Los Angeles Lakers

Couper Moorhead

1. After a slow offensive start to the season Miami put up 35 assists against Washington Friday night and looked as though things were starting to come together. But one game is one game and even though the Los Angeles Lakers haven’t been what they wanted to be defensively, they still have Anthony Davis manning the middle. You can only prove yourself against the test in front of you.

You can’t ask for much more than the 130 half-court Offensive Rating that Miami put up in the first half in this one. The threes were falling, sure, but the process was the opposite of static. Every slow rotation, every missed assignment, every half step this way or that way was punished by a HEAT group, led by Bam Adebayo’s 11-7-7, that was as on top of its approach as they’ve been through the first two weeks of the season. You don’t shoot 9-of-10 at the rim without those looks being generally pretty open, cutters catching and big men finishing when Davis was drawn to help.

Problem was, the score was 62-59 because the Lakers were getting plenty in the paint, pushing in transition with hit-aheads and working through Davis and LeBron James in the half-court for 34 paint points, 15-of-20 at the rim. As good as Miami was playing, the Lakers were keeping pace and then some. The wrinkle being that with about two minutes left in the half, Davis was removed from the game with an apparent lower body issue.

After the Lakers briefly took the lead in the third following three consecutive restricted area scores, Davis again exited for the locker room leaving Christian Wood as effectively the only healthy center remaining in their rotation – only to return three minutes later and then exit for the rest of the night soon after that. Meanwhile, Butler was hitting his third three of the game to take back the lead, Miami going up by 11 soon after that as Los Angeles’ bench units started leaking while being unable to generate consistent offense as the HEAT packed the paint.

Double digit leads haven’t been kind in fourth quarters of late and two minutes into the fourth the Lakers pulled back within six behind James, pushing in transition, and Austin Reaves, with half of Los Angeles’ three-point makes (six) at that point. Then Adebayo comes back in to settle things down, Jaime Jaquez Jr. finishes a couple at the cup, D’Angelo Russell gets ejected and it’s back to 10. The stiff arm maneuver went fine for a bit after that, until James (30 on 23 shots) brought it back to one for another clutch evening. The Lakers had their chances. Quite a few of them, in fact, as Miami’s turnover total grew, including the chance of the night with 8.9 seconds left. The result was a wide open Cam Reddish corner jumper that missed and a HEAT victory before a long road trip, 108-107, as neither team scored over the final 2:38.

2. You aren’t going to see many better performances than what Adebayo did tonight as he did, quite literally, everything as he finished with 28-20-10-2-2 for his seventh career triple double). The entire defensive package was on display, dropping back off picks, switching out when necessary, getting his hands into passing lanes and protecting the rim – also blocking an Anthony Davis fadeaway which is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Los Angeles still got their paint attempts in, only rarely when Adebayo – sometimes still looking like he’s holding the defense together like Spider-Man holding back the runaway subway car – was near the ball. On the play of the game, with James threatening downhill, it was Adebayo playing the part of wall at the rim to force James into a kickout pass to Reddish.

The offense was mostly what we’ve seen before – with one exception, down below – with 14 of Adebayo’s 20 attempts being non-rim two pointers. That’s his game now and he can get to his game no matter the opponents. He hit Duncan Robinson on the cut, sprung Tyler Herro free with screens and played the patient hand otherwise.

Still, it’s the 18-point fourth quarter that will linger in the minds of many and neither Adebayo nor anyone else was immune of responsibility as the offense slowed and the Lakers couldn’t capitalize on their open looks in the final minutes. Adebayo and Herro are arguably playing the best, most consistent offensive basketball of their career and Butler was Butler (28 points on 15 shots) as usual, but the fourth quarter has been a bit of a bugaboo. You would expect the team that won so many close games last year on their way to the NBA Finals to figure it out, but it’s a box that must be checked at some point, nevertheless.

3. More Adebayo. One of the most interesting moments of this one happened in the first couple of minutes. First, Butler made a three with Davis on him after a kickout from Adebayo. The clock was short on that one and Butler will take threes against length, so there wasn’t thought to put into it. Then, about a minute later, Adebayo held the ball at the top of the key, early in the possession, and with Davis dropping back to the free-throw line he took one dribble and stepped into a three – almost as if he had planned to do it.

Adebayo taking threes has been a hot topic for years now and we have often reminded that there’s a massive difference in taking a few threes a week and being someone defenses have to truly worry about and account for. Sure enough, the Lakers – whether it was Davis when he was playing or Wood otherwise – didn’t alter their coverage of Adebayo at all. That being said, Butler may be the example here as he took and made two more threes over the course of the night. There’s no proving exactly what Butler’s thought process is, but he does seem to up his volume against teams with good length or elite switchability. So even as teams rarely cover Butler as though he’s a shooter, he takes the opportunities when they’re there – those opportunities then become crucial during the postseason. It’s early, but maybe that’s where Adebayo follows in the short term. He doesn’t have to alter the geography of the court, just become comfortable with taking the shots when the moment is right.

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Coup's Takeaways: Lakers, LeBron James Storm Back, HEAT Hold Fast In Final Minute Behind Bam Adebayo Triple Double

The Miami HEAT are 1-3 this week with a week-later rematch against the Utah Jazz on deck. Here's what we've been noting and noticing:

When Dewayne Dedmon signed with the HEAT last April, he immediately produced like one of the best backup centers in the league. In 13 minutes a game, Dedmon was posting 27 points and 20 rebounds per 100 possessions, with ridiculous 73.5 percent true-shooting. Coaches love to talk about players being a Star In Their Role, no matter how big or small that role is. For 11 brief games last year, Dedmon was effectively a Hall of Famer in his role.

It was going to be nearly impossible for Dedmon to repeat that success over the course of a full season. That’s just how math and probability works. I don’t make the rules. But as long as you weren’t expecting more of the same, there’s nothing to be disappointed in. Dedmon is still of the league’s best backup centers, providing stable rebounding, rim protection and finishing whenever Bam Adebayo needs a breather. And while the statistics have come down to less absurdist levels, Miami’s offense has a On/Off differential of plus-17.5 per 100 when Dedmon is on the floor. So, still absurd.

“Dewayne has given us really productive minutes in those short bursts off the bench at that position,” Erik Spoelstra said. “He’s a big big for us off the bench, which we need.”

We don’t have to discredit Dedmon in any way to note that that level of impact is not all due to him. In some respects he’s simply a marker, his presence on the floor serving to represent the overall effectiveness of the HEAT’s bench lineups. It’s not all about Dedmon, but if we want to keep our field of vision as narrow as possible, it’s about Dedmon and Jimmy Butler.

For two players who had never played together before, Butler and Dedmon had incredible out-of-the-box chemistry. Of Dedmon’s 24 two-point makes last season that did not come off of an offensive rebound, Butler assisted exactly half of them. This year, as they continue to work their two-man game, Butler has assisted on 9-of-10 non-putback scores from Dedmon.

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Butler Serving Dedmon

“Jimmy can make it work with anybody but Dewayne is a really big target on his pick-and-rolls to the rim,” Spoelstra said. “He has really good hands, he has good spatial awareness when he catches it in traffic, he’s able to find the rim. We run a lot of actions with the two of them involved together and they’ve just found a good connection.”

Of the 104 two-man units that played at least 50 minutes last season, the best, by far, was Butler and Dedmon at plus-31.5 points per 100 possessions. This season, they’ve dropped all the way to No. 2 on the team at plus-23.5 per 100, and the pair remains the best offensive grouping at 125.4 points per 100.

If you take your eyes off the ball for a few possessions and just watch P.J. Tucker, it won’t take you long to see the effect he has on the team’s highly-rated rebounding effort (No. 4 in Offensive Rebound Percentage, No. 4 Defensive). Spoelstra recently called him on of the “best box-out guys” in the league, and when Tucker isn’t doing that he’s flying in from the corners to buy the team second-chance possessions out of nowhere. Only Adebayo (26) has grabbed more offensive rebounds than him (24), and only Adebayo has more box-outs as tracked by the league. He’s never the tallest or quickest or bounciest player on the floor, but he’ll put a body on anyone.

That also goes for non-rebounding situations. While Tucker is well known for being one of the most prolific corner-three shooters in league history, he’s equally adept at creating corner opportunities for others. Enter The Hammer.

Popularized by the San Antonio Spurs earlier in the millennium, the hammer action is essentially a weakside backscreen set in the corner that frees both a relocating shooter and opens a passing lane for an attacker as he drives the opposite side of the lane. It looks like this:

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P.J. Tucker Hammer Screens

Tucker typically lurks in the dunker spot or outside the key, threatening to cut into the paint as the defense is drawn toward the ball. More often than not, it’s a feint. He’s waiting for the perfect moment to crush a defender and create an annoyance-free pocket for his suddenly open teammate.

Screen assists, as a statistic, get a bad reputation because of how they’re utilized in certain narratives, but they do offer a glimpse into the functionality of a given player. Unsurprisingly, Adebayo leads the HEAT at 3.3 per game. After that, there’s Tucker at 1.7 and Dedmon at 1.5 each. What’s interesting about this is that Adebayo and Dedmon are both screening to free the attacker, setting upwards of 34 ball screens per 100 possessions. For Tucker, that number is 7.7. Instead, he’s making his living building picket fences made out of brick and iron away from the ball.

"I think P.J.’s one of the best screeners in this modern day era," Spoelstra said. "In terms of his nuance with it, IQ, timing, deception, feel and his variety of different ways to get guys open. It really is remarkable. He can do it in pick-and-rolls, off-ball, in hammer screens, a lot of things that you can’t really teach. You have to have such a superior level of mind and IQ for the timing of those kind of screens. It’s been really fun to see that part of his genius off the ball, he’s as good as anyone I’ve seen."

You might read this section and think nothing of it now, but there’s a very good chance that someone on the HEAT is going to his a huge shot next postseason. And it’ll only be when you rewatch that play that you’ll notice who moved the bodies around to make it happen.

If there’s a statistical curiosity that’s worth keeping an eye on over the coming months it’s whatever is going on with Miami’s early-season halfcourt numbers. We have a few options that allow us to parse out halfcourt-only data but to use a site that is publicly available (though behind a subscription) we’ll use CleaningTheGlass.com, which defines halfcourt as:

“Anything that occurs when all 10 players are in the scoring half of the court and set in a normal guarding position.”

Still with me? Let’s start with the offense, where Miami is No. 4 in Offensive Rating (111.3 per 100 possessions) but No. 16 in halfcourt points-per-play. That per-play modifier is important because it represents the gap between those two rankings. Per-play doesn’t include offensive rebounds since every second-chance is a new play, so between Miami’s rebounding and their prowess in selective transition opportunities, that’s how their overall attack is still ranked so highly.

Defensively, there’s a similar effect at play. Miami is ranked No. 7 in Defensive Rating, but No. 15 in halfcourt points-per-play allowed, again the difference in the two is made up with the elite defensive rebounding – the HEAT earning more plays than the other team – and transition defense. This is all despite Miami being No. 1 in the NBA in opponent field-goal percentage on all shots outside of the paint – they allow more threes as a percentage of total shots given up than anyone in the league, as a side effect of their scheme – and jumpers are notoriously difficult to control over time.

In light of the wild variance in jumpers that we’ve seen so far, there just isn’t enough information to get a full grasp of the HEAT’s defense. It’s elite on paper, and it sure looks elite on film, but if there’s any truth to be found in the halfcourt ranking those kernels might be enough to keep them out of the Top 5.

What’s so interesting about the offense is that outside of The Kyle Lowry Effect, many of the changes on that end were made, seemingly, in the interest of improving the team as a postseason offense, where everything slows down and the halfcourt is crucial. All those mismatches the HEAT have been hunting in the early going? That’s playoff basketball.

In the 18 years since 2003-04, which is as far back as the data goes for CleaningTheGlass, 23 of the 36 teams that made the NBA Finals had a halfcourt ranking inside of the Top 5. Only six teams were outside the Top 10 – one this decade, the 2019-20 Los Angeles Lakers – and each of those six was a Top 5 team in Defensive Rating, among them the vaunted Detroit Pistons units of 2003-04 and 2004-05.

We’re 12 games in, so all of this is more observational than exclusionary. If the HEAT stayed exactly as they are today, with a tiny boost defensively that would come from simply not being in the midst of a losing stretch, there’s precedent for a team with that profile for making the Finals. But it is the path less traveled, and it remains an unusual dossier in terms of the way the HEAT get to who they are. Their identity is both somewhat obvious and, as becomes apparent the deeper you dig, somewhat murky. Part of the fun of the season is uncovering answers in the fog.

When asked about his point guard’s prowess in setting screens to free up others, Erik Spolestra had this to say:

“It’s the subtle nuances of deception, bursting to screens, creating some separation and the unpredictability of his angles that makes him a creative screener. He’s always been a guy that gets people open. In that regard he reminds me, in a different way because the game is different, of John Stockton. John Stockton used to be a brilliant screener to get guys open. Kyle’s been that kind of screener over the course of his career.”

"To be compared to a guy like John Stockton is incredible," Lowry said.

Of the 67 players classified as point guards, per their typical defensive matchups, by Second Spectrum, Lowry has set the second most ball screens at 48, trailing only Brooklyn’s Patty Mills. Of those 47 picks, only three of them have resulted in the ball getting back to Lowry for a shot, drawn foul or turnovers (a used possession). In other words, Lowry’s screens are truly and almost entirely geared toward getting his teammates open, as is often the case with Herro, or a mismatch, as he does for Butler.

The inverted pick-and-roll between Lowry and Adebayo has been limited, so far, but it has been used and thus, clearly an option.

-As we discussed last week, the HEAT aren’t actually scoring that much more early in the shot clock because they’ve essentially replaced their pick-six turnovers from last year with Lowry’s hit-ahead passing. A fine trade overall, but it does speak to a larger shift in that Miami is only middle of the pack this season in forcing turnovers after finishing No. 3 a season ago. A large part of that is the lack of blitzing they’ve done in pick-and-roll compared to a year ago. When trailing Denver by double digits on Monday, Spoelstra called in the more aggressive strategy in an apparent effort to manufacture some turnovers – their 13 blitzes in that game were the most this season outside of Dallas, against whom you practically have to put two on the ball with Luka Doncic. Miami hasn’t been as aggressive this year, but they’ll clearly dial things up when required.

-By that same token Spoelstra called in 27  zone possessions – Miami had only used three total prior – on the second night of a back-to-back in Los Angeles last night.

-You’re forgiven if your brain told you that you were watching Bam Adebayo leaping for a crucial putback dunk late against the Los Angeles Lakers on Wednesday when it was, in fact, 36-year old P.J. Tucker. You’re also forgiven for wondering when the last time Tucker, not exactly known for skywalking, dunked the ball. The answer to that little bit of trivia is May 8, 2019, during the Western Conference Semifinals against the Golden State Warriors. Was that three seasons ago? Four? Five? Who knows at this point. Time is a flat circle.

-Tyler Herro has taken 55 pull-up jumpers this season, fifth-most in the league. That’s more than Russell Westbrook, Damian Lillard, Bradley Beal, Trae Young and Steph Curry. The Leader in the clubhouse is Kevin Durant (90 attempts). Herro’s effective field-goal percentage on those shots, as of today, is 44.5.

-I remain nonplussed about Duncan Robinson’s shooting, which we’ve discussed at length so I’ll just add two more points. If you want to hold Robinson to a standard, using his 2020-21 season (8.5 3ptFGA/g at 40.8 percent) might make more sense than his 2019-20 (44.6 percent, same attempts). That’s not to say Robinson can’t hit his earlier marks again, but both he and Spoelstra have commented in the past that it took a while that season for the league to adjust to a surprise All-World shooter. Those consistently open and unbothered looks, they’ve said, are never coming back.

Secondly, since the ol’ timeline appears to be kicking the rotation-change-mobile into high-gear after the losses in L.A., it should be reiterated that a major part of why Robinson is so important to the HEAT is the volume at which he can get his shots – off a rare set of movement skills – which contributes to spacing just as much as percentages. Miami’s starting lineup needs that volume, given it’s lack of true shooters, and the best-case scenario for everyone is things working in the current situation. After the Clippers loss Spoelstra again reiterated his confidence-level in Robinson.

“It’s a tough league. You more often than not have to manage disappointment of not playing up to standards that you have. That’s not exclusive to Duncan. You have to manage those emotions and stay the course. He has uncommon persistence. He’ll break through. I have no doubt about that. His teammates the same way. The staff, the same way. You just have to stay the course.”

-Every game that Robinson plays with a made three extends his franchise record for consecutive games played with a triple. Decently cool, despite everything else.

-Lowry’s 22-point fourth quarter against the Clippers tied his career-high for any quarter, one that he set well back in 2015. His top four single-quarter scoring efforts have all come in the final period.

-Adebayo’s 19-point first quarter against the Clippers was a career-high for any quarter, as was his 24-point first half for any half. He started drawing doubles in the second half, with the Clippers planting their center as available paint help while Nic Batum took some of the primary responsibility, that limited his ability to force the issue on offense, but drawing doubles is the next step in his offensive evolution.

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Coup's Notebook Vol. 3: Jimmy Butler And The Dedmon, The Hammer, Kyle "John Stockton" Lowry, Half(Court) Steppin' And More

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

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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