Anthony Davis

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Couper Moorhead

1. The first half of this game isn’t going to be winning any blue ribbons at the state fair, that’s for sure, but the finish was one of the HEAT’s best.

This may have been a rematch of the 2020 NBA Finals, minus Jimmy Butler, but what a matchup looks like on paper doesn’t matter once the clock starts and from that moment this was as much of a regular season grind as any we’ve seen this year. Miami wasn’t playing their best basketball, certainly not shooting their best, but they were the more active, energetic group, sharper where the Los Angeles Lakers were dull. After six minutes the Lakers had six turnovers – a combination of Miami’s disruptive defensive philosophy and some remarkably poor passing – and it didn’t get much better from there as they finished the first quarter with 10 giveaways while shooting 0-of-7 from three. Miami’s offense wasn’t there in the halfcourt, but they took those steals and did what they needed to do, eventually pushing the lead to double digits and forcing the Lakers to play from behind while stalled out by the zone.

Behind positive minutes from Nikola Jovic (2-of-4 from three in the first half, running a few breaks) and a late surge from Tyler Herro (13 points on 12 shots in the first half) Miami led 53-45 at the break despite making just 41 percent of their shots. You don’t have to play your best basketball every night to win, you just have to play better basketball than the other guys. LeBron James (12 points on 18 shots) was just 2-of-9, the zone loading up the paint against him as his shooters failed to convert.

Proceedings did not exactly upgrade in their execution in the second half, the Lakers reaching 19 turnovers midway through the third, as Miami remained up nine – a margin that could have been twice as much had more threes fallen or had they capitalized on more of their many fast-break opportunities. The zone remained productive with the Lakers missing from outside, but just as it was against the Clippers Monday night the opposition slowly started to find a groove against the coverage, this time Anthony Davis (29 points on 17 shots) getting comfortable at the nail, enough to have Los Angeles within five after three.

A nice start to the fourth, a couple threes falling and offensive boards rewarding to get Miami back up 10 after the Lakers had closed it to two. Both teams just needed one guy to get hot to take the night, and Duncan Robinson (11 points in the fourth) was more than happy to oblige in this one, transforming what had been one of his worst shooting performances of the season into a game-winning one. Some nights you win ugly, and two weeks later nobody remembers it as anything but a win, tonight going 110-96 in favor of Miami as all eight players in the regular rotation hit double figures capped off by Jaime Jaquez Jr. hitting a tough turnaround over James on the block.

2. Through three quarters the story was Los Angeles fighting both themselves and Miami’s defensive positioning, multiple feet in the paint at all times when an attacker had the ball, as the turnovers mounted. Perhaps most important, more than half of those were of the live-ball variety. Miami averages 7.5 steals per game, tonight the almost doubled that up with 14. Had the HEAT’s transition efficiency been better – they missed a number of open threes on advantage breaks – this would not have been as close as it was early in the final period.

But as it has happened so often, those turnovers dried up in the fourth quarter, which has partially been the case for the HEAT’s fourth quarter struggles as they’ve faced more field-goal attempts as the game slows down the stretch. Tonight, the past was irrelevant as Miami outscored the Lakers 38-29 in that final period, one of their best of the season as the threes started to fall and the energy kept up, Miami’s offense moving and shaking while the Lakers spent precious seconds staring down defensive formations, forcing little movement and fewer rotations. The HEAT were playing the better game for much of the night without the results that typically comes from that designation, but as they continued to play the better game the tide turned. Robinson got things started with those early-fourth splashes and Jaquez Jr. (16 points on 14 shots) may have followed up at just the right time with some makes of his own, including that score over James that you’ll see all over social media on Thursday, but it was the way Miami played, precise and mistake free, that allowed the make-or-miss (38.1 percent from three by the close) to stretch the lead.

3. Basketball analysts have for years debated how much control a defense has over the opposing percentages from deep, and the only thing everyone can really agree on is that it’s at least more control than they have over opposing free-throw percentages.

So what, then, do we make of Los Angeles’ futility from deep – 4-of-30 for 13.3 percent – tonight? Do we give credit to the HEAT for their activity, contests and closeouts? Do we blame the Lakers for missing a variety of good, open looks? The answer is always a little bit of both. The Lakers are not a particularly good three-point shooting team, and were without one of their better shooters in D’Angelo Russell, so it made perfect sense that Miami would go back to their zone (a season high 47 possessions of it, allowing 0.78 ppp) to force the Lakers to take spot-up looks rather than deal with James getting downhill. Davis eventually forced Miami out of that zone with his middle catches, for a short stretch at least, but by that point the Lakers were underwater from the perimeter and they kept missing, regardless, against the man-to-man. Did Miami force James into 0-of-6 from three? Probably not. James took the same slow-roll pull-up threes he usually takes, and missed them. But with Taurean Prince going 0-of-5 and Max Christie going 2-of-9 the HEAT defense was much more attentive, and that’s the sort of thing you control regardless of scheme.

No defense can fully control what threes they give up to who, and one of the worst shooting nights – only two teams have shot worse on 30 attempts this year – is an outlier for any group, but you take the make-or-miss as it comes – for about six weeks Miami was giving up far higher percentages than their defensive Shot Quality would have projected – and remain consistent elsewhere. Tonight, Miami won largely because they were +36 points from the arc, and credit ultimately doesn’t matter.

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Coup's Takeaways: Duncan Robinson Kickstarts Dominant Fourth Quarter In Los Angeles

The locker room, as much as any room can express the feelings of a group, felt like many things, but it did not feel sad or regretful. It was tired.

Nobody knew what to expect in the coming offseason, but the end of the 2014 NBA Finals felt like the end of something. Changes were inevitable. The way the Spurs so thoroughly shredded Miami’s unique style of defense portended a reinvention, both for the team and the league. Some veterans were headed for retirement. Free agents had decisions to make. The future was in good hands, but the picture in that crystal ball was cloudy.

I wasn’t in the locker room Sunday night after the Miami HEAT’s run ended at the hands of the Los Angeles Lakers. Not many were. But from what we were able to see, it wasn’t anything like that night in San Antonio. This was a setback, relatively, but an early chapter. What you needed to know rested in the lengthy pause a normally stoic Erik Spoelstra took to wipe watery eyes before answering questions over Zoom.

“It took me a few minutes just to gather myself to be able to even figure out what to say to the team,” he said.

“These memories that we'll have, again, that transcends even the game. As disappointing as this loss was, those moments and memories in between and this whole experience will be something that we can all take with us for the rest of our careers and the rest of our lives.”

Spoelstra’s reaction recalled the final night of the 2016-17 season, when the HEAT were officially left outside looking in on the postseason having been eliminated via tiebreaker. That team, famously starting 11-30 before finishing 30-11, had captured the hearts of many in Miami and inside AmericanAirlines Arena.

"When any one of us wanted to get into team sports it was to be around a team like this," Spoelstra said that year. "We went through so much together in just a few months and really got to know each other. Through everything we've made each other better."

Meaningful as that team was at the time, and crushing as the result felt, the feeling dissipated as the weeks wore on. Even though much of the group was brought back, at the time nearly the entire team was bound for free agency. With Dwyane Wade in Chicago and the Golden State Warriors holding the mantle of the mid-2000’s dynasty, there was no mistaking that period as anything but transitional.

A couple months later, with a lottery pick they had only because they missed the playoffs, the HEAT drafted Bam Adebayo.

Little did anyone know at the time, but draft night in 2017 was the beginning of the end of that transition. Wade would return midway through the following season and get the full retirement tour as that particular, incredibly successful era in franchise history came to a close. The work was still being done, with Adebayo and Josh Richardson, Justise Winslow and Derrick Jones Jr. being developed, Duncan Robinson was signed and put on a path starting in the NBA G-League and Kendrick Nunn was signed in the final days of the 2019 season amidst Wade’s many festivities. Small beginnings in the face of a big ending.

The constant was Goran Dragic, the one-time All-NBA selection and eventual All-Star who was brought in to compete with one group that almost immediately fell apart and did nothing but smile through the years until the next contender came together. Not a soul who has spent time in his vicinity was surprised for a second that he would try and eventually succeed in getting back on the court with a torn plantar fascia, as he did in Game 6. If you ever encounter Dragic in the wild, good luck shaking the compulsion to buy the man a beer.

You know the rest. The HEAT continued the mother of all team-building runs, drafting Tyler Herro, trading Richardson and Hassan Whiteside for Jimmy Butler and Justise Winslow for veterans Andre Iguodala, Jae Crowder and Solomon Hill. Every move contributed to winning. If they were standing at the craps table the casino might have asked them to leave. Well, that’s not quite the right analogy. These weren’t dice rolls. They were calculated plays. Poker plays. Not guaranteed plays, but the right ones by the percentages.

The Bubble helped the HEAT, as it did for any team without home-court advantage or injuries to sort out or midseason trades to coalesce. You can acknowledge as much without discounting the accomplishments. Just about everyone in Orlando said repeatedly how different things were in that space, and we should probably believe them.

Most teams say they’ll be back. Jimmy Butler said so Sunday night, and he has no reason to think otherwise. But not all teams will be. There simply aren’t enough spots for it to be true for each team, each year. The HEAT just experienced years of things going one way, until everything seemed to dramatically shift the other way all at once in what became a nearly adversity-less season until injuries mounted the past couple weeks. The Heat had as many postseason wins in the final five minutes as any team since the 2002 Lakers, and that’s after a regular season in which they ranked 24th in clutch minutes. Butler had the third-most clutch points this decade, with 48. Things had to go right, as they do for any team. You do the work to put yourself in position for things to go your way.

“We're trending in the right direction,” Butler said. “We're going to learn from this. We're going to get better. We're going to come back. We're going to come back. We'll be back. That's what we're all saying in that locker room. We got guys that want to do it. We got guys that already want to get back in the gym and get to working at this thing. That's what we do here.”

Different as the feeling was in 2014, everyone thought that team would be back, too, until they weren’t. Reminding that you never know what can happen isn’t revelatory. It’s only to appreciate for a few moments more how special what just happened was before we move on to what could be.

Writers have different styles and goals when they sit down in front of a blank page. Some lean toward hardcore reporting, some weave an intricate story and others offer technical, data-driven analysis. No matter how precise a breakdown or purposefully purple the prose, it’s always important to ask yourself how the words are intended to make someone feel. There’s too much writing, as there are so many movies and shows and podcasts, for anyone to remember a specific sentence for longer than a couple of days. But years later, someone will know how the best of it all made them feel.

Few will soon forget the feeling the 2019-20 HEAT gave them. In what has been the darkest year on record in the lives of far too many, there were at least moments like Adebayo blocking Jayson Tatum or Herro dropping 37 or Butler following up Jimmy Butler’s Game 3 with Jimmy Butler’s Game 5 as he defended LeBron James and twice touched immortality. Moments of lightness, of brightness. That might not be much, but it’s something.

What’s to come will come. Another draft, another free agency period. Possibilities to discover and debate. Decisions to make. Just about everyone who worked for the team back in 2014 works for the team now. Spoelstra and his staff just put on a coaching masterclass – one timely adjustment after another as they tailored schemes and rotations to the challenge at hand – worthy of all the front-office wizardry which set it all up. The process isn’t changing.

They aren’t a rebuilding team. Not anymore. They aren’t an up-and-comer. They’re here, now. They’re expected. How that changes the microscope and the noise and the attention, we can only wait to see. Looking back, we may remember this season as the honeymoon. Or not, given how well all the pieces seem to fit together behind a player who proved nearly all he needed to prove, even without the desired result.

“This is what my team needed me to do, the organization asked of me,” Butler said. “I told them that I would win them one and I didn't hold up my end of the bargain, so that means I got to do it next year. I told Coach Pat, I told Coach Spo I'm here to win one. I didn't do my job, so moving forward, I got to hold up my end of the bargain.”

Either way, whenever next season begins it will be different, however slightly.

The HEAT haven’t quite been in this position before. They’ve had teams full of young talent that didn’t get this far, to the Finals. They’ve had star-laden, veteran squads that seemed like that had to get this far. The balance they have today, young and old, talent across the board, with flexibility ahead and success in pocket, is one franchises rarely come across.

They’re here, with promise ahead, because of all the work that culminated in one special year. Sometimes the beginning is the best part. This is the end of that beginning, but what a beginning it was.

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The End Of the Beginning

Midway through the first quarter of Game 3 in the NBA Finals, Jimmy Butler is bringing the ball up the floor. His team is trailing 2-0 and is without the services of both Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic. As Butler crosses midcourt, the paint is empty of all defensive players. Only Kentavious Caldwell-Pope stands in front of him

Butler lowers his head and shoulder and drives. Caldwell-Pope moves his feet well but Butler keeps moving his legs, like a running back pushing through initial contact. Hit. Forward. Hit. Forward. Butler gains his inches by the foot. Three dribbles later, Butler is spinning, Caldwell-Pope is underneath the rim and the ball is going in. Help never came.

This was not an isolated incident. On his way to a historic 40-point, 13-assist, 11-rebound do-it-all performance with the season on the line, Jimmy Butler just kept on truckin’.

It’s very difficult to know NBA players from afar. Butler is no different. Amid every quote that gets blasted across airwaves and social media, there’s a human being.

About a month into the regular season, with the HEAT riding high on an 8-3 start which everyone was still trying to figure out whether to file into Real or Not Real folders, I asked for 10 minutes with Butler. He was putting up his fewest shot attempts per game in over six years and I thought I had come up with some clever lead-in statistics about his occasional aversion to throwing lob passes, but mostly I just wanted to get a better feel. Plenty of players talk. Not all have substance to what they say.

A few minutes into that discussion in one of the side rooms at AmericanAirlines Arena which rarely gets hit with sunlight, Butler described his game.

“I’m not a volume scorer. I take what the game gives me. I really like my teammates to be successful, man.”

I don’t mention this because it was a particularly colorful quote. It’s certainly not the sort that’s going to get retweeted constantly for a day or two. I mention it because of how it was delivered. Eye contact. A thoughtful pause. Tone absent both braggadocio and any sense of rehearsal. Butler laid his game out in such a way that demanded belief. Everything you needed to know in the way he said everything that followed, “I can get you a bucket, but…”

We tend to put All-Star wings into fairly small buckets. Given the tremendous amount of detailed reporting available these days every unique trait a player possesses tends to get its time to shine, but eventually perimeter players reach a point where if they do not appear to be carrying the offense in the manner they are expected to then criticism find its opportunity. Where many might ask ‘Why aren’t you doing more?’ what they often mean is, ‘Why aren’t you playing like someone else?’

It’s fitting that Butler’s hang-it-in-the-Louvre Game 3 masterpiece, a 40-point triple double in the NBA Finals that had only been previously matched by Jerry West and LeBron James (in losses), fit his identity perfectly.

“Jimmy was phenomenal,” James said. “He did everything that they needed him to do tonight and he came through big time in a big-time game.”

In an era where shooting is more in demand than ever, Butler was the first player since 2014 to score 40 points in a playoff game without attempting a single three. And the first since Dirk Nowitzki in 2011 to do it in the Conference Finals or later.

The only other players to do that in the NBA Finals since the three-point line was created? Shaquille O’Neal and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

“How else do you say it other than Jimmy-effing-Butler,” Erik Spoelstra said.

Butler has only taken 25 shots 10 times in the past five years. For comparison, each of the Los Angeles Lakers’ two stars crossed that threshold in over 50 games during the same time period. As he said, volume is not part of his modus operandi. When he tops 30 points, it’s usually because he’s efficient from the floor and is getting to the foul line. In Game 3 Butler only took 20 shots, joining Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley and Chris Webber as the only players to put up 40-point triple doubles on 70 percent shooting – in any game, postseason or otherwise.

Only four of those 20 shots were outside the paint, and those four were all within a foot of it. Butler’s 26 points in the paint were a career-high. Relentless is the operating word. No fancy moves. No blazing first steps leaving his defender in the dust. Over and over Butler went into, at and through whoever was in front of him after some Spoelstra-designed actions to shake James.

Without Bam Adebayo for the last two games, the HEAT have been forced to be a different team. Adebayo is both so central and essential to everything they try to do offensively that it’s impossible to fully replicate even with players in possessions of similar skills. Instead of trying to be the HEAT with Adebayo when Adebayo wasn’t playing, the HEAT settled on something a little different in many of Game 3’s most important stretches. Put four shooters on the floor, put the ball in Butler’s hands and make the defense pick a poison.

If you found yourself wondering how Butler got so many one-on-one attacks against favorable matchups, that’s how. It was evident in Game 2 that the Lakers were selling out to stop the HEAT’s shooters, pressuring them off screens in such a way that it freed up rim rollers when they slipped out of contact. Miami couldn’t get a stop that night, but they scored plenty as they hung 50-40-90 shooting percentages on one of the league’s top defenses.

In Game 3 those free rolls were still there, but more often than not the Lakers found a way to stick with shooters and chose to play Butler one-on-one.

Butler ran 33 pick-and-rolls. The HEAT scored 1.43 points per possession when it resulted in an attack or assist opportunity.

Butler drove to the rim 24 times, per Second Spectrum, the same number he had in Game 2. Of the 22 he used, he produced 31 team points.

When things flattened out and it was squarely on Butler to make a play, he produced 14 points out of 12 isolations, two off his season high. On any possession that Butler touched the ball, the HEAT scored 1.26 points per. Butler had 131 touches.

“I got the easy job,” Butler said. “These guys create so much space for me, I get to shoot whenever I’m open, pass whenever I’m not.”

We’re often using the term ‘produced’ because it wasn’t just about Butler scoring or drawing fouls. He had those 13 assists, too. When the Lakers grew tired of Butler attacking in space, help was punished.

“When he’s getting to the basket, all five guys are looking at him,” Tyler Herro said. “Obviously we have a couple guys that are more than capable at shooting.”

“You can’t leave those guys, because if you do I’m passing it to them,” Butler said.”

What mattered most was that those spread lineups held up defensively. Brilliant as Butler was, he was nearly as impressive in Game 2 albeit with a lower scoring total (25 points). In Game 3 the HEAT got stops, throwing more bodies at Anthony Davis (in foul trouble for most of the first three quarters) in man-to-man coverage and helping on James wherever possible. After posting the third-worst Defensive Rating ever (134.8), Miami’s defensive effort (104.0) equaled those we saw earlier in the playoffs against Indiana and Milwaukee. The Lakers hadn’t been outscored by 26 points with Davis on the floor all season until Sunday night, and his 50 touches were a postseason-low aside from a 17-minute, blowout victory over Portland in the first round.

Butler was a huge part of that, too, staying attached to James for a full eight minutes of his 44 minutes night and somehow never tiring despite hitting the floor multiple times.

“This is why Jimmy prepares the way he does, years round, is to deal with that physicality,” Spoelstra said. “To draw fouls and take contact and to be able to get up and make the free-throws.”

The Lakers still have James and Davis. They still lead 2-1, and the health of Miami’s injured players is still in question. We have only just entered the midpoint of the series. But win or lose, like Roy McAvoy’s 12 with a more positive spin, nobody will soon forget Butler’s stubborn 40. It was and will be immortal.

Toward the end of that November conversation, Butler made sure to note that he wanted to know how the team would respond to adversity, having not lost two in a row to that point. In some ways, he never really found out. Five times the HEAT faced consecutive losses and four times they responded with a win, only losing three in a row while shorthanded on a West Coast trip around the trade deadline. There were no cracks in the façade. The lines never broke. A team that seemingly came together over a single offseason cruised through the regular season like a team that had been together for years, with a leader who was both new and seemed to have been in Miami all along. The gravy train never came to a stop. Until the NBA Finals, they never trailed in a playoff series.

It wasn’t until this week that Butler found what he was looking for, with his team on the verge of losing three-straight with a championship on the line. Given the role he played, maybe he had the answer all along.

“It's so settling when you have that type of guy in a really competitive game like this,” Spoelstra said. “It allows your other guys, and we're playing young guys, they can just be who they are, they don't have to worry about too much pressure or context. They can just be who they are when you have somebody like that that takes on all the pressure for them.”

After a year, can I say I truly know Butler? No. But there is a sincerity to him that reveals itself the more time you spend in his vicinity. Beneath it all is a guy, one that Dwyane Wade vouched for while looking Spoelstra and Pat Riley in the eye, who says he is only about one thing. It’s hard not to believe Butler the way he says that, but it’s impossible not to believe him when he shows it like he just did.

“Everybody remembers winning,” Butler said. “I don’t care how many points you score. All they care about is if you won or lost.”

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Jimmy Butler Is That Walkin' Dude

The Miami HEAT’s run to the NBA Finals in the strangest, and most heartbreaking, of years is improbable. Sure. So many things have had to go right over the last 12-plus months to get to this point that you’d be forgiven for thinking that sometime in 2019 Burnie was sent on a quest to find the Oracle of Delphi. Even then it might still shock you the degree to which everything in South Florida has been coming up Millhouse. All of that can be true, but this is not an accident.

The HEAT are in the NBA Finals because they plan to be.

Best laid plans guarantee nothing. There’s plenty that’s out of your control in the NBA, both on and off the court. Even a sure-fire run can come to a screeching halt just the same as teams that miss the playoffs, like both the Los Angeles Lakers and HEAT, can come surging back into the picture. What matters to the HEAT is the work. Erik Spoelstra has quoted Dumb and Dumber in reference to many things over the years, ‘So you’re telling me there’s a chance?’, but there’s always a kernel of truth to it. If something can be done, this is a group of people, players and staff, that work together to do it no matter how long the odds.

“So much of this league is just about alignment,” Spoelstra said. “Who cares what you believe in, who cares what your culture is, can you get a group of people that are aligned?”

That alignment is what makes a run like this possible. It makes it so when drafting Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro in the late lottery works out exceedingly well, when you attract a star like Jimmy Butler in free agency, when veterans like Goran Dragic stand by you and trade acquisitions like Andre Iguodala and Jae Crowder fit in and signings like Duncan Robinson and Kendrick Nunn add incredible value, you’re already set up to put all those individual successes into something meaningful. There’s little to figure out. The figuring out has been done before things started working out.

And now they get to play the true underdogs, fairly. If you’re asking if the HEAT can beat an excellent Lakers team in seven games, of course they can. Things far more unlikely have gone and continue to go their way. You don’t need to look any further than the 2004 Detroit Pistons and 2011 Dallas Mavericks for teams that knocked off elite, historic collections of talent. Those teams defended, they played together, they were resilient in tough moments and in Dallas’ case they shot the ball extremely well. Sound familiar? Those teams were both undervalued headed into those series, and they didn’t get to play on a neutral court, either.

Maybe the HEAT bring home their fourth NBA title in the past 20 years. Maybe the Lakers get their sixth in the same stretch. What matters is that the HEAT plan to win until rules and regulations say they can’t. There’s a chance, probably a better one than they’re getting credit for, and they know it.

“We know who we’re facing,” Spoelstra said.

Ever try to put together a bookshelf from IKEA?

It’s not neuroscience. You crack open the surprisingly tightly sealed box that you somehow fit in your car despite it being the length of a surfboard, separate all the large pieces and rip all the plastic bags open letting the various screws and dowels and other un-nameable trinkets fall to the floor – unless you’re a maniac like yours truly who wastes time sorting out each individual piece and neatly grouping them together. Then you open up the instruction booklet which contain precious few words because Sweden, figure out what piece is what and where to start and 30 minutes to two hours later you have yourself a bookcase. Simple enough. Except, damn, you just finished step 20 and it turns out the piece you installed in Step 12 is in the wrong place and the top of the shelf isn’t fitting flush with the sides.

Well, where you put long double-sided screw F in spot 7 where it should have gone in spot 11, LeBron James just got a dunk and is now running back on defense.

Everyone knows what they want to do against James. Build the wall in transition and load up help defenders to keep him out of the paint, where even after all these years he still does a pretty good Shaquille O’Neal impersonation around the rim. If that sounds like how Miami treated League MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo in the second round, that’s the idea Do everything you can to keep James out of the paint when he has the ball in his hands. Miami executed that scheme well before, they can do it again, right?

While Antetokounmpo is beginning his reign in the top tier of NBA players, James has seen and beaten the same coverages – he beat Golden State’s switch-everything look, too, which Miami has at times emulated – for well over a decade. Allowing for the possibility that Erik Spoelstra turns over some stone the league has missed, James has seen it all. Granted James’ jumper, a key tool to making a paint-protection scheme pay as James did against San Antonio in 2013, comes and goes as he shot about as well as Anteokounmpo on pull-up jumpers this year. But he also just ended Denver’s run with an outside flurry. Shooting will always be a variable. Where James really punishes you for missing one step in the manual is his all-time playmaking. You might be on the opposite side of the court from LeBron, ready to help in the paint, but if you’re not spaced perfectly, if you’re one step too far in one direction, he’ll whip a pinpoint pass to a shooter before you even realize the ball is in the air.

As far as defending James one-on-one, you can’t do much better than having Jimmy Butler, Andre Iguodala, Jae Crowder and Bam Adebayo to throw at him – two of whom weren’t even on the roster when these teams last played – but defending James is rarely a one-man show. At least it isn’t until the game, and clock, dictates it.

What has separated the Lakers, offensively, from some of James’ previous world-beaters is that they haven’t been a particularly good shooting team. They aren’t bad by any means, as they made corner threes at over a 40 percent clip during the regular season and shot plenty of them thanks to James’ passing, but they were the second-worst team on above-break threes at 32.9 percent. That rate has ticked up in the playoffs as the Lakers are making non-corner threes at nearly the same rate as Miami after the HEAT struggled through the middle of the Eastern Conference Finals against Boston, but the Lakers know who they are and do their best not to fire away without a purpose.

Still, in that weakness lies Miami’s path to getting consistent stops over the course of the series.

Instead, the Lakers live at the rim where they led the league in efficiency and were second in volume. Part of that comes from them being a force in transition – something Miami typically defends well but as with everything else a good James pass can beat you even when you think you’ve done it all right – but they’re also creative about using their length and athleticism. In non-transition possessions the Lakers converted 159 lobs this season, nearly twice as many as the HEAT. The only other team over 100 was Brooklyn at 118.

One of those lob threats happens to be pretty good.

Where things get complicated with the Lakers is they also have Anthony Davis, who is so good he should never be the “also have” part of a sentence but that’s what happens when you play with LeBron. In any normal circumstance, Davis would be the focal point of your entire scheme. With Davis on the floor with James, you’re essentially trying to build two slightly different bookcases with two different sets of instructions at the same time. It’s tough enough to load up on one player. While you’re managing what you have to manage against James, staying aware at all times of the passing lanes he can use, Davis can easily slip into the small gap in the coverage and spring free. You won’t find many better defenders for Davis than Adebayo, but Adebayo is needed to help his teammates, too.

Is zone the answer? After not using it for two rounds, Erik Spoelstra went to that look for nearly 30 percent of Miami’s possessions against the Celtics. It worked, even as the Celtics grew increasingly comfortable against it, because the zone kept the ball out of the paint far better than man-to-man. Boston’s outside-in attack, despite all their weapons, often grew stagnant trying to find the seams.

Davis might be a zone-killer. The Lakers ranked No. 10 in zone offense scoring 1.18 points per possession. With Davis on the floor, in 180 possessions, that number increased to a staggering 1.24. Those numbers were consistent against Miami’s zone, but that was how Miami looked in November and December. The HEAT as constructed today, with so much length to throw up top, are a different test. But Davis’ ability to catch the ball anywhere on the floor and thrive over the top, making half of his many attempts in mid-range, has always made zone an inconsistent solution to a complex problem.

Coupled with Davis and James’ ability to post any overloaded defense, a weapon the HEAT once comfortably used against Tom Thibodeau’s strong-side heavy Bulls, and the zone may not have the same effect it did against Boston.

If it sounds like this is all going to be difficult, that’s because it will. The challenges only get tougher, and the combination of James and Davis is as tough as they come. If the Lakers also happened to be a truly elite shooting team, like Miami is, then they might be an unstoppable juggernaut. But they aren’t, so they aren’t. The HEAT have the personnel and the coaching to figure this out. There shouldn’t be any doubts left about what they can execute, and as much top-end talent as the Lakers have they’re still susceptible to stringing together stagnant offensive possessions, even at the end of games.

Miami can get stops, but it’ll be about more than any single scheme or matchup. It’ll be about meeting the task at hand, which they’ve done again and again. How many other teams do you want building your furniture?

“We’re going to have to be damn near perfect to beat the Lakers,” Butler said. “We’re capable of it.”

Of the teams Miami has faced in the playoffs, all of which defended at a good-to-great level and all of which Miami has found a way to score efficiently against, the Lakers are the most flexible. Like Milwaukee, Frank Vogel’s group can play big with multiple center-sized players on the floor dropping back into the paint on pick-and-roll. Like Boston, the Lakers can play smaller, switch-heavy lineups that flatten you out and try to induce as much one-on-one play as possible. And as maybe only they can do it, the Lakers can do a little bit of both at the same time.

Let’s start with the Milwaukee approach. Outside of what became an outlier Game 1, the HEAT never again crossed the 40-point threshold for points in the paint. Games 2-5, even with Antetokounmpo injured for most of the final two, were largely played on the Bucks’ terms as far as them keeping the ball out of the middle of the floor and conceding a few threes in the process. Miami was more than happy to meet those terms with their full complement of shooters, taking every shooting pocket presented by those drop-back Milwaukee bigs as they made 37.2 percent of their threes on over 40 attempts per game. Miami got to the foul line plenty and created some much-needed relief points by forcing Milwaukee turnovers, but in a general sense the HEAT were able to score because they were uniquely suited to score on a defense that never really figured out how to adjust.

Boston was a change of pace as much as following up a romantic comedy with a horror movie would be – though that line might get a little blurry depending on who you ask – but Miami proved equally capable on that front posting an offensive rating (114.2 per 100) that would have been good for second during the regular season. Boston’s switching certainly accomplished its goal of flattening out Miami’s many actions, but each game a different individual took the reins. Butler drove with physicality, Goran Dragic was a nightmare cover, Tyler Herro went off for 37 points when nothing else was working and Bam Adebayo took over a series-clinching Game 6 with a collection of dribble drives directly into the chest of Daniel Theis.

As a quick aside, it’s a testament to Adebayo’s work and development that it would sound insane to travel back to early 2019 and tell a random person, even a HEAT fan, just how offensively dominant, with and without the ball, Adebayo was against the Celtics. They might be more apt to believe Paul Thomas Anderson had cast The Rock in There Will Be Blood: Part II. Sometimes players surpass even the highest expectations and shortest timelines.

“I let my teammates down in Game 5,” Adebayo said. “I just had to realign myself and be who I want to become.”

If you dissect the Lakers’ defense down to its individual parts, there’s plenty of evidence that the HEAT can find ways to score. They’ve shot it over length and they’ve scored against switches. It just gets a little tricky when your opponent can be two things at once, when Davis is the one you have to find a way to attack. The good bet is that the HEAT’s shooting will have to play more than it did against Boston. It can, but the Lakers are no slouch defending the three themselves.

While it’s a part of the game that doesn’t tend to get a lot of coverage, the HEAT’s scoring will often come down to mistakes. Like most James teams, with James being one of the best free-safety defenders in history hunting your passing lanes before the ball has left your hands – as Butler has done so many times in the playoffs – the Lakers can turn you over and take advantage. Outside of a couple key stretches against Boston, Miami has done well limiting its turnovers. That has to continue.

The flip side of the Lakers having a lot of defensive options is that they have to choose from all those options to fit the moment. Few offenses are better at exploiting a defense caught thinking too little or too much than the HEAT. Every switch that isn’t clean leads to Adebayo slipping his way into space. Every pick-and-roll coverage on the sideline that doesn’t contain the ball means Dragic is powering his way into the paint. If your weakside help isn’t precise, then lobs and kickout passes are coming. It might not come quite as easy as James firing a cross-court pass to a shooter, but Miami isn’t any stranger to work. The HEAT are going to challenge the Lakers’ connectivity, maybe even more so than the two-man game of Jamal Murray and Nikola Jokic just did, and loose wires get attacked.

Of everything that has changed about the HEAT during the bubble, from lineup changes to player development, maybe the most impressive has been their performance late in games. All the changes and adjustments are factors, but Miami was No. 24 in Clutch Net Rating (-14.0 per 100) and No. 28 in fourth-quarter (-5.8 per 100) Net Rating during the regular season. In the playoffs, that’s flipped to No. 2 and No. 1, respectively. Over the last two rounds against very good teams, the HEAT are 8-2 in the clutch. When everything is on the line there isn’t much the HEAT haven’t done right on either end of the floor, and that’s what has Miami in the Finals.

Clutch can be a fickle thing. Nobody would doubt Miami’s level of composure and poise at this point, but even if you’re doing all the right things there’s no guarantee the ball is going to bounce your way. Over the past two rounds, the HEAT are 13-of-32 from three in clutch minutes (40.6 percent) while their opponents are a staggering 3-of-21 (14.3 percent). That can change or stay the same, nobody knows, but it’s a reason this preview is being written today. The good news is that the HEAT by and large have been getting the looks they want in those situations.

The same can’t be quite said of the Lakers down the stretch, Davis game-winners aside. The Lakers are scoring just 102.5 points per 100 in fourth quarters during the postseason, and 89.5 per 100 in clutch minutes. They’re still 5-2 in those close games on the strength of defense, but there’s no question their offense has slowed a bit when the game gets into a half-court crawl. This is where the argument comes back to, ‘But yeah, LeBron’ and the only response to that is, ‘Fair’.

For Miami to win the title there’s little question they’ll have to win a few more tight ones. They’re coming into this series with nearly a clean sheet in that regard, ‘But yeah, LeBron’.

“If you want to win, you’re going to have to go through a LeBron James-led team,” Butler said. “At the end of the day, that’s what it normally comes down to.”

That’ll make for more anxious nights in Miami, where everyone has their game-watching rituals hammered out with fine print, but the good times always have to roll over some rocks along the way.

Just remember that that rock didn’t start rolling itself. It takes a village to roll it to the top so it can come down the other side. Some years may look more Sisyphean than others, but the HEAT are always pushing.

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