These teams can’t get out of each other’s way. Each time they meet, the Bucks have been the favorites, which is why it was such a surprise to some when Miami knocked them off their No. 1 seed perch in only five games during the Orlando Bubble. When the sequel came along a year later, Milwaukee restocked with Jrue Holiday, it was a clean sweep – only Game 1 was competitive with wild shooting performances on either side.
Now the HEAT get another shot at what may be the prohibitive favorite. The No. 8 seed has won before, the 2007 Golden State Warriors took down the 67-win Dallas Mavericks and the 2011 Memphis Grizzlies beat the 61-win San Antonio Spurs. Both those teams entered the playoffs with a bit more pedigree than this HEAT group – Memphis had a Net Rating of +2.5 while Golden State was around +2.0 after acquiring Stephen Jackson and Al Harrington before the trade deadline – that has been outscored by half a point per 100 possessions.
There’s little doubt that a HEAT victory would constitute one of the greatest upsets in league history were it to happen. For that reason, nobody is going to pick Miami and understandably so. It’s nobody’s ideal position to be in, maybe, but it’s also one that allows for a degree of freedom. Miami has a blank check here, free from producer’s notes and budget constraints. This is their Babylon – or, judging from reports, their Beau Is Afraid – to make, their vision to live by absent expectations. Everything from here on out is pure upside, and there are plenty of players in that locker room who are familiar with what it takes to topple the Bucks. If this season of Miami basketball has taught us anything, it’s to never expect the expected. This team finds ways to surprise you, at least as far as all roads somehow leading to the same clutch situations with five minutes to go. All they need is a couple of those close games to be in business.
THE EMPTY POCKET
Even if Giannis Antetokounmpo didn’t play – he only played in five of a possible 16 quarters against the HEAT this season – January 12 was a significant game in the developmental story of Bam Adebayo. After slowly adjusting to and progressing against deep drop coverage over the past four years, maybe the two most aggressive scoring months of Adebayo’s career culminated in nine shots made in the paint with Lopez acting as the closest defender, according to player tracking data from Second Spectrum. At the time, it was the most paint shots anyone had ever, in nearly 360 games, hit against Lopez in a single game.
How Adebayo did it wasn’t much of a mystery. There were no complicated schemes or adjustments involved. Whether he caught the ball in the post or in the paint, he ate the space that Lopez, prioritizing the rim as ever, offered up. Against a team that has managed to pull off the difficult two-step of being Top 5 in preventing shots both at the rim and from the arc, finding success meant scoring in between and Adebayo made 9-of-14 shots in the upper paint en route to a Miami victory.
Just do that four times and win the series, right? It’s not that simple. Take a look at these images from different HEAT-Bucks games this season.
They’re the same picture. An Adebayo unencumbered. Milwaukee is able to shut off the water in the two most efficient zones on the floor because they drop all their length back as their many guards chase shooters over the top of screens and handoffs and push them off the arc while shutting down passing lanes elsewhere with tight coverage. That means the pick-and-roll often becomes a two-on-two affair, and the pocket is empty. In theory, this is a series tailor made for the Tyler Herro and Adebayo connection. Of the 73 players who faced at least 300 possessions of pick-and-roll drop coverage, Herro was No. 22 producing 1.07 points-per-screen. When it was Herro and Adebayo together against drop, that number rises to 1.12 points-per.
(In the past Milwaukee has sent more help into the paint, often leaving a shooter open as a result. That’s how Caleb Martin scored his career-high 28 last year, with the Bucks daring him to beat them outside and Martin hitting 6-of-8. The Bucks have changed things up a bit this year, but this is still in their wheelhouse.)
It’s no secret that Miami’s offense, at No. 25 overall, struggled to maintain much traction this season. Most of the attention has gone towards the sizeable dip in three-point shooting across the board, but there was also a refocusing of the offensive approach by Erik Spoelstra. After the scoring flat tire that was the Eastern Conference Finals – when the HEAT were highly reliant on forcing live-ball turnovers to juice their own scoring – Spoelstra sought to build an offense that could sustain in the postseason without relying as heavily on shooting. Part of that shift was a determination to get Adebayo in scoring positions rather than Adebayo beginning most possessions looking to free up his teammates. Any Adebayo pick-and-roll – particularly those with Herro through the early and middle parts of the season until Butler’s post All-Star usage went up – produced solid offense, and on possessions where Adebayo got the ball and shot, drew a foul or turned the ball over, Miami got 1.11 points per possession. Not an elite number, but a good, reliable one in a season where the HEAT needed all the consistency they could find on that end. Need to keep the train on the tracks? Find Adebayo with a pocket pass.
The other side of the coin is that the most common result was an Adebayo jumper – he took more upper paint jumpers (184) than anyone in the league, with only Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (163) even coming close. Adebayo shot 52.2 percent on those shots, 49.7 percent on all upper paint shots (600 attempts), with the jumper falling off a bit outside of 10 feet. Good, workable numbers overall, just not the most valuable shot on the floor if it’s going to be your primary objective. As good as Milwaukee is, they have the eighth fastest defensive pace – they don’t grind out defensive possessions up against the shot clock – in part because teams often take the first shots available to them in the drop.
Back to the photos above, of which there are plenty more examples. Even with Adebayo now more willing to take those shots and make them at a good clip, Milwaukee rarely played him any differently. Maybe Lopez would take a step or two up, contesting better than many might give him credit for, but they rarely altered their overall philosophy. If Adebayo was going to hurt them with two-point jumpers, so be it.
Is that going to continue to be the case? Is the pocket going to remain as empty as it was before? The last couple of months especially have been defined by team bringing over a third defender to disrupt Adebayo’s upper paint catches, leading to his attempts per 100 possessions dropping from 22 pre-March to around 18 since – coincidentally the same period when Miami’s offense was trending closer toward league average with all those bodies in the paint.
Milwaukee can do what all those other teams, including Atlanta and Chicago in recent play-in games, did if they want. They even had Antetokounmpo dig in on Adebayo a couple times in February. It’s just not typically in their DNA to commit extra bodies just to prevent a non-rim attempt.
If the space is there, then, and the help doesn’t help, many possessions will flow through Adebayo into the shot that has become his calling card.
“Shoot my shots, get to my spots, and live with the results,” Adebayo said of his plan against Milwaukee’s coverage.
WHO GUARDS JIMMY?
Miami’s run to the 2020 NBA Finals, which went through Milwaukee, had the unfortunate side effect of giving other teams some ideas when it came to dealing with Jimmy Butler. Granted some of this had to do with Adebayo being injured for much of that series, but the Los Angeles Lakers put Anthony Davis on Butler, having Davis go under screens and use all his length to absorb Butler’s typically bruising, shoulders-forward drives. LeBron James defended Butler for 181 touches in that series. Davis defended him for 176. Nobody else had more than 59 possessions. Butler still managed to put up two of the better games in Finals history through sheer brute force, but Miami’s offense, free flowing as it was that season, was as labored as ever.
That same postseason, Giannis Antetokounmpo only defended Butler for 20 possessions across five games while Wes Matthews was the primary on 171 touches. In the sweep a year later, even with P.J. Tucker on the roster, Antetokounmpo took Butler for 147 possessions – double that of anyone else not named Tucker – including the very first possession of the first game. Mike Budenholzer wasn’t about to waste any time waiting to be forced into an adjustment and Butler, for really the only time in a HEAT uniform, struggled as he shot 29 percent from the field on his way to 14.5 points a night. Even if Miami managed to shed Antetokounmpo with a screen, Butler’s downhill path would be blocked by the presence of Brook Lopez while Antetokounmpo recovered in the rear-view mirror.
Fast forward to the one game where both teams were healthy this season, February 2, and Antetokounmpo only defended Butler for five touches – these numbers aren’t exactly perfect when you watch the clips, but they’re accurate enough at the highs and the lows – while Matthews and Holiday took the brunt of the assignment.
So the question going into Game 1, then, is whether Budenholzer was playing possum for the regular season, ready to spring Antetokounmpo on Butler the moment the games started to really matter. We’ll find out soon, but even if it’s not the move from the jump it’s always one in Milwaukee’s back pocket – and when and if it happens how Miami tries to get Butler to his spots without relying on too many 15-foot-and-out makes will be a major storyline.
OFF THE WALL
The case used to be that Miami defended Antetokounmpo better than any team. Similar to how the HEAT had previously given a very different player in Trae Young absolute fits, of the 11 games with a GameScore under 10 on Antetokounmpo’s ledger since his first MVP season, three of those belonged to Miami. During the 2019-20 season, an Antetokounmpo drive alone was worth 1.10 points per possession. In the series against Miami, during which he scored just 22 points a game on 50 percent shooting, that number dropped to 1.03. Even in the sweep the next year, when Miami lacked a true power forward next to Adebayo, Antetokounmpo only shot 45 percent overall.
The story was typically repetitive. With Adebayo anchoring the heart of the defense, Miami would build a wall, early and often in transition, as well or better than any team in the league, taking charges and stone-walling drives, forcing Antetokounmpo into kickouts and/or jumpers – the latter of which always played right into the HEAT’s hands. Over the last four years, Antetokounmpo is shooting an effective field goal percentage of 41.9 across 1,780 jumpers. Against Miami, that effective rate drops to 21.3. Only Boston and Golden State held him to a lower effective field-goal percentage overall than Miami’s 50.6. The blueprint wasn’t exactly a secret across the league, the HEAT were simply among the very best at executing it.
Things have started to change in the past couple of seasons. Antetokounmpo grew more comfortable making the right reads and getting off the ball earlier when he drew help. He started setting more screens, an effort aided by Holiday’s arrival – Milwaukee no longer having an Eric Bledsoe that Miami could ignore at the arc was also a major shift in this dynamic. And of course the HEAT’s personnel changed year to year.
This year Miami is playing smaller than ever, going with Max Strus and Tyler Herro in the same starting lineup – effectively putting Butler at power forward – while playing Kevin Love as a five-out backup center. Even replete with players willing to step in and manufacture a charge, The Wall, such as it is, is as small as it’s been. In the one complete game Antetokounmpo played against Miami this year, he put together probably his best performance against the HEAT – it was, by GameScore – posting a 35-point triple double on 19 shots and finished a +19 in an eight-point victory. It all looked rather effortless, at least in the context of a matchup that had always made his efforts look particularly laborious. When the HEAT lost to the Bucks it was supposed to be because they took away Antetokounmpo’s bread and butter and made the rest of the Bucks beat them, preferably from the outside. That one game in February was worth a raised eyebrow.
What’s the answer now? It’s no different. Adebayo has to shoulder the bulk of the burden – which is often going to leave smaller players to deal with Lopez, given the current rotation – and he’s going to need his teammates to shrink the floor with pinpoint timing and precision. You don’t want to give up threes to a team full of ready and willing shooters, but there are no other options in the game of you have to give up something. There’s no clever scheme where you give up driving lanes and free rolls. You have to help, and you have to be razor sharp with your closeouts when Antetokounmpo – with whom the Bucks’ rim frequency goes up a full 11 percentage points, the highest On/Off difference in the league – passes into the space you vacated. At the very least, you have to find him in transition. Milwaukee has the fourth-highest transition frequency off live rebounds, as you would expect from a team with a freight train in uniform. The HEAT will probably need to be careful and selective when crashing their own offensive glass – the Bucks are already the No. 2 defensive rebounding team – even if that’s something they sometimes rely on.
The first two games of this series will be telling. Whether or not the Bucks win their home games, keep an eye on Antetokounmpo’s process. If he’s still taking the occasional jumpers and not getting to the rim as often as it seems he should, that’s a win. You’ll take that process if it takes Milwaukee shooting lights out from three to win, and it leaves the door open for Miami to capitalize on their own opportunities from deep with some variance games. But we shouldn’t take for granted what the HEAT used to be able to do. This roster is different than it was four, three or even two years ago, and Antetokounmpo is a different player.
TIDBITS
-This is a big one, but relatively simple so it won’t get its own section. As you know, the HEAT played the most zone (1,379 possessions) in recorded NBA history this season. Milwaukee, however, faced the second most zone (439 possessions) of any team this year, and they scored 1.23 points per possession against it, second best. That doesn’t guarantee the Bucks success moving forward, but it’s safe to say they won’t be caught off guard.
-No team limits corner threes from opponents better than Milwaukee, while a large part of Miami’s uptick in shooting after All-Star was due to getting up to 41 percent in the corners.
-By that same token, Milwaukee led the league in shooting from the corners after All-Star, where the HEAT have given up the most attempts, by frequency, in the league.
-Milwaukee was the No. 3 half-court defense this season, and best defense against the teams with Top 10 Offensive Ratings.
-The Bucks were only No. 14 in half-court offense, but since Khris Middleton returned to the lineup – mostly for good, but with some absences as they managed his usage – on January 23 they were No. 4.
-Miami deserves credit for Chicago only pulling in five offensive boards on Friday after what happened with Atlanta, but keep in mind that the Bulls crash their misses far less than the Hawks. There weren’t nearly as many possessions with two or three Bulls chasing misses as there were in the first play-in game. The good news is that despite their size the Bucks don’t tend to attack their own glass unless Bobby Portis and his boundless energy is on the floor. That said, this is the sort of thing coaches can easily toggle on or off. Prior rebounding initiatives are not guaranteed to repeat themselves in a single series.
-When the Bucks have had Holiday, Middleton, Antetokounmpo and Lopez on the floor this season, across just 300 possessions due to various injuries, they’ve outscored teams by 19.5 points per 100. That’s the second-best four-man group in the league behind the Golden State Warriors starters.
-Middleton was a full participant in Thursday’s practice, so pending the official injury reports it’s looking like the Bucks are going to be whole for Game 1.