HEAT 104 - Magic 100 Recap

The Miami HEAT may have only beaten the Orlando Magic by a small margin, 104-100, after withstanding a 20-4 run in the game’s final minutes, but for three and a half quarters, this was a dominant showing by a team that’s hit its stride in its past three games.

Even taking into consideration Miami’s massive December surge, the past three games – wins over Oklahoma City, Cleveland and Orlando – may represent the team’s best three-game offensive showing of the season. Never before this season has the HEAT maintained such a balance between its individual talents and role players, seamlessly transitioning between feats in isolation and crisp ball and player movement in the half court.

More impressively, those points stand on a night when LeBron James set the NBA season high and HEAT franchise record for points in a road game, dropping 51 points on the Magic to go with 11 rebounds and eight assists.

James was unstoppable in the most literal sense, because when a player is hitting pull-up jumpers in the mid-range over any defender you throw at him, he cannot be stopped. James began the night hitting six jumpers in a row, and rolled from there, scoring a team-record 23 in the first quarter.

"When he is going like that, there is nobody in the world that can guard him," Dwyane Wade said.

With most players, those jumpers would turn into a bad, heat check sort of look. Once the gravy train stopped and those shots stopped falling, most offenses would find themselves out of rhythm, having fallen into over-reliance on individual performance.

Not the HEAT, who scored 118 points per 100 possessions against the league’s fifth-most efficient defense.

"I’m sure the basket looked as big as an ocean to him, but he was also able to facilitate a lot of offense for us at the one position which made it unique," Erik Spoelstra said. "You would think scoring over 50 points, that we’d been running every single play for him. He was initiating a lot of our offense for the majority of the night. It was really an efficient basketball game."

Instead of keeping with the easier-to-get jumpers, James stayed true to his abilities, and the needs of the offense, driving to the rim, getting to the free-throw line, grabbing offensive rebounds and finding teammates for open looks.

With James out to begin the second quarter, the offense hadn’t missed a beat. On the first possessions of the quarter, Eddie House freed himself in the corner for three on a pass from Erick Dampier. Then Wade and Chris Bosh combined for the team’s next eight points before James returned to action. But even with the stars finishing plays, Miami closed out the first half with a jumper from House, assisted, and an alley-oop to Dampier to take a ten-point lead headed into the break.

The game continued as such, not a moment of James’ torrid pace feeling labored or forced. This was natural flow, the onus falling from one player to another as the defense found itself at various disadvantages with matchups – Ryan Anderson on Bosh – and rotations – James drawing up to three defenders at a time.

“Even with some of my big individual scoring nights, I have always found a way to get my guys involved in the game and not just try to force shots because I feel I have it going," James said. "When the shot is there, I take it but it is always within the flow of the offense.”

Midway through the fourth, things appeared to be in hand, but then the Magic, who had been shooting below their norm on good looks, began to hit, at one point making six shots in a row.

James seemed to end what appeared to be a fool’s gold run with a pullup three from the top of the arc with 1:29 to play, putting Miami up nine, but there would be one final moment of nervousness.

After a few missed free throws left the door open for Orlando, an inbounds pass was tipped of James’ leg, giving the Magic the ball, down three, with 10.6 seconds left. Without a timeout to set up a play, Orlando still found Ryan Anderson at the top of the key with what seemed like a good look, but Joel Anthony’s strong contest of the shot may have been the difference. Anderson missed, and Wade’s free-throw clinched the division victory.

"We had an unfortunate six-minute lapse," Spoelstra said, "But I’m not going to let that take away from the win. It was a very good win. Our guys were very motivated in this game to beat a division rival, but hopefully we’ve learned our lesson.”