Al Horford

Couper Moorhead

Some series you can run through with a fine-tooth comb and keep coming up with new strategic discoveries. Some series don’t have through lines or threads, each game speaking its own language.

Other series are rather simple. The team that does this and that is the team that wins.

On the surface, these Eastern Conference Finals feel like the latter sort. For three games, Miami both shot better than Boston and had fewer turnovers. For the next two games, Boston made more threes and committed fewer errors. Each contest has coincided with the winning team winning both categories. You shoot well and take care of the ball, you win.

If you’re the HEAT, still a game away from the NBA Finals, that might be comforting. They’ve shot the ball extraordinarily, historically well at times in the postseason, owning three of the best shotmaking games in modern playoff history with two of those coming against Boston, and turnovers have generally not been a consistent issue for them. If all they have to do is two things they can do well, they’ve proven themselves more than capable.

If you’re Boston, there’s solace knowing that you’re probably one of the best volume shooting teams of all time. If the HEAT can knock off the Milwaukee Bucks by shooting 45 percent from deep over the course of five games, the Celtics can certainly hover around 40 percent over four. Like Miami last season, when they were 32-2 on nights they shot 40 percent or better from three, the Celtics are now 38-2 when hitting that mark. With enough talent, defense and discipline to your gameplan, good shooting is effectively a win condition all on its own.

It’s never that simple, even if it feels like it at times. There’s a process to generating good threes just as you don’t accidentally fall into the other team turning the ball over. The latter category is of particular interest because Boston, generally speaking, doesn’t force many turnovers. They had the fifth-lowest opponent turnover percentage in the league this season, with Milwaukee coming in last. Both teams had good reason for it, not requiring many risk-taking endeavors because the bones of their defenses were so strong. The Bucks had their coverage and stuck to it, relying on the lower expected percentages of the shots they allowed to carry the day, while Boston maintained faith in their individual defenders, using switches to flatten out opposing actions and trusting that they could force tough shots one-on-one.

Milwaukee never adjusted in any meaningful way, and they lost – albeit in a fashion that required Giannis Antetokounmpo to miss a few games and for Miami to stage consecutive dramatic fourth-quarter comebacks. The Celtics, meanwhile, have clearly decided that they aren’t going out on their heels.

In Game 1, you could argue that Boston over adjusted to the dominant postseason that Jimmy Butler was having. Yes, Butler was scoring one-on-one, but they were sending help – obvious, expected help – even when it wasn’t necessary. Butler or Bam Adebayo didn’t even have to be in a threatening position. They didn’t even have to have a live dribble. Help came, the right pass was made and HEAT role players capitalized on the shots they knew were coming. Boston’s help came to Miami’s aid more than it ever came close to discombobulating them.

They reversed course in Game 2, holding strong in the faith that they could get stops without compromising or bending the rest of their defense. It earned them another temporary double-digit lead, but Butler and Adebayo attacked the matchups they wanted as Boston’s gambit, putting Robert Williams on Caleb Martin where they thought he could help off into the paint, failed with Martin playing one of the best games of his career. Game 3 was such an avalanche, another incredible shooting night from the HEAT, that not much else mattered. The way Game 4 started, everything was still playing out on Miami’s terms.

Since the second half of Game 4, the rules of engagement have changed – moderately at least. This isn’t just Boston getting hot and Miami coughing the ball up, even if there has been some fumbleitis on their particular symptom list. The Celtics are forcing turnovers because they’re trying to force turnovers. What’s happening is real in part because Boston is playing a bit against type. They’ve adjusted and taken agency in their own fate. These past two games have come with, easily, Miami’s two highest turnover percentages of this entire run.

“Their activity level has gone up the last two games, and that's what you have to expect in a competitive playoff series,” Erik Spoelstra said. “And then we're playing in a crowd quite a bit.”

For good reason, too, because strangely enough these two teams have flipped offensive identities since last year – at least in relation to each other. In the previous seven-game series, Miami struggled mightily to score in the half-court, requiring stops and turnovers to feed their offense and get them playing with some pace. Through five games this year, Boston is scoring just 1.01 points per possession in the half-court off a made HEAT field goal or free throw. Off defensive rebounds or live-ball turnovers – 13 of Miami’s 16 turnovers in Game 5 were steals – they’re scoring 1.29 points per possession.&nbsp; The HEAT’s entire offense resides comfortably within that range, more consistent against a set defense but a bit less explosive after getting stops.

So what is Boston doing? They’re helping without overhelping. They’re shrinking the floor. They’re being opportunistic with their swipes and their pokes and their stunts. They’re playing, in many ways, like Miami – one of the best pass-pilfering and dribble-dispossessing groups you’ll find anywhere.

Take the first possession of Game 5, one that Boston players were crediting with setting an early tone for whatever that is worth to you. Until recently, the Celtics have almost always trusted Horford to defend Adebayo one-on-one, but with Adebayo producing nearly 1.3 points-per-isolation through the first three games of the series – and having scored efficiently against Boston all throughout the regular season – he seems to have earned at least a few shares of respect.

So, on this first possession, Marcus Smart helps. He doesn’t send an early, obvious double. He does what Miami does and waits until the ball is in, or headed towards, a dangerous position, and attacks the dribble.

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Celtics Game 5: First Possession Turnover

“Definitely more of a packed paint,” Adebayo said.

Later on, watch how Boston defense this Butler-Adebayo pick-and-roll – Miami’s most-used action, in its various forms, this entire postseason.

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Celtics Game 5: Third Quarter Crowd Steal

Smart and Horford concede the switch and a relatively simple entry pass, but Horford is biding his time, waiting for the dribble. As soon as Adebayo puts the ball on the floor, Horford digs in. Adebayo makes the right pass back to Butler for a catch-and-go, but as soon as Butler puts the ball on the floor going downhill, Horford is already recovering in front and Derrick White is poking the ball away, with Jayson Tatum looming as a second layer of the arms-and-hands gauntlet.

“They jammed us up several times in the paint with quick hands, strip-downs, things of that nature,” Spoelstra said. “We have to shore that up. That's two games in a row of that. We do have to be aggressive and then make the appropriate plays with appropriate spacing.”

Frame for frame, it’s almost exactly the sort of turnover that Miami has routinely siphoned out of Boston for the past two years, especially from Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Along those lines here’s a real doozy of a statistic – through five games, Boston already has more pick-six turnovers (14) than they did in last year’s seven-game series (13), with eight of them coming in the past two contests.

A couple of possessions later, we don’t even need video. Look at how Horford is spacing an Adebayo post-up on Brown, the same matchup Adebayo demolished with a spinning dunk in Game 3.

“They pack the paint really well, switching really well and just contesting shots without fouling,” Butler said. “But it's on us to get [Adebayo] in better positions to score the ball, get it to him in transition and stuff like that. When you look at the film and look at how we can be better and getting him into his spots with the ball, with the position and with the time on the clock to score, we'll be better at that.”

The Butler-Adebayo pick-and-roll has been the central tenant of Miami’s offense in this postseason – along with Adebayo’s connections with Lowry and Gabe Vincent – for how it gets Butler going downhill and how it creates advantageous matchups for both players. Boston obviously knows this and they’ve tweaked their coverages to eliminate as much as they can. They give up the switch – Boston switched more in Game 5 than in any game this series – but Butler’s defender stays attached to Adebayo and limits the chance of a hard roll while Adebayo’s initial defender stays flat and waits for Butler to approach – not as deep a drop as Brook Lopez was playing, but not respecting the three-point line, either. Even if Butler eventually gets the White matchup he’s seeking – White has his best game of the series staying in front and staying down on Butler’s fakes – it’s all side-to-side for Miami.

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Celtics Game 5: Jimmy-Bam PnR

With Vincent unavailable to pace the early offense and provide a dangerous off-dribble threat against a big playing a few feet off the arc, Butler and Adebayo used a season-high 17 pick-and-rolls in Game 5 – a game in which neither topped 35 minutes due to the late deficit – and the action only produced 0.50 points-per including assist opportunities. Through Game 3 of this series, that number was 1.06 in the postseason. On a related note, Butler’s 10 drives, as tracked by Second Spectrum, were a postseason low.

As you’ve probably noticed in these examples, Boston is primarily helping off Butler while staying within closeout-range – their closeouts were entirely on point, to their credit – on Miami’s other shooters, which is part of the reason why they took a postseason-low 23 attempts from three. Without Vincent’s pull-up threes and with Kyle Lowry struggling in Game 5, the HEAT needed to generate the sort of catch-and-shoot opportunities that have been difficult to come by in this series – part of why Boston’s Shot Quality numbers have been so superior. The Celtics are creating upwards of 30 catch-and-shoot three attempts per 100 possessions, consistent with their league-leading mark in the regular-season. For Miami? Just below 20, well below both the 25 they averaged in the first 82 and the 21 the Atlanta Hawks generated, last among all teams.

If Vincent is available for Game 6, that alleviates some of the possession-to-possession pressure on Miami’s two offensive engines to create everything themselves. Even if he can’t, the good news is that this isn’t anything the HEAT haven’t dealt with before. Milwaukee dared Butler to make jumpers and he crushed them over the top. New York crowded Adebayo in the paint and the HEAT found enough offense – even if that series was mostly about them jamming up the Knicks – to prevail, with Adebayo making the reads he spent all season making when teams brought third and fourth defenders into his airspace.

They can also just be better in everything that they do. At their best, the HEAT never stop moving. Someone is always a step ahead of their defender. Someone is always disappearing from where their defender thinks they should be. Someone is always finding space while everyone else is in exactly the right spot.

“Those guys, they play at an incredible pace,” Tatum said. “They kind of remind me -- kind of the pace they play at is kind of similar to the Warriors. They sprint to their spots. They sprint off screens. They find those pockets. They relocate. You can't blink because they'll relocate, you'll lose a shooter for a three, so you've got to be disciplined, you've got to be sound, you've got to chase those guys because all night they're going to be running. You've got to bring your track shoes.”

In the last six quarters, they haven’t looked like what Tatum is describing. Boston’s switching will do that to anyone, but previously the HEAT were taking their bad possessions – the ones where the ball never gets closer than 15 feet and they’re stuck without a dribble and the shot clock is shrinking – in stride and getting right back to their game. That hasn’t been the case, but it can easily be so again. It’s much more difficult for Boston to be as precise with their help and rotations if you’re making them process the court a half-second faster.

There’s still a yellow flag flying over this series, which is that the Celtics have managed to score 1.18 points-per-possession in the half-court against Miami’s man-to-man coverage. The defense has been buoyed, to this point, by the zone defense limiting the Celtics to 1.05 points per. The zone continued to do its job in Game 5, even without Vincent’s tactile skillset paired with Martin in the top two spots, as it changed the rhythm of the game and slowed the Celtics down, but factoring in Boston’s offensive rebounding that coverage allowed 1.43 points-per across 21 possessions. You can feel the Celtics growing more comfortable the more zone they see, screening the wings, getting into the paint and finding the open threes they want. Even if the zone turns it into more of a make-or-miss game on Boston’s part, too many makes can spell doom when every basket matters.

In Miami’s favor is the fact that outside of their main actions, their younger role players continue to excel. Martin was well on his way to another Caleb Martin Game back in Miami before things went haywire, and he was again decisive with the ball in his hands in Game 5. Boston still doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with Duncan Robinson – his nine assists on Thursday were, unsurprisingly, a career high – as they run him off the line and he makes them pay off the dribble. Haywood Highsmith was a few possessions short of a revelation, managing the top of the zone and closing out on a dime as he continues to give Tatum trouble one-on-one. Another confident game from Highsmith, attacking when Boston helped off of him and otherwise draining three triples on four attempts, could easily turn a result.

And yet we have must return to the simple items. Miami needs to shoot well, or at least shoot better than Boston, and based on how this series is playing out they’re going to have to so on some fairly tough shots – on average, they’re taking more than a full dribble more than Boston before a shot attempt. They’ll need to get back to taking care of the ball, working the crowd that Boston is sending into the paint, while disrupting what Boston wants to get to. They’ll need to look more like the HEAT than the Celtics look like the HEAT.

This series is still going at 3-2 because for the last six quarters, the Celtics have manifested a version of themselves that looks quite a bit like what Miami is always trying to be. For the HEAT to punch their ticket to the NBA Finals, they can’t let anyone play to their own identity better than they do.

Forget about history. Forget about records and what has or hasn’t happened before. All that matters is what is right in front of you. And that’s Game 6 – nothing more than another late-May opportunity to be exactly who they mean to be, rough edges and all that comes with it.

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Working The Crowd: The Celtics Extended The Series By Becoming The Team They’re Trying To Beat, But The HEAT Have Seen It All Before

With about eight minutes left in the second quarter, the Celtics are fighting back fast and furious. Jayson Tatum scores nine straight points, and after falling behind by 10, again, in the first quarter Boston is within one.

Jimmy Butler catches in the right corner. Grant Williams isn’t giving him this shot, as the Celtics have occasionally done. The HEAT have nothing else going. Standstill. Butler gives a half-speed jab step to the right and then makes up his mind. He loads up from three. Williams contests. Butler’s feet barely leave the ground. The lead becomes four.

Before the game, before an elimination Game 6 in a hostile environment, P.J. Tucker and Markieff Morris were having a discussion with Butler. At one point, they put it out there.

Butler didn’t say a word in response. He looked his teammates and nodded his head.

With about eight minutes left in the third quarter, Boston is pushing again. Down three. They had already taken a momentary lead early in the period after trailing by two at the break, answered by a ludicrous Max Strus three with one second on the shot clock. Now they’re back at the summit, about to grapple the final ledge.

Butler catches the ball on the right wing, drawing Robert Williams in a cross match. Williams stands on the arc, arms out wide. Once between the legs, and Butler makes his move. He doesn’t so much as beat Williams as he gets into him, creating just enough space to cross the plane from the right hemisphere of the rim to the left. The ball goes up awkwardly, but it travels just high enough to get up over the rim. Just barely. It sits there. One beat passes. Another. The lead goes back to five.

Dwyane Wade usually only reaches out in times of great need. The morning of Game 6 was one of those times. A phone call. A text message. Something Butler needed to hear.

Butler’s knee might be banged up, Wade relayed in his messages, but nobody cares. These are the nights when you build your legacy.

“It meant the world to me,” Butler said.

You can never know when a game like this is going to happen. You can think. You can guess. You can project. You can hope. You can’t know. Not for certain. But certain players make you think it’s possible. They make you believe.

Butler had earned that belief before. Had shown he could be the last man standing and emerge victorious, at least for a night. Two years ago he dropped 40 and 35-point triple doubles on LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers to stave off defeat in the NBA Finals despite the team being ravaged with injuries. Two of the greatest Finals performances anyone has ever seen. He showed everyone what it looked like to empty the tank.

He had been rolling in that postseason, playing as well as ever. You could easily argue he was topping that postseason run this time around, having dropped three 40-point games, averaging 30 along the way. Atlanta had no chance. Philadelphia challenged him to be a scorer more than a playmaker and he obliged. In Game 1 against Boston, he dropped 41 points on 19 shots. But even with Miami taking Game 3, the previous three games combined for one of the worst stretches of his career. 27 total points on 10-of-40 shooting. He was not, by any stretch, his usual self.

“I let my team down a couple of games,” Butler told ESPN during his walkoff interview.

With about 11 minutes left in the fourth quarter, Boston is back within four. Ime Udoka has stuck Horford on Butler, as he did down the stretch of Game 5, mimicking the choices of past coaches to put the likes of Anthony Davis and Giannis Antetokounmpo on Butler to keep him away from the rim. Tucker screens Horford off of Butler, who drives on Grant Williams. Pullup. Contact. Foul. Boston is back down seven.

Udoka clearly trusts Horford. He’s right to, but you can tell how much a coach trusts a defender by how much help they offer them. Doc Rivers trusted Joel Embiid to keep Butler away from the rim while shutting down Miami’s shooters. Butler averaged 32 points in the games that Embiid played, shooting 55 percent. Boston is doing the same. A minute after the score over Grant Williams, it’s one-on-one. Ten paces on the main drag. No help coming. No shooters to find. Nowhere to hide.

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Celtics Game 6: Jimmy Butler Attack Al Horford One-On-One

In the grand scheme of it all, maybe this is a win for Horford. If you force the shot Butler takes here, a fading jumper off a reverse pivot, over and over again, with a good contest, the percentages are probably going to work out in your favor.

Averages don’t matter in the fourth quarter of an elimination game. You get the shots you get. You make them, or you go on vacation.

Horford did everything right. Butler passes the test regardless. He passes nearly every test. His 29 field-goal attempts tie his career postseason high, and with Miami sending plenty of help, in the gaps, with blitzes or with straight up doubles at Boston’s two stars, those 29 shots are more than Tatum and Jaylen Brown take combined (26).

Butler wasn’t alone in this one, not hardly. The offensive burden was his to bear, but Kyle Lowry has his best scoring performance of the playoffs despite dealing with his own injury. A 5-of-14 in the box score isn’t going to make you look twice, but Miami doesn’t win without his four - one of them tying the game after Boston took a late three-point lead - or Strus’ three triples. Tucker and Bam Adebayo grab five offensive boards to complement their typically exceptional defense. Butler put his name on the game. His teammates gave him a hammer and a chisel.

With eight minutes left in the fourth, Boston is surging. The HEAT were just up nine. Now they’re up two after a pair of Brown free-throws. Butler catches in the left corner with Marcus Smart in front of him. Tucker moves to set a screen, to get Butler the White matchup on the switch. Butler doesn’t wait. Another three, and Miami is back up five.

It’s not always the best sign of healthy offense if Butler is shooting threes. Of the rotation players who take them – pretty much everyone who isn’t Adebayo – Butler’s percentages are typically the least inspiring. It is not what you would call Option No. 1, not by any stretch. Even after hitting a bunch of them earlier in the postseason, Butler was shooting 32 percent from deep coming into this game. But Butler has continuously shown that the percentages can be damned. Sometimes you aren’t going to get a great look, aren’t going to have a traditionally healthy offensive possession, no matter what you do. That’s the playoffs. Sometimes you just have to be willing.

It’s one of two corner threes Butler would make in the game, as many as the Celtics hit as a team. He scores 20 points on 14 isolations.

The easy and obvious and fair comparison is to James’ 45-point Game 6 in Boston back in 2012. Nearly identical situations, though the stakes were a little different for that HEAT team, having fallen to Dallas in the previous NBA Finals, under possibly the most scrutiny of any group in the history of professional sports. James stole Boston’s soul early in that one. He hushed the crowd in the opening minutes and neither they, nor the Celtics, could muster anything for him. Complete and utter domination.

The crowd on Friday night had hope. Again and again, the Celtics were right there. Either making it a one possession game or outright taking a lead. Again and again, Butler stood firm. Indomitable. The silencer.

“Jimmy brought his competitive will tonight, and it was a will that would not let us lose,” Erik Spoelstra said.

With six minutes left in the fourth, it’s a one-point game after a pair of Tatum free-throws. How many times is this the moment where the home team follows the script? They make their run, the building comes to life, they never look back. Instead, Butler comes off a screen, puts his head down, barrels through Tatum’s swiping arm and sheds Smart, arms up and not fouling, to free himself for a short jumper.

Butler’s 22 drives are a series high for any player, topping Tatum’s previous high of 17. He almost hits as many two pointers (8) in the second half as the entire Celtics team (9). He ties his season high with 20 points in the paint.

With two minutes left in the game, it’s tied. Brown had just missed a pair of free-throws. Butler has the ball on the right wing. Boston doesn’t want to switch White, a good defender but giving up some size, onto Butler. Or at least it doesn’t look like they want to. It looks like White is supposed to hedge out on Butler, stop the ball, and let Smart recover to the man. If that’s the case, the coverage is blown. White doesn’t stop anything. Smart doesn’t recover. Butler gets a full head of steam, charges the lane and goes right at Horford’s chest. And one.

In the entire postseason history of the league, only Russell Westbrook had ever posted numbers to match Butler’s 47 points, nine rebounds, eight assists and four steals - each of them distributing run-stopping silence on their own. Westbrook needed 43 shots to do it that night in 2017. In making over half his attempts, Butler put up a statistical line that had never happened before. Ever. Even including regular season games, only the likes of Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Rick Barry and James Harden matched Butler’s line. Those performances didn’t happen with a season, with championship hopes, on the line.

“The game speaks for itself,” Adebayo says.

The dagger comes in the final minute. Boston clings to hope down four. Miami has to take the ball out of bounds in the corner, directly in front of Boston’s bench. There’s 2.2 on the shot clock.

Butler posts up Smart 20 feet out. Fakes right. Spins left. White comes over to help and contest. Mike Breen lets out an ‘It’s good’. Scanning the seats, you can see multiple heads fall into multiple sets of hands. Twenty thousand hearts break in unison, and that’s not even counting those at home.

It’s also an incredibly tough shot. With Boston posting its best Shot Quality – expected effective field goal percentage based on the shots taken and how well they were contested – of the series on one end, Miami’s number sits about where it’s been for the last four games, in a range that would have been one of the worst marks for the regular season. The HEAT score 21 points in the last three seconds of the shot clock, one off their own season high and the most late-clock points Boston has surrendered all season. It was notable when Philadelphia did the same to Miami, and it’s notable now. It’s a tough way to live, and would be tough to replicate in Game 7.

It also doesn’t matter now that Butler has given Miami the gift of life. There’s no guarantee that Game 7 will have to play out the same way, nor that the same will be required of Butler. It may be that Butler will have to step out into the midday sun, little hand and big hand both pointing right at twelve, and face down the same opponent. Or another hero could emerge. That’s for then.

For now, Butler gave Miami a chance to keep figuring it out. It wasn’t just a game to remember. You won’t have to remember. You will be reminded of it, on broadcasts and in articles, in tweets and in memes and in feeds. It will be recorded in every volume. A shared experience for everyone in the sport that will one day transition into legend.

No matter how the context changes in the coming days or weeks, Jimmy Butler’s 47 will never go away. Because, as Lowry so eloquently put it, ‘it was f****** incredible.’

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High Noon: Jimmy Butler Serves Up Silence In Recording His Masterpiece

There have been times in this bizarro series where it has looked like the Miami HEAT were playing against themselves. One dynamic, super-switchy team going toe-to-toe with another, each side employing similar tactics to tighten their grips on the paint. You won’t find any defense more like Miami than Boston.

“It’s like we’re looking in the mirror,” Bam Adebayo said.

“It’s like we’re literally looking at our twin,” Tyler Herro said.

What makes each unit so good defensively is that they have the versatility, the intelligence and the quick-twitch precision to execute a variety of schemes. They don’t have to switch everything, nor do they defend each opponent the same way. It’s that variety that allows them to take away what you do best, to force Trae Young and James Harden to adopt a strict outside-looking-in diet, to deny Joel Embiid his comfort zones, to repeatedly knock Kevin Durant off his spots or to cut off all of Giannis Antetokounmpo’s air supply.

It’s because these defenses, so similar in their capacity for change, adapt so seamlessly that their opponents often perish in such an ugly fashion, forced to live their offensive lives on the edge. Forced to be something other than themselves.

It’s because these defenses are so similar, that neither Miami nor Boston looks much like themselves at all.

If they’re looking in the mirror, the image they see only resembles their own. It’s a version of themselves possessed by a Kandarian demon, and it’s reaching out to apply hands to neck. If they’re looking at their twin, it’s because they can’t see themselves. You think you’re looking at you because it looks like you, but you don’t look like you. You’ve exchanged faces with someone else. Now you look like Nic Cage. It’s like looking in the mirror, only not.

Miami’s offense was nearly unrecognizable in the early stages of Game 4. They were missing shots at a historic rate, but they weren’t missing their shots. They weren’t getting their shots. They shot 3-of-20 in the first quarter. None of them were corner threes – which Miami took the second most of during the regular season – and only one of them was at the rim. Everything was in-between, and the HEAT are not an in-between team.

“We just kind of settled in and just took the first available contested shot,” Erik Spoelstra said. “Against a great defense like they have, or conversely, against us, if you fall prey to that, you're going to feel like you're in quicksand.”

They might have played their own part in wandering into the sand, as Spoelstra also noted they weren’t exactly running their offense with “great intention.” But the sand has its say as well, and struggle as you might if you don’t find a way to pull yourself clean out, you’ll only sink deeper. Boston ensured Miami sunk, for a quarter at least, about as deep they as they could possibly go as their 11 points – following eight minutes without a field goal – was the lowest scoring opening period in franchise postseason history. Boston did it with some adjustments we’ve seen before from HEAT opponents, and from the HEAT themselves.

You can’t really put it any other way other than Robert Williams, in the limited time he’s been able to play with his knee injury, has posed a problem. Miami has already been at a Shot Quality disadvantage in this series, with their number – which represents the expected effective field-goal percentage on their shots – dropping from 51.6 (Rank 18) in the regular season to 50.1 (would Rank 30) in this series. Boston, meanwhile, has been right around their usual number regardless of who the HEAT have on the court.

With Williams playing, Miami’s Shot Quality drops even further down to 49.8 – each decimal tick is more meaningful here given the relatively thin range of values at play – and down to 48.7 with Horford on the court. When either one of those two are in the game, Boston has been around +23 points per 100 possessions.

Adebayo gave Horford the business in Game 3, there’s no doubt about that. He attacked early and often in transition, and the HEAT were able to give him plenty of space to attack in one-on-one situations. In Game 4, Horford pushed back, immediately pressuring Adebayo out to the three-point line – just as the HEAT did to Embiid – to stall out the offense. Horford was generally brilliant, holding Miami to a 62.5 Offensive Rating in his 33 minutes, but it was the combination of Horford on the ball and Williams off the ball that presented the most trouble.

Let’s take a look at one of Miami’s first pick-and-rolls in Game 4.

The first thing you’ll notice is that Horford is in drop coverage. Boston may switch more than any team in the league, but they aren’t a one-trick pony. Like Miami with Adebayo, they’ll toggle between multiple coverages to keep you off balance, and they’ve been fairly assertive with when to be conservative. Namely, if Butler is handling the ball they’ll either go under the screen entirely or play a traditional drop to mitigate the damage Adebayo can do, and has done, slipping the screen mid-switch. The HEAT have handled that coverage pretty well – though having a healthy Tyler Herro and/or Kyle Lowry helps quite a bit there – scoring an exquisite 1.22 points-per-screen against drop in this series, that number drops all the way down to 0.97 with Horford on the court.

Also in that above image you’ll notice how Williams is cheating off of P.J. Tucker to seal off the rim. Williams is there so early, in fact, that Horford doesn’t even have to align himself square with Butler’s potential drive, he can simply play the space in between and take away the lob threat to Adebayo – a threat that worked wonders in Game 3, with Williams unavailable – knowing that he’s not alone.

How Williams was playing that pick-and-roll wasn’t a one-off. It's what he was doing all throughout the second half of the season as Boston's defense gained steam.

Where Philadelphia opted to defend most of these Butler-Adebayo actions two-on-two while cutting off access to the HEAT’s shooters, a strategy which both worked and didn’t work, Boston isn’t allowing nearly as much space. A pick-and-roll becomes a two-on-three proposition, with Ime Udoka trusting one of his capable wing defenders to manage the space between two possible HEAT shooters away from the ball, always favoring the more deadly of the two (often Max Strus).

With Boston also taking a page out of Milwaukee’s book and experimenting with having Williams be Butler’s primary defender on a handful of possessions, creating a facsimile of what last year’s Bucks’ series looked like at times with Antetokounmpo taking on that assignment, it’s a well-worn strategy for keeping Butler and his teammates away from the rim. Butler was 1-of-7 on non-rim two-pointers in the first half. The HEAT were 4-of-24 as a team.

“We settled for too many mid-range jump shots, myself included,” Butler said.

The 31 non-rim paint attempts Miami took was the second-highest total of the season, and the highest with the regulars available. Their three attempts at the rim in the first half were the second fewest of the season.

Typically, a HEAT game against Milwaukee features a decent number of those mid-range looks by design. When the HEAT hit enough of those shots, or drain threes at high-volume – something they do against the Bucks at a fairly outlandish rate – they’ll beat that defense. But what Boston managed to pull off in Game 4, with their ability and willingness to switch off-ball actions while playing somewhat conservatively in the middle of the floor, is that none of the great three-point looks that are typically available against Milwaukee were there. Their two corner-three attempts in the first half tied a season low.

Requisite passing angles are there. If Tucker is in the corner, that’s traditionally a great look. Enough of those can turn a game. Miami just couldn’t ever really get him the ball. Midway through the second quarter Butler ran another pick-and-roll with similar spacing, Horford cheating off of Tucker, and he tried to deliver the ball to Tucker. Except the pass was low and away, and by the time Tucker was able to mechanically recover and threaten to launch, the closeout was already right on top of him. At other teams, HEAT players were simply too close, or even right on top of, each other, making it far too easy for the Celtics to split the difference between two shooters with one defender.

Boston’s defense was a razor blade. Miami’s offense was operating with all the edge of melting butter.

“We need to move the ball around, get it to the open guy and let that guy make the play and live with what we get out of it,” Butler said.

Of course, the HEAT are trying to do much of the same on the other end. They don’t have the size and length of Boston, but the philosophy is the same and Boston’s drives are down, as are their paint touches. Much of what we’ve spent all year talking about the Miami’s defense is working as intended. The Celtics are only scoring 108.6 points per 100, down from 113 in the regular season.

“They have the same tendencies [as us],” Adebayo said. “They get in the gaps.”

When Miami tried to get in the gaps in Game 4, the extra efforts they need to fill in behind weren’t quite there. Here Tucker pulls all the way off Grant Williams to crowd the paint, and Tatum makes the quick read for a cross-court pass.

The good news is that the Celtics didn’t have some extraordinary offensive game. They won because of their early defense and the fact that they were able to consistently get to the free-throw line – save your complaints on that one, the HEAT are being plenty physical and the Celtics played into the contact rather than on their heels in this one. Unlike some other teams, the Celtics are involving Adebayo in as few screens as possible, choosing to seek matchups small-for-small and avoid the Adebayo switch. All that twisting and turning in the halfcourt has led to some flat offense. The bad news is that Boston only shot 8-of-34 from three. Some of their misses were just misses.

More critically, Boston’s offense wasn’t helping the HEAT at all. If there are any numbers you remember from this piece, remember this: Miami is scoring 1.09 points per possession through four games. When they are able to play off a defensive rebound or a steal, they are scoring a rather absurd 1.36 points per possession. When they are playing off a Boston make, either a field-goal or a free-throw, their offensive efficiency drops down 0.97.

Those same splits are present for Boston, as they are for pretty much any team, but they aren’t nearly as dramatic. Miami’s best offense, by miles and miles and miles, has come off defensive stops. The Celtics may have been missing some shots in Game 4, but they only turned the ball over three times. In maintaining their composure and not feeding the mistakes into Miami’s transition – stops beget scores beget stops all over again, just like the last 10 minutes of MEN – while succumbing to Miami’s never-ending pressure, the Celtics were upping their chances on both ends of the court.

The reality here is that despite four fairly lopsided games – though we can’t act like Miami almost losing their big lead in Game 3 was a non-issue given how they played with advantages at times this season – Boston likely has the greater margin for error at this point. Regardless of who has more healthy bodies, the HEAT have been outscored by 28, and Boston holds a significant scoring edge in the final two-thirds of the shot clock, 1.17 points-per-possessions to Miami’s 1.06 (0.99 in the final eight seconds, while Boston’s number remains the same). The Celtics have been less reliant on the defense-to-offense-to-defense feedback loop.

“Even if it was early in the clock or halfway through the clock, we just didn't really execute with purpose and we paid the price for that,” Spoelstra said.

And yet the series is 2-2, and the HEAT have both avenues to improve and homecourt. Shooting 27.4 percent on pullup jumpers, well below their averages, is something they can reverse in a hurry. Those are shots they hit against Milwaukee in the past and against Philadelphia in the second round, and they are shots they can hit again, with Victor Oladipo adding a nice boost in that department in Game 4. With better spacing, Butler and Adebayo can find better angles to attack. If Boston is going to cheat off of good shooters, those good shooters are going to have opportunities. Boston did a nice job switching smaller guards away from danger off the ball in Game 4. If Miami plays with a little more pace in the halfcourt, they'll find those matchups again. None of what the Celtics are doing is new, and vice versa. We’re quickly reaching the point of the series where the answers lie in doing what you do, knowing what’s coming from the film, and doing it better.

The adjustments were plenty doable when the Philadelphia series was tied, 2-2, and they’re plenty doable now. Boston is better than that team, but they haven’t proven themselves infallible. Miami might need their pressure to pay off more like it in did in the first quarter of Game 3 (5 steals) and the third quarter of Game 1 (10 steals), but they’re here because they’re one of the best teams in the league at applying aggressive, physical and (more often than not) disciplined pressure. Turnovers, especially steals, might be a bit more of a high-variance play than we typically discuss them as – similar to three-point shooting – yet that doesn’t mean you sit back and let them happen. You go out and take them.

“The turnovers in the playoffs don’t feel the same as the turnovers in the regular season,” Caleb Martin said. “If you turn the ball over, it feels like it’s three turnovers just because possessions are cut short and every possession has so much importance in the playoffs.

“It’s kind of a dagger to your team whenever you turn the ball over that much.”

If turnovers are the dagger, the HEAT and Celtics must feel at times like they’re trying to stab themselves in the back. You won’t find two defenses more similar than these, yet it’s those similarities that are making these teams look, at times, very much unlike themselves.

This series may feel like looking in the mirror, only the image in the reflection may not always look like what you expect.

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Mirror's Edge: The HEAT And Celtics Defenses Couldn’t Be More Similar, And That’s Making The Offense Nearly Unrecognizable

What you’re about to see may end up being one of the greatest defensive battles in recent history.

After a torrid run through the second half of the regular season, the Boston Celtics finished as the No. 1 defense in the league. The Miami HEAT finished just behind them at No. 4, and when Bam Adebayo was available – he missed 26 games mostly due an injured thumb ligament – they had a defense that would have been No. 1. No teams switched more pick-and-rolls than these two, and no teams forced more isolations. The Celtics allowed the third-fewest direct paint touches per 100 possessions, per Second Spectrum, and with Adebayo on the court Miami allowed the second fewest.

“If both teams are on top of their games this should be a series where neither team is scoring 130,” Erik Spoelstra said. “Both teams hang their hats on rock solid team defense, making multiple efforts and being disciplined to schemes.”

Forget a rock fight, there’s a very good chance that this series is the (legally and within the rules) basketball equivalent of Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David pummeling each other for six minutes in an alleyway. Except they won’t be fighting over a pair of alien-revealing sunglasses. It’ll be a ticket to the NBA Finals, what could be Miami’s second trip in three years and sixth in the past 13, or Boston’s first since 2010.

Miami’s last Finals berth is a good place to start.

Despite ending in six games, the 2020 Conference Finals were as close as it gets. Miami finished that round with an Offensive Rating of 114.2 and Defensive Rating of 114.0, with wins of three, five and three points as they took a 3-1 series lead – a series in which they were actually outscored by a single, lonely point. The HEAT were also outscored in each of the first three quarters. So the difference, as you might guess, was in the fourth where Miami posted a Net Rating of +13.5 per 100 possessions, outscoring Boston by 22 points in all.

That may not sound all that wild in the end but consider the context. Miami had the third-worst Offensive Rating in the fourth quarter that season. Boston had the second best. But in the clutch, the last five minutes of a game when the score is within five points either way, they were fairly even, with Miami at No. 24 and Boston at No. 26. Both sides had some warning flags about their abilities to score down the stretch headed into that series, but in the postseason the HEAT swung one way – largely thanks to good three-point shooting and Jimmy Butler being something North of incredible – Boston didn’t swing at all and that was the difference. You probably remember some big Butler shots or Tyler Herro, as a rookie, going off for 37, with 17 in the fourth, of a pivotal Game 5, but so much of what worked for Miami was the stops they were getting. Whenever the Celtics couldn’t get a good look or turned the ball over, with Miami playing plenty of zone thanks to their multitude of rangy defenders, it gave the HEAT life going the other way.

Is that series relevant to this one? Does it matter? Somewhat and a little.

The core groups are mostly the same. Butler, Adebayo and Herro on one side, Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart on the other. All those players are better or, in the case of Butler, the one true veteran of the group, at the very least just as good. We’ll get to all of them in a minute. The rest of the supporting casts have changed dramatically.

On Boston’s side, for as good as Tatum and Brown and Smart already were at that time the team was still built with the talents of veteran All-Stars Kemba Walker and Gordon Hayward – who returned from an injury in Game 3 – in mind. While during the regular season all of Boston’s scoring talent made it easy for them to move Adebayo around the court and always have someone to attack one of Miami’s weaker defensive links, Hayward never looked himself in that series and Walker was continually engulfed by the HEAT’s big wings after they acquired Jae Crowder and Andre Iguodala at the trade deadline. Grant Williams and Robert Williams were on the team but were so young they weren’t quite ready for primetime. The center rotation consisted of Daniel Theis and Enes Freedom. Brad Wanamaker was playing backup point.

Since then the Celtics have reconfigured around their youth. Tatum and Brown lead the scoring. Smart starts at point. Al Horford has returned to the fold looking as good as ever. The Williamses are major rotation pieces – Robert was available, coming off an injury, to play in Game 7 of the Milwaukee series but didn’t see the court – and Derrick White, acquired at the deadline, rounds things out. They might not be quite as dynamic as the former group, but they make up for it with a precise, switching defense that features very few obvious pressure points.

Miami has undergone both more and less change. Less in the sense that Butler and Adebayo are still the featured pieces, Herro has grown into a neon lightning rod off the bench and there’s still dynamic shooting available, with Max Strus slotting into the starting lineup where Duncan Robinson was two years ago. More in the sense that everything else is different. P.J. Tucker is as good a fit as a flexible four next to Adebayo has anyone could have hoped for. Dewayne Dedmon has been a revelation as a backup center. Victor Oladipo has pushed himself into the rotation to give the HEAT a little downhill mojo and defensive stability. Gabe Vincent is the epitome of this group’s Find A Way ethos and Caleb Martin is ready to plug-and-play into any lineup at a moment’s notice. All season long this group has proven itself better, both more consistent and more potent, than that 2020 team that found another gear in the Orlando Bubble.

The big question is the status of Kyle Lowry and his hamstring. In the previous Boston series, Goran Dragic was the unsung hero as he averaged 22-5-4 on 40 percent shooting from three in Miami’s four victories. Miami may have won those games in the clutch, but Dragic kept them alive in the third and early fourth quarters. In his place is Lowry, a defensive upgrade who has consistently been the source of the HEAT’s most stable offensive flow. The HEAT have players who are more than capable of stepping up in his stead, of providing two-way impact and making plays. They just don’t offer the same dominate-a-quarter capability, on or off the ball, that Lowry does.

That’s where we are now. Both teams are different, both teams are a better, both teams have ways of getting to the other by playing to their own identity.

And for as different as these teams are, they still share similar weaknesses to the groups of two seasons ago. The HEAT’s fourth-quarter offense finished No. 21, No. 24 in the clutch. Boston was No. 26 in clutch offense and despite being No. 8 in halfcourt offense they were also reliant on that halfcourt execution with how little they added in transition. Both sides can get stuck in the muck and flattened out when the game slows down.

If anything has regularly gotten in Miami’s way, it’s their late-game offense. While their pick-and-roll numbers against switches are better than you might think – No. 6 in the league – switching, good switching, is what kills the ball movement for a team that is at its best when the ball is traveling by air rather than ground. Butler was incredible in isolation this season, No. 7 among 54 players with at least 250 isolations at 1.09 points-per, and especially so when Lowry was available to set him up. As much as Miami worked on hunting matchups this season in anticipation of the postseason, too much of one thing is never their thing.

In Boston’s two blowout wins against Miami – one early in the season, one without Butler, Lowry and Tucker – their switching reduced the HEAT’s flow to a trickle. Those were two of the most juiceless offensive performances of the season, though one of them can be mostly excused due to absences and the other occurred with Erik Spoelstra using a different rotation.

If anything has regularly gotten in Boston’s way, it’s also their offense – though less so after New Year’s, from when they had the No. 2 Offensive Rating. The defense almost always plays, but you can jam them up with switching and get them playing one-on-one. Sound familiar?

That’s not exactly what happened when the HEAT went up to Boston in March and took the fourth quarter, 27-15, on their way to an eight-point win – a game that featured Lowry shooting 6-of-12 from three. Even with Miami locked in defensively, the Celtics never stopped moving the ball. Brown missed a dunk and a layup, they missed some corner threes with Miami aggressively helping off the strong side to get in the way of drives, Tatum only attempted three shots and they shot 6-of-22 overall, 1-of-8 from deep. Meanwhile the HEAT didn’t earn one shot at the rim in the halfcourt, but shooting 5-of-9 on non-rim two’s, most coming from Butler, was enough.

Curiously, Butler was able to shake free in the mid-range because Boston did what Philadelphia just finished doing. They spent a lot of time hugging Miami’s shooters while defending Butler’s pick-and-roll two-on-two, exactly the reason Butler was giving the 76ers fits with his constant forays into the paint while optimal three-point looks were hard to come by.

“We’ll continually take what the Celtics give us, whether it’s an open three or getting into the paint,” Butler said.

We might end up seeing is the same dichotomy we just witnessed in the last series. The HEAT showing Boston’s best scorer in Tatum a crowd to limit his aggression, the Celtics cutting off Miami’s shooters and putting the weight on Butler’s back. Then again, Ime Udoka might watch that film, see what Butler did with games of 33, 40 and 32 points, and decide against taking that path. And Tatum is a much-improved playmaker, with more height than Trae Young or James Harden, so giving him passing lanes may be a trickier matter than it was two years ago. Maybe this entire series comes down to each side executing a similar scheme, switching and loading up the gaps and building a shell around the paint while allowing threes in bunches. That’s what the HEAT do normally, and it would hardly be a departure for a Boston squad that limited paint touches slightly more. That’s the larger point with what we’re about to see. Either team has the personnel to execute just about anything their coaches can think up.

“They have a lot of defensive leaders, guys that are vocal, they’re physical, and they’re really, really good at communicating,” Tucker said. “It’s a lot of the same traits that we have, too.”

It would be surprising if we didn’t see some zone on Miami’s part. No team faced more zone than Boston this season, by about 80 possessions over the team in second place, for good reason. They scored 1.01 points-per-possession against zone, third worst in the league. We’re only talking 460 possessions so it’s not a huge sample, but teams clearly saw something that made them use it, and Spoelstra has never been afraid to dial up various zone looks starting with a full-court press that drops back to shorten the shot clock. There’s history here, too, as Miami used zone against Boston in that 2020 series for a whopping 188 possessions, against which the Celtics scored 1.07 points-per.

But Boston didn’t have Horford’s skills nor his composure in the middle of the floor that year. With Horford on the court, Boston’s efficiency against zone jumps up to 1.09. Not a great number, but one that is survivable in a tight playoff game. Udoka, who Spoelstra was kind enough to remind everyone was on the bench for San Antonio during those epic Finals series in 2013 and 2014, is not going to be caught off guard.

We could go on for pages about every little tweak each coach could try. Does Boston send help at Herro when he comes off a screen? Does Tatum earn himself any hard doubles? Which shooters will either coach be comfortable playing off of in order to keep another foot in the paint? In which scenarios will the switchiest teams in the league actively avoid switches, or can they effectively pre-switch a screen to keep who they want involved in the action? How do the Celtics work around Adebayo on defense and how often can Adebayo punish switches on offense by slipping screens? How does Miami attack the paint if Robert Williams is good to go and back to defending off-center, looming in the paint to deter all comers – a look Caleb Martin was more than happy to attack back in January? Does either team want to or need to play smaller lineups with so many versatile defenders on hand?

Each side has a dozen answers for each question and the ability to raise another dozen questions with their own decisions. By the time we get a handle on the details of how these teams have chosen to defend, everything could change by the next game.

There will be no panacea in this series. No elixir that one coach can cook up that will decide who advances. These teams are too good for that, and they have too many options. The best path either side has to scoring might be to get stops and play off misses and turnovers. Miami was already keeping their halfcourt offense afloat against Philadelphia with some timely offensive rebounding, and they might need to dial that up even more against a Boston team that finished No. 17 in Defensive Rebounding percentage. Boston rarely gets to the line, so Miami’s occasional propensity for fouling might not be as much of an issue this time around.

Whoever wins, they’ll win it in the margins. They’ll stagnate their opponent’s offense more often than they get stagnant themselves. They’ll move and cut and make themselves difficult to guard. They’ll find ways to get three, four or five easy baskets even when they seem impossible. They’ll win loose balls, and they’ll be more composed. At some point, they’ll be the ones to hit more threes in the right game, or they’ll hit a couple tough shots in the final minutes. They’ll be great, in every sense.

The winner is going to have to earn this, and there’s no better kind of series than one that has to be won in the trenches.

the-multiverse-of-defense-behind-jimmy-butler-and-jayson-tatum-the-eastern-conference-finals-features-two-teams-that-can-and-will-do-anything-and-everything-to-stop-you

The Multiverse Of Defense: Behind Jimmy Butler And Jayson Tatum, The Eastern Conference Finals Features Two Teams That Can And Will Do Anything And Everything To Stop You