 as resources were committed to Murray and Jokic.
CHANGING IT UP
Denver has, for the most part, put a dent in Miami’s own postseason bread-and-butter when it comes to pick-and-rolls between Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo.
Through three games, Miami’s had gone to that combination 46 times – 25 per 100 possessions and 24 times more than the next combination – and produced just 0.86 points per direct action, per Second Spectrum. Jokic was hanging back a little bit in drop coverage, staying attached to Adebayo, while Denver brought over a third defender, committing less and less to unnecessary help as the series has gone on while still eating into space if Butler gets too side-to-side. Both players have been able to get two feet in the paint with the ball in their hands, but almost always with at least one body in front of them.
The good news was that through those three games, Kyle Lowry’s screens with Adebayo were producing 1.31 points-per, albeit in just 20 total possessions.
So, in Game 4, Spoelstra switched things up. As Denver managed their help discipline against Butler, he and Adebayo ran just five total pick-and-rolls between them while Lowry and Adebayo’s usage jumped up to 10 – producing 1.25 points per. The film doesn’t suggest that this was a light bulb moment, as a handful of those points came from Kentavious Caldwell-Pope biting on a Lowry pump-fake from three and Kevin Love banking in another three from the top of the arc, but you could see where Lowry’s ability to get low and work through the coverage got Denver off balance at times. And getting Butler off the ball only helps when the defense is off balance.
Finals Game 5 Primer: Jimmy Cut
The HEAT are still going to have to make shots. Denver’s defense isn’t giving up anything easy – Jokic even saved a dangerous pass or three with his feet in Game 4, lunging less with his arms as he did in the games in Denver – but Miami hasn’t always needed to find things easy outside of Milwaukee conceding pull-up jumpers with their conversative drop. Miami’s Shot Quality on three pointers against Denver, an expected effective field-goal percentage of 50.7, is about the same as it was against Milwaukee and Boston. Butler and Adebayo’s combined Shot Quality, 49.05 expected, is about the same as it was against Milwaukee and New York – more similar defensive styles to Denver than Boston’s switching, with New York’s help rules being the closest comparison. The shots just aren’t falling the same as they were, outside of Game 2.
Is that all this is, make or miss? It’s never that simple, but Miami had been doing a lot of making until now and this is only the second series, after New York, where the HEAT have underperformed the expected value of the shots they’re getting. It didn’t matter too much against those Knicks and all of their own half-court struggles, but against a Denver team putting up 120 points per 100 on an average night, every percentage point matters.
Then again, all these stats and schemes, they might not matter at this point. It doesn’t matter what you should be shooting. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, who you’ve beaten or how you did it. It’s been a remarkable run for Miami, full of magic and memories that will last a lifetime, but only Monday night matters now.
The Nuggets have proven themselves different. For six weeks the HEAT were constantly the hunters, reenacting the bar scene from Near Dark – vampires walk into an establishment, run amok, drink blood, leave the establishment in tatters and flames – over and over again. But Denver has had too much life force to drain, their stars steady and their role players – Gordon, Bruce Brown, Nicholas Braun, etc. – stepping up in exactly the same ways, in all those timely ways, that Miami’s role players did against the Bucks and Celtics.
This is no premature obituary on the HEAT’s season, merely an acknowledgement of the task ahead. Denver has earned that respect, and then some. There is no five-point palm exploding heart technique that will turn the tide, only doing what Miami has done best and finding a way to do it even better. The task is monumental, but the HEAT have been scaling monuments for months.
All of the basketball world is ready to crown Denver because that’s what should happen. Miami still holds, as ever, the possibility of what could. And if they’ve proven nothing else, it’s that you’re going to have to shove a wooden stake into their collective heart to put them down.
TIDBITS
-As we’ve been tracking all season, Miami’s half-court man-to-man has generally been pretty reliant on forcing turnovers. During the regular season, the HEAT allowed 1.32 points per possession when their man-to-man looks ended in a shot or a foul, ranked No. 25. Against Denver in those same situations, they’re allowing 1.37 points-per. The Nuggets had their second-lowest turnover rate of the playoffs in Game 4, with just six total turnovers to Miami’s 14.
-Miami is 2-4 in the playoffs when committing 14 or more turnovers, though they also committed just four, a postseason best, in Game 3.
-On a related note, the HEAT didn’t use a single possession of zone in Game 4.
-The HEAT are shooting 32.3 percent from three in their three losses.
-Jamal Murray is only producing 0.68 points per isolation in this series, which is largely due to Adebayo’s switching. Butler is up at 1.03, not the heights he’s been at previously – 1.14 across the regular season and postseason – but a workable number.
-In Games 1 and 3, the HEAT scored 0 points on seven Butler drives which ended in a pass. In Games 2 and 4, they scored 20 points on 12 direct Butler drives leading to a pass.
-Duncan Robinson’s handoffs with Adebayo, perhaps Miami’s best action through three games at 1.37 points-per, fell off a bit in Game 4, two points on three handoffs, as Denver continues to key in on them.
-While the HEAT are generally limiting Denver in transition outside of live-ball turnovers, Denver’s 118.8 half-court offensive rating in Game 4 was the highest mark Miami has allowed in the postseason and fifth highest including the first 82.