What is the quintessential HEAT play of the last four years?
What comes to mind might say a lot about you as a basketball watcher. We’re not talking about any one possession. Not Bam Adebayo’s block on Jayson Tatum. Not Tyler Herro’s three against Philadelphia. Not even Jimmy Butler’s missed three against Boston. No, we’re talking about the play that always happens. The play that comforts you like an old friend showing up at your door with beer and curry. Maybe it’s Adebayo’s dribble-handoffs to Miami’s array of shooters, even if those have fallen somewhat out of favor of late. Or it could be Adebayo catching a lob out of a pick-and-roll, Herro pulling up for three or Butler drawing a foul after getting a defender caught on his shoulder. If the last couple of months are any indication, it could soon be Adebayo’s jumpers from the dotted line.
All apt choices, but none compare to the play that, even if it isn’t the one that happens most often, is the one that is so intertwined with who the HEAT have been, for good and for ill, that nothing else fits their identity quite so perfectly.
The one constant through all the years has been the Jimmy Butler pick-six. The seasons have rolled by like an army of steamrollers. The standings have been erased like a blackboard. Rewritten and erased again each June. But Butler’s defensive plays, the steals which transform an imminent threat into two easy points within a few dozen beats of a hummingbird’s wings, have marked the time.
Since he joined Miami in the offseason of 2019, nobody in the NBA has more pick-six steals than Butler’s 43, per Second Spectrum tracking data. The way you get to a statistic like that is long winded, but for the sake of transparency it’s *deep breath* unassisted two-point shots made in the first three seconds of the shot clock which occur on possessions that begin with a live-ball turnover. Grab, go and score. Or, this:
Den of Thieves: Butler Pick-Six Steals
“It’s just like, ‘How did you cover ground that fast?” Gabe Vincent says about watching Butler’s off-ball defense. “He’s a hell of an athlete, and when you match that with his brain his anticipation is second to none.”
Part of the reason those Butler steals feel so comfortably expected is that you can see them coming. An opposing ballhandler probes for a moment, feels the threat of HEAT defenders about to pinch the gaps and create a suddenly claustrophobic space. Then they think better of it. They retreat, if not with a white flag then a pass – lateral or backwards. In the back of your mind, you know Butler, the James Caan of this pass pilfering operation, is looming. So when he’s suddenly there, with the ball, and gone, with a score, your brain offers up a kick of serotonin as if to say yes, you saw it before it happened. You were right.
“Jimmy gets in the brain of whatever the other team is trying to get to, and then he just waits for you to make any kind of mistake,” Erik Spoelstra says.
“Being that aggressive, you can only do that if you have trust and faith in the guys behind you,” says Gabe Vincent. “I think that’s when we’re at our best version, when you can trust the guys in the back line. There are certain positions where you can push a guy or funnel a guy to it, and there’s only so many places he can go. Our guys that read the play well, they can jump the gun and see it as its happening, and now the offensive player is put in a really tough spot of you have to make this pass over Bam [Adebayo] and you got Jimmy playing two on the weak side. It leads to a lot of runouts for us.”
And then there are those nobody can see coming, the steals which happen as your eyes have already begun to track toward the predicted landing spot of the pass. Those steals where Butler is no longer in Cover 2. He’s a linebacker chasing down a quarterback. Demarcus Ware making Michael Vick look silly.
Den of Thieves: Jimmy Ware Steals
Fittingly, no team has more than Miami’s 123 pick-sixes over the same four years. That’s not by mistake. Butler’s free-safety skills lead the way, but the HEAT’s defensive system has always been constructed, in varying styles, to encourage mistakes. Just as it was years ago when the similarly skilled LeBron James was in town. Back then Miami was out blitzing as many pick-and-rolls as humanly possible, purposefully putting themselves into rotation into order to scramble the opposing offense. After finding their identity that first season with James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, Miami ran off three straight years with an opposing turnover percentage in the Top 5. Similarly, after this iteration of the franchise settled in that first season with Butler, they’re sitting No. 2 this season – with their highest opposing turnover rate (16.8) since James’ last season in Miami – after two consecutive years ranked third.
With league turnovers per 100 possessions down from 15.7 in 2012-13 to 14.4 this season (13.9 last year), it’s not much of surprise that Miami and Toronto's turnover-forcing rates are higher than all but one team (the 2019-20 Chicago Bulls) since 2014-15.
That’s all well and good, but why are we talking about this all today? Two reasons. For starters, this team, possibly more than any of Miami’s other good turnover teams in recent history, needs to force that many turnovers to survive. More on that in a minute. The other reason is that Butler is now be flanked by as many complementary ball hawks as James was in those days – with Wade and Mario Chalmers – and may actually have an equal in the Mr. Steal Your Ball category.
When Victor Oladipo was younger, he wasn’t the most talented scorer. He was tall enough, though, and had those long arms, so it didn’t take him long to sort out that there was a pathway to success as the good kind of ball stopper. That’s how he discovered an innate power that most players either have or they don’t – and most players don’t. He had hands that could Bruce Lee proud.
“Defensively it just clicked for me,” Oladipo said of his early playing days. “That was the only way I could really stay on the floor, is if I guarded the other team’s best player. You guard the best player all the time, you figure out little nuances that can help you. That’s how I figured out that defensively I can use my body, my hands, and make it difficult for guys.”
For as often as Oladipo’s status as a former two-time All-Star is mentioned, what doesn’t come up as often is that he led the league in steals in 2017-18 at 2.4 a night. That season 3.5 percent of Indiana’s defensive possessions ended with an Oladipo steal while he was on the floor. In his first 20 games back with Miami this season, that number is 2.9 (which would be tied for No. 3 in the league with Butler with enough qualifying appearances). In the playoffs last season, when Oladipo and Butler were walking nightmares for the Boston Celtics, that percentage was 2.6.
It’s so obvious why those numbers are what they are that it almost doesn’t require description. It’s the hands, man.
Den of Thieves: Oladipo Hands
“Two seasons ago I was watching all of his defensive clips [from] when he was All Defense and I literally had never seen anything like it,” Spoelstra says.
Remember when we noted that Miami was No. 2 in opponent turnover percentage, behind Toronto? Well, since Oladipo’s return on December 6, they’re No. 1 at 17.3. In the 184 minutes with Butler and Oladipo on the floor together, that number jumps up to 17.9.
Oladipo and Butler may go about things different generally, one on the ball the other off, but each can live in the other’s territory, too. The results are often the same – the ball going the other way for two. I’ll bet you can guess who led the league in pick-six scores during Oladipo’s All-Defense season.
“Vic’s athleticism is incredible, especially laterally,” Vincent says. “He’s very quick, he’s got good hands, he has good anticipation. He does a really good job on the ball especially with smaller, quicker guards. Vic is a little unique in that manner because he’s so athletic that he can cover ground as well and cut guys off.”
So why does this HEAT group need turnovers? Their offensive struggles are well documented. They are No. 24 in Offensive Rating, No. 20 in half-court offense, No. 22 in true-shooting percentage – notably No. 20 on two pointers as part of that – and play at the third-slowest pace with possession of the ball. In the second half of games, when defenses generally start to tighten up, they’ve been No. 29 on offense. Even as Adebayo and Tyler Herro take steps forward in their offensive approaches and there always exists the possibility of the shooting turning around – it’s not quite as simple as positive regression given the differences in personnel this season, but that’s a story for another day – the team needs juice wherever they can get it. As we saw in the Eastern Conference Finals against Boston – a series which spurred many of the strategic shifts on the attack that may pay out dividends down the line but may also be partially responsible for the current scoring downturn – Miami is at its best when they’re living in that feedback loop of stops begetting scores begetting opportunities to set your defense in the half-court and get more stops. When the HEAT live outside of that loop, the struggle can manifest as a 40-pound demon on their shoulders with no saintly rejoinders in earshot. A pick-six, then, is manna from the basketball gods.
“If we can put ourselves at an advantage by getting pick-sixes and being active, because then you’re getting those stops and its leading into easy offensive possessions for us, it’s killing the momentum of the other team as well,” Martin said. “For us, it’s a game of momentum.”
That much we’ve known. What is a little different this year is that the defense might also need those turnovers as much as the offense does.
Miami has played 4,444 defensive possessions this season – we’re using Second Spectrum tracking data for this, so we can be uber flexible – during which they rank No. 4 allowing 1.12 points per possession. That’s great. If you take out the 738 possessions which ended in a turnover and only focus on the 3,770 possessions which ended in the other team taking a shot or drawing a foul (there are only three true outcomes for an offensive possession), then Miami drops down 1.32 points per possession. Duh, you might be thinking. If you remove all the possessions that end in a guaranteed zero points, of course the number might rise. You’d be correct about that. But if you look at where Miami ranks among all teams with turnovers taken out of the equation, they fall to No. 16.
Going one step further, if you look only at half-court possessions with no turnovers – still a sample size of 3,766 – they drop a bit further to No. 21. Before their recent two-game stretch against the Milwaukee Bucks without Giannis Antetokounmpo and last night versus a Pelicans team missing Brandon Ingram and Zion Williamson, that number was closer to No. 25. Last year, when Miami was Top 3 in forcing turnovers, they remained inside the Top 10 in the half-court whether you included turnovers or not.
Put simply, Miami might be the best team in the league at creating the absolute best defensive outcome possible for a given possession. They’re so good at that, they’re a legitimate Top 10 defense. But they’ve been below average in the other possessions – surprisingly these numbers are not affected by their best defenders being on the court, so injuries aren’t a major factor here – which happen to be the majority. Sometimes they put out The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable. Other time, the output looks more like Lady In The Water or The Happening.
“You can’t really argue the numbers,” says Caleb Martin. ”To me, just being out there and playing, there’s some games where you cannot really force a ton of turnovers. You won’t get the best outcome every time.”
Many of the reasons behind this are pretty simple, some a bit more complex. It’s an undersized roster, for the most part, last in the league in blocked shots, so in a pinch – for them, the ball residing in the paint is the pinch – they’ll often go for the ball rather than the contest. Then you come back to Miami allowing the second-highest volume of threes in the league, 40 percent of opposing field-goal attempts behind only Houston. And teams are shooting the fourth-highest percentage on threes against them at 36.9 percent. That’s not as bad as it sounds, as they’re less than a percentage point away from league average. On top of that, Miami is allowing the tenth-highest percentage on two-pointers. However you look at it, the end result is they’ve allowed the fifth-highest effective field-goal percentage in the league. Fortunately this is mitigated by the HEAT being one of the best teams when it comes to limiting free-throws – helped along by their record-setting usage of zone – but it puts the team’s win-loss record, and their league-leading total of clutch games, into perspective.
Is some of this bad luck? Undoubtedly. Three-point percentages are notoriously difficult to control. Two pointers a little bit less so, but Miami does well keeping the ball away from the rim - allowing the second fewest points in the paint per 100 possessions and second-fewest attempts at the rim - with their shield phalanx scheme. The higher percentages they allow in the mid-range are at least partially influenced by how much zone they’ve played. It wouldn’t be a surprise at all if they got into a playoff series and started limiting makes to a far greater degree. But they also haven’t been nearly as good against isolations, and their ability to comfortably switch one-through-five was a huge part of their success last season.
It’s all connected, somehow. Every team is playing the risk-reward game. You want to protect the paint? You’ll probably give up a few more threes. You want to create chaos and force turnovers? A whiff has your other team defending at a disadvantage. When the offense struggles, the defense might press. You play smaller lineups, they swipe for steals and try to take charges, not blocks and verticality plays. The good news is Butler is probably one of the best in the league at minimizing his own mistakes, and everyone else is in on the game.
“It’s like giving guys who are natural scorers, putting them in position and running certain schemes to let them be who they are,” Martin said. “[Spo] does a great job of doing that on the defensive end. Some of the schemes that we do allow us to be who we are.”
“You can’t take away from him,” Vincent says of Butler’s gambles. “At times we’ll get on him. At times he’ll get on himself, saying I probably shouldn’t have gone for that one. And at times he’ll have seven steals in a game. You can’t micromanage that. You have to let talent be talent.”
The symphony is an aural delight when everyone plays together. That one wrong note just sticks out above the rest. Next time Miami gives up a three that seems a little too open, understand that it may be for the exact same reason they took a steal the other way a couple plays before, or why they’ll eventually do it a few minutes later – as it may be better to wait for a high-leverage spot when you’ve picked up your opponent’s tell, whether you’ve timed their dribble or you can see their play sequencing. There’s a reason Miami has, by far, the highest opponent turnover rate in the fourth quarter. A rate that, at 18.5 percent, would lead the league in almost any season.
The HEAT are in a better spot than it might sound. Being great at one thing, particularly a thing that almost took you to an NBA Finals last season, is far better than being average at a wider swath. Greatness gives you an identity, and for all the stats you can find which may raise yellow flags, a team with an identity is a team that knows what it has to do in order to win games.
“For us to really be our best version defensively, we have to be extremely disruptive,” Spoelstra said. “And when we’re getting deflections, when we’re speeding teams up, when we’re getting them out of what they normally like to do, regardless of the scheme, those games have a better tenor for us and way more to our identity.”
Nobody is going to call Miami a perfect team much less a contending favorite. But Oladipo has been integrated into the rotation joining the cadre of defensive playmakers that make up the ‘You know what they’re looking at? Us’ crew of Butler, Martin, Vincent, Kyle Lowry and newcomers like Haywood Highsmith (and Jamal Cain, when he plays). Put them around possibly the best and most versatile – and that versatility has sure been put to the test this season – defender in the game in Adebayo, and the HEAT have a formula that can make any team, any player, any coaching staff putting together a series scout, uncomfortable.
They may be thieves, but they’re exceptional thieves, Mrs. McClane. This crew is good.