1. When two teams each on the second night of a back-to-back, one of them coming off a double-overtime game, face off you never quite know what to expect.
Don’t know that anyone would have quite expected this first half, even with the HEAT running on those extra-minute legs, with Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving putting on a show against one of the best defenses in the league. Those two combined to shoot 11-of-15 outside the paint, 40 points on 22 shots overall through two quarters, and very few of those attempts were of the spot-up variety. Even Bam Adebayo, possibly the world’s greatest one-on-one defender in space, couldn’t do anything as both Irving and Doncic drained jumpers over his outstretched arms and fingertips. Sometimes great players are great, and there’s nothing you can do.
The lead wouldn’t have stretched as far as 25, it was 22 at the break, had Miami played a cleaner game, but against a Dallas defense – bodies in the paint, strongside overloaded, help coming – that tends to give them issues they struggled to get into the paint and convert when they did. Some bad turnovers, crosscourt passes thrown out of bounds, hindered the halfcourt momentum, and with Dallas scoring a decent chunk in transition on top of it all, there wasn’t much else, their own 7-of-15 shooting from three – partially balancing out Dallas’ 11-of-23 – the only solace found in a 104.4 Offensive Rating. Signs of tired legs and minds all around, but that doesn’t count for much when you’re in a postseason race.
More intent to the offense in the third, Dallas just wasn’t showing many signs of slowing down as Doncic managed all the bodies Miami threw his way. A couple Kevin Love (16 points on nine shots) threes offered life, the lead down to 16, as Dallas cooled from three on some good looks, but it was a slow run, the lead only shrinking to 13 after extended minutes to empty possessions on either side. Still, down 14, with Dallas only mustering 19 in the period, is still well within earshot. It doesn’t have to be pretty to mount a late run.
Bombs away from three in the fourth, the lead down to eight after four deep makes out of the Tyler Herro (21 points on 15 shots) and Love two-man action, helped along by a smattering of offensive glass as the zone strung together stops. Dallas pushed back quickly enough, both Doncic (29 points on 23 shots) and Irving (25 points on 15 shots) back on the floor for the duration, and it was back to 15 at the four-minute mark, time working against Miami as Mavericks coach Jason Kidd pulled his starters with just under two to play. Dallas takes it, 111-92.
2. The HEAT shot 43.3 percent from three (13-of-30), many of those makes leading to their run with the the Love-at-center bench units, and yet their Offensive Rating finished at 102.2 – a strange relationship between those two numbers that wasn’t characteristic of this team’s profile before this season.
The 16 turnovers certainly don’t help, though you can peg quite a few of those on back-to-back processing speed, but the main thing to say is the same thing that was said after many recent games, including the double-overtime game in Atlanta. The paint has been absolutely packed for weeks, four sets of feet always in the way of Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo, strongside help coming early as teams rely on their closeout speed rather than sticking to shooters and trusting their defenders one-on-one. Miami has shot well in a number of those recent games, but the coverages often haven’t changed, often becoming more resolute as time wears on, confident in the lack of downhill momentum (just 17 percent of Miami’s field-goal attempts came at the rim tonight as they were pushed into the upper paint). Going back two years, Dallas was one of the first teams to do this when they doubled Butler and Adebayo like few teams had ever tried before, and now they’re just one of many teams executing like-minded schemes. Having shooters like Terry Rozier and especially Duncan Robinson, whose gravity disrupts even the most extreme paint-packing philosophies, but this is the trend to watch as the season winds down.
3. Miami could have been locked into the Play-In with tonight’s result as Cleveland beat Memphis, but Orlando left the door open for some final-weekend movement with a loss to Milwaukee. As things stand right now, Miami is one back of Philadelphia in the loss column – two back of Indiana, which holds that particular tiebreaker – for homecourt in a 7-8 Play-In game that appears exceedingly like the most likely outcome with two games remaining.
There is a small window of hope, however, in the form of the Orlando Magic, up two in the loss column on the HEAT, whose loss to Milwaukee means that if they lose their final two and Miami wins their final two, Miami will win the division (thanks to a head-to-head tiebreaker) and thus as the division winner be in the lead of a variety of multi-team tiebreakers. There’s also a path where Orlando falls into the No. 7 seed and they become Miami’s Play-In opponent.
All the HEAT can do from here on in is win their final two games and cross their fingers for a little help elsewhere. Such is life when you don’t control your own destiny and the season is in the proverbial final two minutes of the fourth quarter.