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Couper Moorhead

The Miami HEAT’s 2023-24 run is a complicated season to discuss. One with bright spots yet also one that fell short of previous and recent highs. One that neither stole away nor emboldened hope. One that proposed more questions than it could answer.

On one hand, so much can be explained by injuries and absences. Miami used a franchise-high 35 starting lineups. They didn’t have a single five-man group together for more than 200 minutes, with only two topping 100 after five hit that mark a season ago. Jimmy Butler and Tyler Herro combined to play 102 of a possible 164 games. Kyle Lowry was traded for Terry Rozier and Rozier dealt with injuries, first his knee and then his neck. Butler was unavailable for the playoffs after suffering a knee injury in a Play-In game at Philadelphia. Teams don’t typically win much without their best players and their best lineups on the court.

On the other hand, we never really found out how good this team could be much less what their best lineups truly were. We could use the previous season’s incredible, somewhat miraculous run as a barometer, but that’s an apples-to-oranges scenario. Herro, Butler and Bam Adebayo played 499 total minutes with each other with a Net Rating of just +3.2, plus only 118 minutes with Rozier alongside that trio at a Net Rating of +1.0. Those minutes came irregularly, as soon as the team appeared to be fully healthy another injury would pop up, opportunities to develop rhythm and cohesion practically nonexistent. This group never got a real shot to prove how good they could be, but they also didn’t have the sort of dominant stretches – their six 20-point victories were the fewest among the 16 teams that made it to the postseason – which would garner contending-level confidence. That confidence existed because of what an iteration of this core had done before, but some relative struggles in fourth-quarter and late-game situations ,after a dominant showing in those minutes the season prior, allowed questions to seep into the even most stringent optimism.

In the end, the only thing that matters is the results. With 46 wins, Miami wound up in the No. 8 seed for the second year in a row after losing a Play-In game, the same path ahead of them as the year before, and now the season is over while eight other teams play out the second round. And yet, as ever, they were just three wins, a few possessions going differently, away from the No. 3 seed. Such is the NBA. Some years are more memorable than others, but each is an important piece of the larger tapestry. For every Finals run, there’s a 2020-21 season – the abbreviated season which ended in a sweep to Milwaukee – that informs what comes next.

If there’s anything specific that this group will hang its hat on, it’s the defense finishing No. 5 overall. Despite lacking a plethora of proven, veteran defenders on paper – Miami only had one player, Adebayo, above +1.0 in Defensive Estimated Plus/Minus, while the other four Top 5 teams averaged 4.5 – Adebayo and, with his ever-changing schemes, Erik Spoelstra pulled everything together after a somewhat rocky start for the fourth Top 5 and twelfth Top 10 defensive finish since Spoelstra became head coach in 2008.

“That was probably the most consistent thing,” Spoelstra said. “Where we weren’t necessarily able to find consistency with our three different offensive philosophies, we were able to find consistency more often than not on the defensive side of the floor. Even though we had a couple different ways of playing based on who was available.

“As long as you have a group that is committed to doing tough things. There’s no easy way about it. If you want to defend in this league you have to guard the ball, you have to take away easy baskets, you have to rebound, you have to do those kinds of things, and we had a group that took pride in that.”

Adebayo, a finalist for Defensive Player of the Year and captain for the first time following Udonis Haslem’s retirement, had maybe his most impressive season on that end in a career full of impressive seasons, embracing Spoelstra’s charge to forgo much of his own individual strengths – switching pick-and-rolls – for the betterment of the whole, toggling into more traditional drop coverages for most of the season while producing comparable numbers to the seven-footers who typically own that coverage. Spoelstra made timely use of his press-zone to flummox ill-equipped opponents, his gap-shrinking man-to-man schemes once again limiting opponents to one of the lowest rim-attempt frequencies in the league. Haywood Highsmith, when healthy, made his name known as a versatile wing defender while Caleb Martin, when healthy, was his usual destructive self chasing around guards. Everyone else filled in and did their jobs, even youngsters like Nikola Jovic finding his footing in the system. It wasn’t a dominant defense, the sort which overwhelmed opponents in a hailstorm of quick feet and long limbs, but it reliably gave them a chance to win every night.

The offense held things back, finishing No. 21 and in the bottom half of the league for the third time in five years despite above-average three-point shooting. Herro had a great start to the season, Butler remained key as a mismatch hunter, Duncan Robinson evolved with the dribble, Rozier offered real on-ball creation once he came aboard, Adebayo refined his approach in isolation and post play and Kevin Love’s five-out bench units were Miami’s most consistent source of punch. The pieces appeared to be in place, but the lack of continuity prevented it all coalescing into something that could produce 2024 levels of efficiency each night.

“We had basically three primary offensive philosophies this season, based on who was available,” Spoelstra said. “All things considered we were making strides in any one of those areas, but the consistency became a challenge to overcome.”

Two players who will most certainly remember this season as crucial steps in their just-beginning careers are Jovic and Jaime Jaquez Jr. A year ago, Jovic was injured, not playing and looking a little turned around when he did get minutes. This season started out much the same, at least as far as opportunity, but after a starting stint in late December he joined the starting group full time just before the All-Star break, shooting 39 percent from three the rest of the way with plus passing while holding his own on the defensive end. In just about three months a player full of potential became a core rotation piece.

“If you would’ve said [last year] that in the First Round series Niko would’ve been our starting power forward and doing the type of scheme things that he was doing defensively, and that we would have to rely on him in a certain way, you probably would’ve said no that’s no happening,” Spoelstra said.

Jaquez Jr. required no time to simmer, starting the third game of his career and scoring 20 in just his ninth appearance. All shoulders and elbows and forearms with soft after-contact touch, he immediately reminded of Butler, burrowing his way into the lane through bigger and smaller defenders alike, ever willing to get off the ball if the window wasn’t there. The culmination of his season happened in Christmas Day against Philadelphia, his 31-point, 10-rebound effort putting him in rare territory among rookies, then an injury kept him out of five games in mid-January. Teams started to adjust to his game a bit, the scouting report detailing his strengths and weaknesses as the final two months of his season proved uneven, 28 percent shooting from three limiting his overall impact.

“I would say sometimes they would try to send two, prepared for the trap especially down in the post is where I think the report was out on me,” Jaquez Jr. said.

Still, he appeared to regain traction in the final two games of the season, scoring 38 across two Toronto matchups at home, and with Miami in dire need of creation against Boston he delivered their most consistent downhill momentum until a hip injury in Game 4. He’s expected to finish First Team All-Rookie for good reason.

“Jaime exploded onto the scene, that was obvious for everyone to see,” Spoelstra said. “Then he got on to people’s scouting reports, it kind of changed for a little bit, he was injured, then when he came back I really felt he was a much better player. He was able to see things at a deeper level.”

Some will use this season as some sort of referendum on Herro after the Boston series, but though he was limited to just 42 games his numbers were right in line with each of his past two seasons. Yes, he shot 38 percent against the Celtics – including 24 points on 13 shots in a Game 2 victory – but like everyone else on the team in Butler and Rozier’s absences he was pushed into a different, outsized role against perhaps the best team in the league.

“The entire gameplan is to take him out. It wasn’t like it was rocket science,” Spoelstra said. “The gameplan for Boston was if you take him out that can take a significant part of their firepower out of their equation. And then to respond in a big way in a big way in Game 2 that really helped drive the win I think is really a massive positive.”

In some ways Herro’s season mirrored Miami’s. He wasn’t always available and there were struggles when rotation options asked a bit too much against certain opponents, but he was fundamentally the same player that he was before. Up and down the roster, just about everyone was who they were expected to be. After a slow ramp up due to a knee injury, Martin was Martin. Highsmith lived up to rotation expectations. Josh Richardson offered two-way value before a shoulder injury knocked him out for the year. Love was reliable as ever, Duncan an impact, on-the-the-move gravitational shooter, and give or take percentages swinging in one direction or another Butler – having the best three-point shooting season of his career – and Adebayo lived up to previously set standards for impact, huge on-off splits following Butler on offense and Adebayo on defense.

That may be the legacy of this season beyond the development of Jaquez Jr. and Jovic and Adebayo expanding his defensive repertoire. Nothing was particularly wrong with the players. They were who they were supposed to be. It just never came together, with Miami’s 22-20 record in clutch games, following an all-time clutch season at 32-22, the greatest difference between the two years. Had Miami been just as injured against Milwaukee last year and just as healthy against Boston this time around, things might look a bit different.

The same could be said for most franchises that maintain a certain level of success. Make the playoffs often enough, you’re going to have disappointments, seasons that leave you asking What If and What Could Have Been – 2016 comes to mind for Miami – just as teams which frequent the lottery will move down as often as they will move up the draft order. You take your good luck, which plays a part in historically great shooting performances during a Finals run, with the bad, which knocks out important players for the playoffs. It’s all in the game.

Where this group goes from here is anyone’s guess, but up to a precious few to determine. Five years ago marked a beginning for the Adebayo-Butler-Herro core, that trio and Duncan Robinson the constants throughout the current build, and there’s been plenty of success – two Finals runs, three Eastern Conference Finals appearances – along the way. But a season full of unanswered and now unanswerable questions can’t help but leave questions for what’s to come.

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Same Path, Different Results: The 2024 HEAT Season Was Full Of Questions That Couldn't Be Answered

The Miami HEAT tied their First Round series with Boston, 1-1, Wednesday night, holding Boston to 40 points in the second half as they shot a franchise playoff best 23-of-43 from behind the arc. Here are the main reasons for how they did it.

First, the shooting. Before we get to the adjustments Miami made we have to talk about the ones Boston didn’t. Nothing about this is normal, folks. Miami has as many playoff games (5) with 50 percent shooting from three in the past two seasons as two franchises, Houston and Utah, have in both regular seasons combined. The HEAT have four playoff games where they’ve made at least half their threes against Boston alone the past two seasons, and no other team has done it more than once against anyone in that stretch. Miami just became the fifth team, ever, to make 23 threes in a postseason game. This is wild, mythmaking, stranger-than-fiction on-court material

But as with anything there is a reason it happens, and there’s a reason it happens to Boston. You can dissect and analyze individual closeouts all you want, the Celtics are giving Miami’s role players those shots.

Last year, after having success with it in the previous Conference Finals, the Celtics went back to their strategic well and opted to sag off Caleb Martin to allow Robert Williams III roaming freedom on the backline of the defense. In the same spot a year later, Martin knew what scheme was coming his way.

“I just knew from the jump, I automatically triggered my brain to last year and the playoffs and knew exactly how they were going to guard me,” Martin said last May. “So I've been preparing myself the minute we beat the Knicks and we were preparing for Boston. I just automatically started trying to re-circuit my brain to the looks I would get and how guys are going to help off of me and preparing to be ready and confident and assertive.”

Martin proceeded to torch the coverage, shooting 49 percent from three across seven games, including 6-of-14 as Miami took the opening two matchups in Boston.

“One thing Caleb told me was, ‘This is not last year,’” Bam Adebayo said after Game 2 that year. “That really resonated with me because they did the same thing to him last year. I feel like he felt like it was disrespectful.”

As Boston cycled out personnel, bringing in Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, it was worth wondering whether they would adjust their treatment of Martin. During the regular season, nothing much changed. Boston had Porzingis and Horford roaming off Martin. Coming into this series, you could see the same thing coming once again. Miami couldn’t make the Celtics pay in Game 1, shooting 32 percent from three, but the looks were there – Boston was clearly willing to live with giving up some catches in space in order to bring in a third defender on Tyler Herro’s pick-and-rolls, as we discussed after Game 1.

“We’re all smart basketball players,” Martin said after Game 2. “We’re going to take the ones that are there. That’s part of their gameplan, too, they’re going to leave certain guys open. You play into the gameplan if you hesitate to shoot.”

It wasn’t just Martin, either. Boston was treating just about everyone who wasn’t Herro or Duncan Robinson the same. With the paint largely inaccessible, the perimeter looks were going to be there. Herro just had to see them, and guys had to make shots. Instead, they rode historic on that fury road.

“We knew a couple of us were going to get some open shots,” Haywood Highsmith said. “They was leaving us open and stuff, so we just let it fly.”

Just as in Game 1, the help came early on Herro as he cleared Adebayo’s handoffs and screens, Jaylen Brown even helping off the strong side corner to jam Herro up.

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Celtics Game 2: Helping To Herro

“Just starting off, the guys that we wanted to shoot,” Jrue Holiday said. “Not that we let them, but it wasn’t like a get out to them and make them put it on the ground, it was kind of like protect the basket and get a good closeouts. They started knocking them in.”

The effect became even more pronounced as the night wore on. Watch the extreme degree to which Holiday, Porzingis and Derrick White help off Martin, Haywood Highsmith and Delon Wright in the fourth quarter.

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Celtics Game 2: Shooters Left Open

“That’s how they’re scheming us so far,” Spoelstra said. “Packing the paint and putting an extra defender in front of Tyler or Jaime or whoever was attacking the paint. Those are the available shots you have to trust whether it’s a make or a miss.”

Of Herro’s career-high 14 assists, around nine of them, depending on your definition, were of this variety, making the help reads –third defenders coming his way, often one pass away – and finding his shooters.

Miami’s Shot Quality from three in Game 2 was an expected effective field-goal percentage of 53.4, which would have been Top 5 among all teams in the regular season. But if you take Robinson and Herro out of the equation, the two shooters who consistently saw attention at the arc, then everyone else had a Shot Quality of 55.7. Overall, Miami shot 61.5 percent on 26 three-point attempts Second Spectrum logged as uncontested or lightly contested. In Game 1 that number was 37.5 percent on 24 attempts. Both attempt totals are in the Top 6 for Miami this season, and the HEAT shot 40.6 percent on those shots, lightly contested or uncontested threes, all year, No. 4 in the league.

“Guys that we want shooting the ball was hitting them, we seemingly couldn’t get them to miss,” Jaylen Brown said.

There’s the math aspect to this, of course. Erik Spoelstra noted between games that they needed to be more competitive in that area. Allowing an offense like Boston’s to take so many more threes than you is a tough hill to sled. But, again, these are also the shots being presented. Miami’s shooters were more willing to shoot, but they were also shots they were being given.

“I just did not want to get annihilated in that department the way we did before,” Spoelstra said of the three-point disparity from Game 1.

Whether Boston adjusts remains to be seen given that they’ve applied a similar philosophy across multiple years against Miami. Counting on average-ish shooters to miss some shots isn’t bad science, so to speak, but science doesn’t always account for the magic that can happen in individual games. At some point the things that could theoretically happen are actually happening. And yet Boston also won three straight games after they went down 3-0 last year, with minimal adjustments. If changes are made, less help coming Herro’s way could open up the paint, and with just five makes in the restricted area in Game 2 Miami could probably use a little bit in the paint. Even without many paint points, however, Miami scored 112.8 points per 100 plays in the halfcourt, their fifth highest mark of the season.

On a related note, for years Boston has been the one team that appeared to have a bit more sway than others over opponent three-point percentages, consistently ranking Top 10 in an area that has in many ways been governed, to a degree, by luck and variance. Much of that was due to these same ideas, a willingness to leave certain shooters over others, but a team’s control over that could also be drawn into question. Still, whatever was real or myth, there’s a certain irony in the team that had found answers for one of the more unsolvable aspects of the game being on the wrong side of those same percentages in the games that matter most.

“There are certain guys on the floor that you would rather shoot than others, that’s any NBA game you play,” Tatum said. “But guys are in the NBA for a reason. Everybody is capable.”

Maybe the answer to all of this is Miami’s shooters get more comfortable when they know what shots are coming their way. Maybe this will never happen again. We can’t hand wave this type of performance anymore, though. Magic or not, it’s happening for very practical reasons and the HEAT have spent two years now doing everything possible to take advantage. It might be rare, special, incredibly unique, memorable and even funny, but it’s not a miracle if you’re the one that can make it happen.

The story of Miami’s defense this season, especially as it relates to Adebayo, is that as their personnel has changed Erik Spoelstra went away from his switch-heavy scheme and dedicated his team to drop coverage as their base pick-and-roll look. You can read about that story here, so we won’t dwell on it too much. One thing was worth remembering about those changes, though. For as much as Miami was diversifying their portfolio to better survive – they turned in yet another Top 5 defense despite 35 different starting lineups, largely due to Adebayo’s multi-coverage capabilities – they never buried their ol’ reliable.

“That’s probably our most comfortable scheme, but we always got that,” Martin said about switching pick-and-rolls earlier this year.

“For us, we think switching is normal,” Adebayo said.

After cycling through just about every coverage in their arsenal in Game 1, giving up 1.27 points per possession across 54 screens while their zone was lightly toasted by three point shooting, Spoelstra returned to the coverage his group once used more than any other team.

In Game 2 Miami switched 41 pick-and-rolls, allowing 0.72 points per possession. The occasion marked the most switches Miami had made in any game all season.

There was a clever wrinkle to the scheme. Rather than putting Adebayo on Porzingis as was the matchup for most of Game 1, Spoelstra went to the same well he did in Miami’s second Play-In Game against Chicago, asking Adebayo to go from defending DeMar DeRozan at tipoff one week to Jayson Tatum the next. Rather than aiming to switch Adebayo on to Tatum, Adebayo started possessions in position to switch off him - Adebayo wasn't logged as the closest defender on any of Tatum's 20 attempts - Nikola Jovic assigned to Porzingis ready to switch should Boston want to run one of their more common actions.

Why is that a good thing? Wouldn’t you want Adebayo on Tatum? Part of what made Boston’s Game 1 offense so dangerous is that Tatum did much of his work early, finding cross matches in transition or running to specific corners against the zone to post up a desirable matchup. That wasn’t going to happen with Adebayo on Tatum, who now had to come get the ball and spend time running a pick-and-roll to find a matchup, time that he couldn’t then use to get off the ball and go get position at the elbow or on the block. Miami would switch a different matchup onto Tatum, sure, but Tatum would then be left attacking from the top of the arc or the wings, much more manageable for a gap-shrinking HEAT scheme that prefers you playing breakthrough-and-conquer with multiple sets of eyes, arms and feet pre-loaded in your path.

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Celtics Game 2: Bam On Tatum Switch

Of course the weakness of the switching scheme, and part of why Miami went away from it in the first place over the past year, is that Adebayo can’t literally be everywhere no matter how brilliant his defense is. Boston has plenty of ballhandlers, plenty of pick-and-roll combinations with which to find matchups they want. They found those matchups just fine, they just couldn’t capitalize on them, 32 Celtics isolations – four off their season high – producing just 0.83 points per, 11 Boston post-ups producing 0.80 points per as Herro held up while Porzingis missed shots over the top.

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Celtics Game 2: Herro On Porzingis

The other tweak was that Miami brought less deliberate help in general. They still played the gaps as they should, but there were no early doubles coming as they did in Game 1, the defense bending but not tilting, rotating but not in rotation. That’s how you hold the Celtics, perhaps the most prolific shooting team of all time, to just 32 attempts from deep, just their fifth game all season with fewer than 33 tries.

“They switched and they didn’t double as much,” Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla said.

You can’t switch without having some faith in your defenders. In Game 2, Miami went back to their old ways, in a good way, Adebayo was his dynamic self, and Spoelstra trusted everyone else to guard their yard as Boston’s offense stagnated. It worked, and now we see how Boston reacts.

After Game 1 it was clear that Boston had every intention not to bring help on Bam Adebayo’s isolations and post-ups, and we noted that while it can be a bit of a trap to take all that single coverage and make it too much of your overall offense – something you could argue is exactly what happened to the Celtics tonight – there is a benefit to knowing Adebayo will have self-creation opportunities whenever you need them.

And you never need them more than in the fourth quarter, when the game is slow and percentages matter more than 48-minute efficiency.

Sure enough, in Game 2, Adebayo was more of a screener than a scorer – his 36 screens tied for sixth-most this season – sprinkling in post-ups but only using one isolation in the first quarter. But in the fourth, there was that option, Adebayo attacking Al Horford with no help coming as Boston attempted to stage a comeback.

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Celtics Game 2: Bam 4th Q Island

“He was great when we needed to get it settled and went right to his spots and was able to get some relief points for us,” Spoelstra said.

And rather than going back to that same look over and over, Miami got out of it just as quickly, the damage done as Adebayo went back to screening for Herro and doing his damage on the pocket pass. Adebayo finished only 2-of-2 at the rim, one of those a lob from Herro, but 7-of-10 in the upper paint and mid-range combined. Through two games, Adebayo has produced 1.42 points-per across 12 post-ups.

“Any time the game gets crazy and they go on a run, we find the ball in Bam’s hands,” Herro said. “He’s just our settle guy. We know he’s going to make the right play or find a hole in the defense to find a shot for himself.”

Any time the game gets crazy and they go on a run, we find the ball in Bam’s hands. He’s just our settle guy. We know he’s going to make the right play or find a hole in the defense to find a shot for himself.

Adebayo (probably) won’t keep shooting this well on tough turnarounds and fadeaways, but the value is in knowing that until Boston adjusts their coverage those shots are always there when Miami needs them most.

-The HEAT only played three possessions of zone, with Love playing just six total minutes as Jovic played the backup five in the second half.

-Boston wound up scoring 100 points per 100 halfcourt plays, per cleaningtheglass.com, a good number for most teams but well below their own rate of 106.5 during the regular season.

-Bringing it back to math again, Miami and Boston each made 37 field goals, with Boston attempting five more. But the HEAT made 11 more threes, 11 extra points over the two pointers the Celtics made, and won by 10.

-Through two games now, Miami has produced 1.21 points per pick-and-roll and 1.19 points per handoff. Both numbers would have led the league by a significant margin.

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Practical Magic: The Reality Behind Miami’s Historic Shooting In Game 2, A Defensive Return To Old Reliable And Bam Adebayo Left Alone Again

The Boston Celtics lead the series, 1-0, with Game 2 coming up Wednesday at 7 pm before things shift to Miami for Game 3 Saturday at 6pm.

The Boston Celtics took Game 1 of this First Round series in decisive fashion, leading wire-to-wire and by more than 30 for a stretch. But as is so often the case with series openers, the final score is far less instructive than the tape. There’s no doubt Miami is fighting an uphill battle in this series, especially without Jimmy Butler and Terry Rozier and with Duncan Robinson (15 minutes) limited, but for all of Boston’s offensive firepower it’s how they’re choosing to defend Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro that may be the most interesting early notes.

The story of the past couple months for Miami has been more and more teams following the examples set by teams like Dallas and New York and their defensive schemes, either sending doubles at Adebayo and Jimmy Butler or loading up early help on their post-ups and isolations across the lane. Some of what made those tactical decisions was the sometimes awkward spacing with Adebayo and Butler on the court together, but the Celtics have rarely schemed the HEAT in such a fashion, opting for years to trust their individual defenders while staying home everywhere else as much as possible.

As expected, they’re treating Adebayo much as they always have. Boston will bring a third player into the lane to ensure he doesn’t get a free roll to the rim, but with both Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford in drop coverage the Celtics appear willing to concede the occasional pocket pass at the elbows or on the baseline out of an empty-corner set. Most crucially, on Adebayo’s one-on-one forays, either isolations or post-ups which often end up being the same things logged differently in various databases, there is no help coming. Adebayo attacking Horford looks the same as it did two years ago, and the same is true of the Porzingis matchup.

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Celtics Game 1: Bam Single Coverage

“I came into the game being aggressive,” Adebayo said. “That’s it. If you’re not going to double me, I’m going to try and go score.”

It’s important to note that these are not bad matchups for Adebayo. His repertoire – every pivot and fake and spin and reverse you can imagine – has evolved to the point where he can create a look against most anyone. He’s scored on both defenders before, and he can do it at volume – he produced a respectable 10 points on 10 combined isolation and post-up possessions in Game 1, per Second Spectrum’s tracking data. They are also inherently static possessions, the rest of the Boston’s defense locked in on their men, and Adebayo’s comfort zone is more in the upper paint than in consistently getting right to the rim against defenders with size playing a foot or two back.

Why this might be so crucial in this series is because of how much more Miami requires shot creation from Adebayo without other on-ball options in Butler and Rozier. In the past, with Butler soaking up postseason-level usage, Adebayo could shoulder the burden for bursts, going at Horford for four straight minutes in a third quarter on the road, a change-of-pace to keep the offensive train on the tracks. But with injuries being what they are and Miami’s creation options depleted as a result, more is required. Using Sunday’s numbers as an example, a point-per-possession while you’re trying to hold a lead late in a game is different than a point-per-possession when you’re down double digits and the offense has already been pushed off the arc and away from the rim.

“I have a lot of thoughts on that end,” Erik Spoelstra said. “You have to give them credit for taking us out of some things. I think they’re willing to live with some of those one-on-ones to be able to keep bodies on some of our other guys.”

The question, then, is how efficient Adebayo will have to be with his one-on-one work to force an adjustment from Boston, or if that limit even exists. Boston didn’t bring a ton of doubles this season, but they weren’t bottom of the league. If Adebayo scores on five straight isolations at some point in this series, will Boston change its coverage, even if only temporarily? Any avenue toward tilting the defense, any option for getting two defenders on the ball, is one worth exploring, but it’s also difficult to spend long stretches searching for those answers when you need immediate production as you try and keep up with a dynamic offense.

One positive in all of this is that if Miami can force clutch minutes in this series, Boston’s predilection for single coverage means Adebayo should have straightforward shot creation opportunities available to him in moments when any good, comfortable shot has greater value – when single-shot percentages can carry more weight than big picture efficiency. If Adebayo has the opportunity to create and take two ~45 percent shots to take a lead in the final minute of a playoff game against a 64-win team, that’s something everyone would probably be happy with. Whether or not Boston would change their first, second and third quarter philosophies in those situations remains to be seen.

On the other side of the high-usage coin is Herro, who has the unenviable task of being the lead ballhandler going up against a team replete with strong individual defenders. As Herro does not lean toward one-on-one play as heavily as his All-Star teammates – he uses about a quarter as many isolations as Butler, half as many as Adebayo – Boston’s core scheme is more about the pick-and-roll game.

Here's the stat to know. In Game 1 Herro ran 20 pick-and-rolls and 10 handoffs. Of those 30 actions, he only shot the ball, turned the ball over a total of nine times, about a 30 percent usage rate, down from a 40 percent usage rate on his own actions during the regular season. Some of that is Herro having more playmaking responsibility with who is currently available, some of that dealing with two guards, in Jrue Holiday and Derrick White, who double as two of the best screen navigators in the league. When your defender can consistently skinny up and around picks and is always on your tail, it’s tough to find comfortable space.

But Herro has seen defenders like these before, and he’s certainly seen drop coverage like this before. No matter how well Holiday and White are fighting through screens, Adebayo is a good enough screener to create space for Herro to get into the space created by the coverage. If that’s all it was, Herro would be able to get to the same shots he was getting in last week’s Play In games against Philadelphia and Chicago.

Boston, however, isn’t defending Herro’s pick-and-rolls two-on-two as a team like Milwaukee would have done in the past. While they’re staying home on Adebayo’s isolations and post-ups, there’s a clear third defender pinching in at the elbow, not always to get in front of the ball but to be enough of a nuisance to force Herro to pick it up, turning what could have been a shorter floater, or even a layup, into a tight window for a long jumper.

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Celtics Game 1: Herro Third Man

It’s a similar idea to how Miami defends so many guards, with their coverage of Trae Young in the playoffs a couple seasons ago a well-known example. Boston’s intention, then, appears to be to make Herro more of a playmaker, Adebayo more of a scorer.

“[They were] just applying pressure and making things difficult,” Herro said. “Not allowing me to get comfortable really from the beginning.”

Whether or not Spoelstra and his staff are happy to live with what Boston is happy to give up remains to be seen. Miami had less than two days between their win-or-go-home game against Chicago Friday and an afternoon game Sunday in Boston, so with a couple days off before Wednesday’s matchup they’ll have the opportunity to reassess. For now it’s only important to note how Adebayo and Herro are being defended within the context of who is available, because whether or not those coverages change could define both this series and the developmental tracks for both players moving forward.

We had a pretty good idea going into this one that Boston was going to be a tough team to zone. They almost always have five good-to-great shooters on the floor, for one, but they also don’t panic against the coverage, avoiding most of the pratfalls which plague other teams. There’s a reason Miami only used their change-of-pace scheme for 15 possessions across three games with Boston.

But zone has been Miami’s primary look when Adebayo rests, their way of keeping the ball out of the paint while they capitalize on the five-out spacing provided by Kevin Love on the other. They don’t necessarily need it, but it’s not a luxury, either. The zone, and the clock-killing full-court pressure that comes with it, is part of their identity. Yet in Game 1 Miami used just nine possessions of zone, as logged by Synergy Sports, and Boston produced 1.55 points-per against it.

Some of what was just Porzingis being a tough player to zone, his ability to shoot in the middle of the floor drawing attention – and creating space for others – where Miami might otherwise be happy to leave a less efficient center to work.

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Celtics Game 1: Porzingis Zone Touch

At other times Boston opted to attack out of the wings and corners, Jayson Tatum posting up the low man of the zone and forcing two to the ball as Sam Hauser reaped the benefits on the weakside.

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Celtics Game 1: Tatum Zone Doubles

“Last year it was a lot easier because they didn’t have Porzingis and I think our zone made a lot of problems for them,” Nikola Jovic said. “It can make a lot of problems this year too but with Porzingis in the lineup, who can stretch the floor and shoot it over anyone, it’s just really hard to guard him. Sam Hauser shot all those threes off great ball movement they had.”

But what was most interesting about Boston’s zone approach, and this is a benefit to having so many reliable ballhandlers in the rotation, is that they treated Miami’s full-court press as part of that zone rather than an initial level to beat. Most teams focus on the press break to ensure they get the ball across the halfcourt line before eight seconds elapse, and then they go into their zone offense. The Celtics, meanwhile, were getting into their zone offense as they broke the press, putting players into optimal positions before the zone could congeal into its intended shape.

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Celtics Game 1: Boston Early Zone Offense

As with Boston’s three-point heavy approach they’re always susceptible to a cold spell, but as much as Miami’s zone allows threes it’s not intended to allow open, ball-movement-derived three. The HEAT want to induce against-the-clock stagnation, and if Boston’s strategy make the secondary scheme unviable that’s a significant blow to Miami’s arsenal. Keep an eye on how much zone the HEAT use in Game 2, as well as the minutes distribution between Love and Jovic – Miami went to some small-ball looks – at the backup center spot.

Miami was at a math disadvantage in the first half, getting outscored by 27 points at the three-point line not just because they had only made three but they had also attempted just 14 from the arc while Boston was 12-of-30. That’s not going to be a winning formula, especially when you aren’t compensating with rim attempts (seven in the first half) or free-throws (six for both the half and the game). With Boston also winning the turnover column (only three) and collecting a handful of offensive boards to give them seven more field-goal attempts, that’s trouble.

The second half was much more manageable, Miami taking 23 threes to Boston’s 19, attempting six more shots overall. Boston still attempted 12 more threes overall, Miami at 43 percent frequency from the arc and Boston at 53 percent, but the HEAT earning more and more catch-and-shoot looks as the game wore on is a good sign. Granted some of those came from Delon Wright with Boston giving him space to shoot – there’s no easy way to look this up, but Wright has to be one of the first 30+ year olds to match his previous career high in threes, five, in a single postseason quarter as he did in the fourth – but with Porzingis and Horford sometimes assigned to Wright, Caleb Martin or Jaime Jaquez Jr. in order to help off into the paint, Miami is going to need some threes from low-to-medium volume shooters.

“That was pretty crazy,” Wright said. “I don’t think I’ve ever hit that many in a row. I just have to take the open shots they give me.”

Still, you might not see Miami take 14 or fewer threes in a half very often going forward. Whether or not they’ll take more threes, or if they should even be trying to take more, than Boston is an entirely different question. The HEAT’s ability to scale up their three-point volume has been a topic since preseason, and though they were rarely healthy enough – Rozier would certainly help in this category – to get a real sense of what their true shot profile should look like, the fact is that Boston averaged 42 attempts per game and Miami only attempted 40 threes nine times all season.

There’s a real danger in trying to force shots you aren’t comfortable with. As much as Miami will want to keep their volume at a decent pace, pushing too hard in a direction that isn’t natural for the personnel on hand can also take you out of your game. Boston has so many shooters, and can tilt the defense by going matchup hunting consistently enough, that they are going to get their looks, with Miami’s defense having a say in how contested those looks are. Trying to beat a historically great offense at their own math game by trying to outdo their idealized shot profile sounds like trying to sprint through quicksand. The better path is to play your own game, and Miami’s second half, with a 116.7 Offensive Rating, was procedurally closer to it.

-Keep an eye on how much help Jaime Jaquez Jr. is drawing in Game 2. He scored 16 points on 8-of-16 shooting against mostly single coverage, with Boston failing to stop the ball on one coast-to-coast drive and losing him on another rim cut, but there were hints of help coming his way in the second half that we might see more of going forward. Granted some of that may be Holiday using the defensive freedom granted to him, but Jaquez Jr. had a usage rate of 25 percent and has often been used as a secondary creator since Butler’s knee injury. When you have the ball in your hands that much, defenses start thinking about adjustments.

-Both teams turned in below-average drives, only 34 for a Miami team that averaged 50.8 per 100 possessions, 30 for a Boston team that averaged 40 per 100. Not super surprising, given the quality and styles of defenses, and the fact that this was a very slow-paced game at just 88 possessions apiece.

-In addition to Jovic at center, we also saw some Adebayo-Love minutes in the fourth quarter when Miami was trying to cut into the lead. That pairing was +3 in 4.5 minutes.

-Boston did not run much this season, playing in transition only 14 percent of the time, but that frequency dropped to 5.7 percent in Game 1. Miami’s press and their own low turnover rate likely influenced that, but the cost – transition defense and offensive glass crash rate are always linked – may have been just five offensive boards to call their own.

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Coverage Consideration For Tyler Herro And Bam Adebayo, Boston's Heads Up Zone Approach And The Pythagorean Problem

No matter how many different paths these teams take, no matter how many roster spots change or how many injuries occur, the Miami HEAT and Boston Celtics appear destined to meet. Certain events occur in every dimension across every timeline.

They haven’t quite met under these circumstances before. Yes, Miami has been the significant underdog, which we’ll get to in a minute, but never has one of the main stars been, presumably until further information comes in, knocked out of the series before it even began. Kemba Walker and Gordon Hayward weren’t right in 2020. Kyle Lowry and Tyler Herro weren’t right in 2022, with Herro missing all of 2023. Jimmy Butler and Jayson Tatum each dealt with ankle injuries last year. All the usual knicks, scrapes, bruises and bumps that come with deep playoff runs have come. This is the first time for the First Round, though, and certainly the first time someone as prolific as Butler is expected to be entirely absent from proceedings.

By all measurements, the Celtics are coming off one of the best regular seasons ever. They won 64 games and could have won more had they anything to play for in the final month of the season as they finished 14 games up on the No. 2 seed. Their +11.6 Net Rating is the fourth best of all time. While we don’t have the time to manually comb through every historical matchup, the +9.9 differential between Boston and Miami’s (+1.8) Net Ratings would likely make for the largest statistical upset in NBA history were it to happen, more than double the +3.9 difference between Milwaukee and Miami in the First Round last year (Boston was +7.2 over Miami in the Conference Finals). This is a very steep hill to climb, particularly without one of the greatest playoff players of the past five years in tow and no word on whether or when Terry Rozier might return.

There does exist a Golden Path for Miami to follow, to be sure, but it is a most narrow one.

Let’s begin with Miami’s offense, which will assuredly look more different than it ever has against the Celtics this time of year. The HEAT are not a better offensive team without Butler. Not even close. They were +7.0 points per 100 possessions better offensively with Butler on the court this season, not only the highest differential on the team but one of the highest in the entire league. Some of that is due to Butler playing a significant chunk of his minutes alongside Kevin Love’s five-out spacing with bench units that juiced the HEAT’s scoring potential more than any other – Love is, of course, still available for that alignment – but Butler is effectively the HEAT’s most prolific driver, their most effective one-on-one player, the best at turning opportunistic defense into offense and the best at getting to the line for easy ones. Outside of Butler, only Bam Adebayo (seven a game) averaged more than one free-throw in Boston’s sweep of the season series. For a team that struggles to generate anything easy on that end, Butler was their most direct path to it.

That said, there has been long been a simplification effect whenever Butler, who has generally missed 25 games a season with Miami, is out. The spacing issues that crop up with him and Bam Adebayo on the court together – issues that have been exacerbated in recent months with teams loading up the strong-side on their touches – vanish as Miami’s lineups shift to a more traditional spread look, either for empty corner sets, pick-and-rolls right down the middle or handoffs on the wings. While it can be overstated at times, they do play a bit faster with those lineups, with a little more natural flow to their side-to-side, drive-and-kick intentions. What they lose in offensive floor they can artificially create in ceiling by increasing their three-point volume. Butler gets them out of jams, particularly in late-game situations when proceedings slow to a crawl, but there remains potential for significant bursts. Coupled with winning the possession game – keeping turnovers down while gaining a few opportunities on the offensive glass – that can be enough to take a lead and stiff arm the rest of the way.

Take Miami February 11 loss without Butler, for example. While the Celtics led for most of that one, the HEAT only lost by four despite their own 30 percent shooting from three because they turned the ball over just seven times and collected 14 offensive boards, taking 16 more shots from the field than Boston with equivalent free-throw attempts. That’s a recipe that keeps you in the conversation until clutch minutes, where Boston has been statistically great this season (+15.4 per 100 in the clutch compared to -13.5 for Miami) but historically and circumstantially suspect.

There’s also a difference between playing a team while shorthanded on a random February night and them having time to prepare for exactly how you look without your star, especially with the lack of Rozier’s additional playmaking capabilities putting even more of a burden on the Tyler Herro-Bam Adebayo pick-and-roll. Boston has defensive options other teams can’t even think to pull off. How they choose to open on Sunday could define how the rest of the series plays out.

One thing Herro noted about the hand injury which kept him out of last season’s run was that he missed the opportunity to play against a bunch of teams that play a ton of drop coverage – all that conceded space creating opportunities for dribble shooters like Herro – with the exception being Boston, a heavy switch team. With Kristaps Porzingis now a starter the Celtics, much like Miami with what Erik Spoelstra has asked of Adebayo, have shifted to more drop coverage themselves, but the overall scheme is not comparable to the consistent, static, to-expectations drop of a team like Milwaukee last year. Porzingis will stay back and trust Jrue Holiday (another new addition) and Derrick White to fight over the top of screens, help defenders pulling in to swipe at dribbles as appropriate, and Boston’s No. 2 ranked defense is quite good in those looks, Porzingis allowing 0.92 points-per to ballhandlers, comparable to Brook Lopez and Jaren Jackson Jr. Herro attempted 9.6 pullup jumpers per 100 possessions against Boston this year, with an effective field-goal percentage of 61, versus 7.5 against all other teams. Miami generally scored well against Boston this season, but their Shot Quality also took a significant dip, according to Second Spectrum tracking data.

Where Boston changes things up is by not putting Porzingis on Adebayo at all, much like they would previously do with Robert Williams III, placing their center on a Caleb Martin or Jaime Jaquez Jr. while a smaller player accompanies Adebayo up to the action where Boston can switch.

Here’s Jrue Holiday on Adebayo during that February 11 game without Butler.

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Celtics Series Preview: Jrue On Bam

And here’s Tatum on Adebayo in that same game on a deciding fourth quarter possessions, Porzingis roaming the back line.

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Celtics Series Preview: Tatum On Bam

Combined with Boston’s ability to switch just about any off-ball action, one-through-four, this is a look that could be a fly in the ointment. There are a few counters. The more creative ones involve multi-step actions, the player Porzingis is defending initiating offense that can transition into a second look, Porzingis unable to camp on the weakside block. Spoelstra exhausts all options, and he tends to come up with plenty. Realistically, though, Porzingis’ assignment is going to have to hit shots whether it’s Martin, Jaquez Jr., Haywood Highsmith, Delon Wright or anyone else. Miami flat out doesn’t win the previous series without Martin true-shooting 71.2 percent on an 18 percent usage rate, including 84 points on 54 combined shots, 14-of-27 from three, in Miami’s four wins. Martin may have had Boston’s curiosity before. Now he should fully have their attention.

Adebayo also has some say in all of this. He’s never been more comfortable attacking one-on-one in his career, all sorts of pivots and fakes at his disposal to create a jumper when necessary. If Boston is going to defend him with smaller players, he can take them into the post or work from the elbows on the switch. The question is how Boston defends him. Many teams have doubled Adebayo in the post – some early, some late, some showing soft doubles that wait behind the first defender as a second layer – but that hasn’t typically been Boston’s predilection, opting mostly to single cover Adebayo, make him a scorer and limit Miami’s catch-and-shoot options. While Adebayo has had his moments against both Porzingis and Al Horford, the suspicion is that the single coverage will continue until a change is forced.

One wild card for Miami is Duncan Robinson (questionable for Sunday), who has been limited with a back injury of late, not playing against Philadelphia on Tuesday despite being available and only appearing for 12 minutes against Chicago. We can talk schemes and coverages all we want, the fact remains that a major factor in Miami’s upsets last season against both Milwaukee and Boston was incredible shooting. The HEAT shot 48 percent from three on just 30 attempts – keep an eye on their volume in Game 1 – in their four wins. A repeat of that team-wide performance would surely be helpful, but Robinson is more than just a make-or-miss player. Outside of Butler and Adebayo in the post, nobody tilts defenses quite like Robinson. His on-the-move stylings can punish drop coverage or create windows of downhill life in those pockets of time where one switch defender hands off to the next.

Kevin Love’s pick-and-pop work will be crucial, as will his ability to work in the post – Chicago went small on Friday and Love immediately crushed those lineups – against switching groups. Haywood Highsmith’s floater has become a solid weapon off the bounce, and his shooting will be a necessity. The two swing players might be the youngsters, Jaquez Jr. and Nikola Jovic playing their first serious minutes in the postseason style. Jovic has the passing touch to help Adebayo and Love take advantage of good position against smaller players, his grab-and-go speed can keep Miami out of the halfcourt and he has the height to get clean looks off against Boston’s impressive closeout work. Jaquez Jr.’s usage rate hit 24 percent against Chicago and there’s a good chance that continues, Boston’s initial lack of help giving him the opportunity to attack shoulders first while his cutting offering potential for the sort of relief baskets that keep the train on the tracks. Boston will no doubt test his catch-and-shoot ability. As much as both players have earned degrees of trust from Spoelstra, you never know until you know when it comes to the playoffs.

It will surely help Miami if they can get out of the halfcourt a bit, but Boston has the lowest turnover rate in the league and is either first or second in most transition defense categories, both in frequency and efficiency allowed. It’ll help if the HEAT’s gap-shrinking scheme can create some pick-six opportunities, but most of the players who have had success doing that to Boston in the past are either unavailable or no longer on the roster. The exception there being Highsmith, who might secretly be Miami’s most important player in this series given how much time he’ll be defending either Tatum or Brown.

We may have seen a preview of Miami’s defensive approach on Friday when Adebayo drew the DeMar DeRozan assignment at tipoff, the HEAT’s gambit paying off as Nikola Vucevic wasn’t able to make smaller defenders pay. The HEAT have used Adebayo on Jaylen Brown like this before. Even in smaller doses, it can disrupt an offense’s rhythm for a handful of possessions. Porzingis has been good against mismatches this season, but Jovic has the size and length to contest his shooting. Of course Boston has far, far more dynamic supporting players – if Adebayo is on Brown, there’s always Tatum elsewhere – and if Adebayo isn’t near the paint to help that can be trouble for other one-on-one matchups.

Miami did not play much zone against Boston this year, giving up 21 points on 15 possessions across three games, after using it to solid effect in the previous Conference Finals, 105 possessions at 0.89 points-allowed-per. Maybe the HEAT were saving those looks for the playoffs, but Boston, almost always with five shooters on the floor, is one of the tougher teams to zone these days. Where before Robert Williams III might have jammed up the spacing a bit, now Boston has Porzingis – with Horford typically making smart plays against zone – to fill the middle of the floor to either hit shorter jumpers or pull defenders off other shooters.

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Celtics Series Preview: Porzingis Vs. Zone

There’s also the matter of Boston shooting 38.8 percent from three on 42.5 attempts a night this season, one of the most prolific shooting seasons of all time. Granted, the same could have been said about Boston headed into the same series last year before they shot 30.3 percent across seven games. Boston’s greatest strength gives them incredible offensive upside – they shot 22-of-40 from three in a 33-point win at Miami on January 25 – but there is a natural variance in their game. All it takes is a cold night or two to give the HEAT a little life. If Boston has a weakness outside of late-game offense, it’s that they’ll sometimes forgo drives, eschewing higher percentage looks for greater value. Cold nights may also be necessary. Boston is 36-1 this season when shooting at least 40 percent from three, 50-5 when shooting at least 35 percent and 14-13 at 34 percent or worse.

So what do wins for Miami look like in this series? Their winning formula isn’t too different from normal, they just have to check more boxes. Plenty of pressure on Herro and Adebayo, and they’ll have to deliver offensively, not just scoring but consistently creating and exploiting advantages within the defense. We’ll see how Boston changes their coverages based on how they perform. Winning Love’s minutes will help, that spacing offering Miami the best opportunities to attack Boston’s deeper rotation defenders. Jovic and Jaquez Jr. will have to make quick adjustments to postseason basketball, real trials by fire, with Jovic shooting well and Jaquez Jr. working his way into the paint. Martin and Highsmith will have their spot-up opportunities, and Martin may have to rescue some possessions up against the shot clock. Miami will be at its best playing fast – not too fast, just aggressive – while keeping the game slow, pushing to create early and secondary transition chances while slowing Boston down with pressure. Wright and Highsmith will need to be everywhere defensively. The Celtics will have to miss some shots. Miami will have to take care of the ball and win in the clutch. It doesn’t all have to happen always, but enough of it will have to line up on the same nights.

The odds are against Miami, this Boston group likely the best Eastern Conference team they’ve played in the past five years and rivaling Denver last season, but they have a chance. Their path to success may be narrow, but it isn’t hidden. They know this matchup, they know these players. They’ve done this before, even if not quite like this.

And we know who the HEAT are at this point when it comes to the playoffs. This is not a group that needs it to be easy. The more you take from them, the more powerful they become, if only for the right night. This will be their greatest challenge yet, but they’ll still force Boston to beat them. There’s no other team more likely to find a way to ice skate uphill.

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HEAT Vs. Celtics IV Preview: Once More, With Feeling

The Miami HEAT are 45-36, No. 8 in the Eastern Conference with a Net Rating of +1.7, No. 16 in the league. With one game remaining to settle all business and determine seeding for the Play-In Tournament and Postseason, here’s what we’ve been noting and noticing.

One of the major questions coming into this season centered around which players were going to step up and become trusted closers with spots theoretically up for grabs after some roster shuffle. There were plenty of promising skillsets on the roster, but few players who had earned Erik Spoelstra’s confidence in big, postseason minutes.

Terry Rozier figures into that equation now, but as he was essentially a straight swap with Kyle Lowry, already one of those trusted veterans, his arrival didn’t change much as far as the roster calculus. Tyler Herro being healthy helps, too. Josh Richardson had a chance to be in the conversation, but he’s out for the season. Jaime Jaquez Jr. is most certainly still in the conversation, though he’s struggled on the offensive end of late after leading the team in fourth quarter minutes through the first few months of the season. The playoffs require an adjustment for every rookie, no matter who you are.

This is a fluid conversation, of course, with availability always a factor – neither Duncan Robinson nor Terry Rozier have factored into the last two fourth quarters due to injuries, for example – but the players who have been earning trust lately are Haywood Highsmith and Nikola Jovic.

Highsmith was an obvious candidate for potential high-leverage minutes coming into the season largely because Spoelstra had shown trust in him before, making appearances in both the Eastern Conference Finals – including Game 7 – and the NBA Finals. His defense is a known quantity. Whenever he checks in he’s either at the head of the snake of the press-zone or being assigned to the most talented guard or wing on the other team.

“He’s so inspiring right now,” Spoelstra said. “He just continues to grind, continues to work, continues to get better and does all the little things for a team to help you win. You need players like that in this league.”

The shooting has been plenty encouraging, at 40 percent today and oscillating between 36 and 40 percent for most of the season. But as we’ve discussed often in this space, the effect your threat of shooting has on the defense goes far beyond percentages and it’s worth considering how closely Highsmith would be defended by the best defenses in the playoffs.

If he’s going to take and make these shots, in spots like this, you can eliminate much of that concern. A reputation still has to be earned over an extended period of time, but those are reputation building shots.

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Notebook 76: Highsmith Three Knicks

“We all have confidence that he can do that,” Kevin Love said. “He’s shot the ball well since training camp. We’ve seen that from him. His confidence is there and is continuing to grow, especially in these last two weeks, but he’s become so much more than just a spot-minute and defender type of guy. You can really trust him to make plays and make shots, to put the ball on the floor and defend 94 feet, he just does a lot of things for us in this game. He just continues to grow and you love to see it.”

Highsmith is typically quiet, a go-about-your-business sort of player who is rarely demonstrative on the court. It says something that after he hit that shot against New York he gave everyone in the building a settle down motion with both hands after the Knicks had stormed back to tie the game.

“We needed a bucket so I just wanted everybody to calm down, we got this, we’ve been here before,” Highsmith says.

Jovic, on the other hand, had plenty to prove this season. He played just 204 minutes last year, most of those concentrated in a November/December period when the team was dealing with injuries before he himself got injured. He wasn’t in the rotation to begin this year, but in early January began getting starts alongside Bam Adebayo before joining that lineup full-time on February 13.

The results so far have been somewhat mixed with Miami’s most-used lineup of the season, Rozier-Robinson-Butler-Jovic-Adebayo, a -23 in 181 minutes, but the HEAT are +8.2 per 100 possessions with Jovic on the floor overall, +6.7 per 100 since he joined the starting lineup for good. The latter numbers are more encouraging when you consider how in flux Miami’s starting groups have been all season – Tyler Herro was out for most of that stretch – and when you isolate the Jovic-Adebayo pairing those two are +9.7 per 100 in 628 minutes. You can’t ask for much better than that.

It's not as though those groups are blowing teams out of the water with offense, either. Jovic being a high volume, high efficiency shooter (8.9 threes per 100 possessions at a 40.3 percent clip) who can push in transition and throw darts on the move, both in drive-and-kick situations and setting up Adebayo and Butler’s posting and cutting work, checks a metric ton of boxes for what you’d like as a frontcourt partner for Adebayo, but strictly from a statistical perspective the Offensive Rating has been 116.3 with Jovic and Adebayo on the floor – just a tick above league average this season. The defense, however, at 106.6 per 100, would be No. 1 in the league. There’s some luck in there, teams shooting 30.7 percent from three with that duo on the floor, and Adebayo makes every lineup work on defense no matter who is with him, but that’s part of why the pairing has been effective with Adebayo offering a high defensive floor and Jovic accentuating the offense with his varied skillset.

Jovic is being protected a little bit by Spoelstra’s rotations, sure. There are games where he doesn’t play much more than the starting shifts at the beginning of the first and third quarters, Spoelstra opting for other rotational options if he doesn’t think the matchup is right. Typical for a younger player and nothing to hold against Jovic, but worth keeping in mind in the bigger picture. The next step is regular minutes as part of the regular rotation, playing through all kinds of matchups even when you aren’t at your best.

To that last note, bringing this back around to trust, that’s why it was something of a milestone moment for Spoelstra to use Jovic down the stretch of both the Indiana – possibly the biggest regular season game of the season – and Atlanta games, and for Jovic to respond as he did, scoring 41 on 22 shots across those two games, including 7-of-13 from three. Spoelstra didn’t just have Jovic out there as a pure floor spacer, either, as Jovic was still pushing in transition in overtime against the Hawks, running two-man actions in the fourth quarter against Indiana to get Butler the switch with Tyrese Haliburton, triggering after-timeout sets and inbounding on some of the biggest out-of-bounds possessions. Injuries may have influenced why Jovic was out there, but he earned the opportunity and did little to dispel any growing trust. Even the defense worked as Jovic held up well enough on switches, and since February 13 he’s allowed just 0.97 points-per-isolation, 0.90 points-per-pick-and-roll.

It's not all perfect, nor should it be for a 20-year old. The finishing in the paint comes and goes, especially when Jovic is on the move or in traffic. The defense is good enough to keep him on the floor right now, but there’s work to be done. As Spoelstra put it Friday night after another strong game against Toronto, 22 points on 9-of-18 shooting, you never really know until the postseason. For now Jovic has improved where he’s needed to improve, fit in exactly how he needs to fit in and it’s showing in how he’s been deployed. It’s a different game in the playoffs, but you can’t take a test until it’s put in front of you.

There’s only so much you’re going to learn at this stage of the season. Even with a team like Miami that has dealt with so many on-again off-again injuries across their rotation, with so many different starting lineups, we’re generally familiar with who they are and what skillsets they rely on. We’re days away from diving deep into very specific matchups which leave the regular season in their dust.

But that doesn’t mean trends can’t continue to develop, and through much of the second half of the season we’ve seen more and more teams packing the paint with a variety of similar-but-different schemes and coverages all meant to deter Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo from their comfort zones. Some teams send early help, some teams send it late, some position a defender in a strong-side zone against isolations and post-ups, some bring a defender across the paint on the first dribble while others bring hard help from the opposite elbow or swarm the ball as soon as it’s within 10 or 12 feet. Each team has their own rulesets to follow in how they execute these details, but the intention is the same. Butler isn’t allowed to attack mismatches one-on-one, nor is Adebayo, Adebayo isn’t going to get clean rolls to the rim or clean touches in the paint, and neither gets going downhill without a second or third body in their way.

The teams which employ these strategies have to make some sacrifices. You overload one side of the floor then by simple math the other side, the weakside, is underloaded. If you force Butler and Adebayo to pass, then the places they have available to pass to will be more open. It’s a bet that’s paid off for some teams, some seemingly fine with allowing 40 percent shooting from the arc if that means shutting down the middle of the floor for a Miami team that generally thrives on drive-and-kick sequences.

When we first wrote about this trend back on March 11 the teams we focused on were Dallas – which may have started all of this in earnest last season – Oklahoma City and Washington, and in the past couple of weeks we’ve also seen it from New York (many of these concepts were pioneered by Tom Thibodeau after the defensive rule changes in the early 2000’s), Philadelphia, Atlanta and Dallas once again.

“There’s details for sure that we have to pay attention to,” Spoelstra said after the loss to Dallas on Wednesday. “As teams start to scheme against Bam, that’s a great compliment. We have to be able to counter that, and we’ve worked at that for the last several weeks because more teams have been doing that. And we still need to get him to his strength zones. It takes being connected and working together to be able to do that, they’re not as easy as reads as they were at the beginning of the year. You can’t expect them to be. But there has to be intention in every single possession, there has to be a motor, there has to be things done with pace and detail, and then moving the ball. It’s gotten a little sticky of late.

“I think the competitive nature of our group, guys really want to will it, and we’re holding it a little bit longer than what is appropriate for our team, and we’re missing some moments. But we’re going to fix that. We’ll get this right.”

Even Toronto tried to use some of these concepts Friday night, but that was more an example of how scheme alone can’t build a great defense as Miami earned wide-open three after wide-open three.

It would be nice if we had great metrics to help illustrate any of this, but it’s tough even for the tracking cameras to follow without custom coding. We can say that Adebayo has been double teamed – doubles logged in the tracking data are typically hard doubles – in the post 51 times this season, twice as much as in either of the past two years, and he’s seen more double teams on isolations, too, while Butler has seen twice as many isolation doubles as he did in 2021-22. Altogether, Miami as a team saw 79 post-or-isolation double teams two seasons ago, 100 last year. This year the combined total is 167. That may not seem like all that much in the grand scheme of things but again the tracking data is only going to show a very specific type of double team. The amount of clean isolations or post-ups they’ve seen, with no help defenders present, have dwindled. When you see box scores where you wonder why Adebayo or Butler didn’t take more shots, chances are it’s because the other team was deliberately jamming up their shooting possessions the same way that Spoelstra’s schemes can take attacking guards out of a game.

This is all especially relevant now because the game slows down in the postseason and those isolations and post-ups become even more important. Even when Miami was shooting the lights out during last season’s run to the NBA Finals, they still needed stretches of self-creation from both of their stars to keep the offense chugging ahead. Notably, neither Boston nor Milwaukee employed schemes like this, Milwaukee in their deep drop coverages conceding the upper paint to Adebayo while relying on Jrue Holiday to defend Butler one-on-one without help, while Boston’s switching scheme similarly trusted individual defenders to guard their respective yards. It was New York that jammed the paint, and thus Miami’s offense, up the most of those three Eastern Conference series.

For now all we can do is wait and see. Both Butler and Adebayo have been willing passers when they draw two or three defenders and it’s not like these schemes have always been a problem. It’s just that we’re seeing more and more of them over the past two months that matters, part of the continued evolution for how teams plan for Miami’s attack.

If you’ve been scratching your head as to how all the various tiebreaker scenarios work out pending Sunday’s results, here are all the scenarios for how Miami can finish anywhere from No. 5 through No. 8.

-Orlando, Indiana, Philadelphia lose&nbsp;

-Either Indiana OR Philadelphia Loses&nbsp;

-Miami, Indiana, Philadelphia Win&nbsp;&nbsp;

-Indiana And Philadelphia Lose&nbsp;&nbsp;

-Miami, Orlando, Indiana, Philadelphia Win&nbsp;

The key for Miami to get out of the Play-In Tournament lies in Orlando loses and Miami winning, as that would unlock the multi-team tiebreaker scenarios where the Southeast Division title would be settled between Miami and Orlando first, and Miami’s resulting division title handing them the trump card over the other teams. But at least one of Philadelphia or Indiana still must lose in order to unlock a scenario for the No. 6 seed.

-Entering Sunday the Heat have a Top 5 defense (111.5 Defensive Rating) for the second time in the last three years and have been a Top 10 defense in 12 of 16 seasons under Erik Spoelstra.

-Over the past five seasons, ballhandlers have only reached the restricted area 8.6 percent of the time when attacking Adebayo in isolation (106 out of 1,226 possessions).

-While Miami’s offense will likely finish in the Bottom 10, their half-court offense, as tracked by cleaningtheglass.com, is actually ranked No. 13. It’s their transition game that has harmed their overall numbers, which is more encouraging than it sounds because postseason success is far more about halfcourt offense. Miami was No. 23 in halfcourt offense entering the playoffs last year.

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