Luka Doncic

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Couper Moorhead

1. When two teams each on the second night of a back-to-back, one of them coming off a double-overtime game, face off you never quite know what to expect.

Don’t know that anyone would have quite expected this first half, even with the HEAT running on those extra-minute legs, with Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving putting on a show against one of the best defenses in the league. Those two combined to shoot 11-of-15 outside the paint, 40 points on 22 shots overall through two quarters, and very few of those attempts were of the spot-up variety. Even Bam Adebayo, possibly the world’s greatest one-on-one defender in space, couldn’t do anything as both Irving and Doncic drained jumpers over his outstretched arms and fingertips. Sometimes great players are great, and there’s nothing you can do.

The lead wouldn’t have stretched as far as 25, it was 22 at the break, had Miami played a cleaner game, but against a Dallas defense – bodies in the paint, strongside overloaded, help coming – that tends to give them issues they struggled to get into the paint and convert when they did. Some bad turnovers, crosscourt passes thrown out of bounds, hindered the halfcourt momentum, and with Dallas scoring a decent chunk in transition on top of it all, there wasn’t much else, their own 7-of-15 shooting from three – partially balancing out Dallas’ 11-of-23 – the only solace found in a 104.4 Offensive Rating. Signs of tired legs and minds all around, but that doesn’t count for much when you’re in a postseason race.

More intent to the offense in the third, Dallas just wasn’t showing many signs of slowing down as Doncic managed all the bodies Miami threw his way. A couple Kevin Love (16 points on nine shots) threes offered life, the lead down to 16, as Dallas cooled from three on some good looks, but it was a slow run, the lead only shrinking to 13 after extended minutes to empty possessions on either side. Still, down 14, with Dallas only mustering 19 in the period, is still well within earshot. It doesn’t have to be pretty to mount a late run.

Bombs away from three in the fourth, the lead down to eight after four deep makes out of the Tyler Herro (21 points on 15 shots) and Love two-man action, helped along by a smattering of offensive glass as the zone strung together stops. Dallas pushed back quickly enough, both Doncic (29 points on 23 shots) and Irving (25 points on 15 shots) back on the floor for the duration, and it was back to 15 at the four-minute mark, time working against Miami as Mavericks coach Jason Kidd pulled his starters with just under two to play. Dallas takes it, 111-92.

2. The HEAT shot 43.3 percent from three (13-of-30), many of those makes leading to their run with the the Love-at-center bench units, and yet their Offensive Rating finished at 102.2 – a strange relationship between those two numbers that wasn’t characteristic of this team’s profile before this season.

The 16 turnovers certainly don’t help, though you can peg quite a few of those on back-to-back processing speed, but the main thing to say is the same thing that was said after many recent games, including the double-overtime game in Atlanta. The paint has been absolutely packed for weeks, four sets of feet always in the way of Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo, strongside help coming early as teams rely on their closeout speed rather than sticking to shooters and trusting their defenders one-on-one. Miami has shot well in a number of those recent games, but the coverages often haven’t changed, often becoming more resolute as time wears on, confident in the lack of downhill momentum (just 17 percent of Miami’s field-goal attempts came at the rim tonight as they were pushed into the upper paint). Going back two years, Dallas was one of the first teams to do this when they doubled Butler and Adebayo like few teams had ever tried before, and now they’re just one of many teams executing like-minded schemes. Having shooters like Terry Rozier and especially Duncan Robinson, whose gravity disrupts even the most extreme paint-packing philosophies, but this is the trend to watch as the season winds down.

3. Miami could have been locked into the Play-In with tonight’s result as Cleveland beat Memphis, but Orlando left the door open for some final-weekend movement with a loss to Milwaukee. As things stand right now, Miami is one back of Philadelphia in the loss column – two back of Indiana, which holds that particular tiebreaker – for homecourt in a 7-8 Play-In game that appears exceedingly like the most likely outcome with two games remaining.

There is a small window of hope, however, in the form of the Orlando Magic, up two in the loss column on the HEAT, whose loss to Milwaukee means that if they lose their final two and Miami wins their final two, Miami will win the division (thanks to a head-to-head tiebreaker) and thus as the division winner be in the lead of a variety of multi-team tiebreakers. There’s also a path where Orlando falls into the No. 7 seed and they become Miami’s Play-In opponent.

All the HEAT can do from here on in is win their final two games and cross their fingers for a little help elsewhere. Such is life when you don’t control your own destiny and the season is in the proverbial final two minutes of the fourth quarter.

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Coup's Takeaways: Late Miami Run Falls Short As Dallas Takes Second Night Of Back-To-Back

1. You aren’t going to see much better displays of offense than what Miami came out of the gate with in Dallas, but the Mavericks are no slouches in that area themselves.

Miami immediately attacked Dallas’ weak point on defense, putting them in empty corner pick-and-rolls and back cutting every defender who dared to turn their heads on their way to a 6-of-6 start, five of those in the restricted area, and eventually a 29-14 lead with five of their first six threes falling. The hot shooting was going to cool, sure, but at that point there were zero indications that Dallas was going to begin stringing together stops. Those stops came, eventually, in the form of the HEAT missing free-throws and turning it over in the passing lanes, and that was enough to bring everything closer together, Miami up just eight despite 71 percent and 85 percent from three shooting splits in the opening period.

Duncan Robinson wasn’t cooling off, though, starting 4-of-4 with plenty of hands in his face, and the HEAT were eventually up to 9-of-11 from three yet only up five at that point. The HEAT never quite lost their grip but the half-court offense started to get just a little more grindy, working a little more against the shot clock as both sides worked into their rotations. Miami by four at the break, the lead not quite reflecting their superior energy, effort and shooting.

Another Robinson (19 points on 7-of-10 shooting) three to open the third, but Miami started to play Dallas’ game a bit, launching quick threes, and eventually things were tied at 65 even with the Mavericks sub-30 percent from deep. Luka Doncic started to really get going at that point, getting to the line after settling for a number of early step-back threes, and Dallas eventually stretched their first lead to five. Then came the zone from Miami, which Doncic immediately answered with a deep catch-and-shoot three. Dallas’ defense kicked into gear, strong-side zone and doubles coming for Jimmy Butler, but a four-point play from Caleb Martin at the end of the quarter managed some serious damage mitigation, Miami down eight headed into the fourth.

Threes still falling for Miami, Terry Rozier (27 points on 17 shots, 5-of-8 from three) keeping his group in it as Martin gave Kyrie Irving trouble on the other end and Butler started taking and making tough jumpers over the help to bring it all back to a tie and an eventual lead on a 9-0 run. A clutch game, of course, Dallas suddenly back up six on a pair of threes – Dante Exum hitting a huge one from the top with time draining – only for Rozier to answer right back with a three of his own. Then Irving answered with a second-chance three in the corner and Rozier missed his answer this time, Miami down seven with a minute to play. Full-court pressure got it back within three, but that was that with the shot clock off and Dallas takes it, 114-108, with a back-to-back in Oklahoma City tomorrow.

2. It didn’t feel like it would be much of a Doncic night as first, but at the end of everything you look up and he has 35 points on 12-of-24 shooting to go with 11 rebounds and 11 assists – in other words the very definition of a Doncic night.

Miami threw a little bit of everything at Doncic, playing him straight-up early – Doncic took plenty of step-back threes during that stretch – and switching perimeter spots while keeping Adebayo in drop coverage, which Adebayo managed well tipping a couple lobs before Doncic finally snuck one in over Adebayo’s head in the second half. Then there were a few zone looks, which Doncic either shot over the top of, manipulated the wings into creating a pick-and-pop for a teammate or whipped a pass to the corner against. We’ve discussed before how difficult Nikola Jokic and LeBron James is to zone and Doncic fits into the same tier unless Dallas is missing their threes.

Then, just as they did against Cade Cunningham on Tuesday night, Miami got more aggressive down the stretch, putting two-on-the-ball with Adebayo blitzing Doncic and other defenders showing out hard to avoid switches. That was how Exum wound up with maybe the shot of the game with just a couple minutes to go, and while getting the ball out of Doncic’s hands helped to create some chaotic situations as Miami attempted to come back in the final minute, Dallas finding their shooting late – they’re an incredibly dififcult team to out-score when they’re near 40 percent, and they finished at 39 from deep to nearly nullify Miami’s eventually 44 percent – created too much of a gap. There’s nothing you can show Doncic that he hasn’t seen at this point, but at the very least Miami kept his free-throws down (4-of-4) and forced him to shoot 7-of-13 from three to keep his efficiency and raw totals up.

3. It’s unusual for an opposing coach to be so specific about something during pregame that they want to focus on in a given matchup, particularly during the regular season, but that’s what Mavericks coach Jason Kidd did before this one, noting that he wanted his team to take away Miami’s corner threes.

It was an interesting comment given that corner threes haven’t been a singular focus for Miami this season and Dallas had set that previous precedent of doubling Butler and Bam Adebayo in the post last year, which tends to induce corner threes with the right ball movement, but taking one of the most valuable shots in the game is generally an understandable goal. Sure enough, Dallas’ coverages for Butler came out, strong-side zones on his post-ups and slow-rolling doubles if the possession was crawling, and with Miami’s screeners crushing off the ball those corner threes came in fast and furious, 10 attempts in the first half and 18 in all – a season high for Miami, with 15 their previous high – as Miami made eight.

There are many questions that we can’t answer here. Maybe Kidd was just playing possum with some pregame gamesmanship. Maybe his team didn’t execute properly on the weak-side rotations. But clearly corner threes weren’t as important to Dallas’ gameplan as disrupting Butler’s night with all that extra attention, and maybe 18 corner attempts in the end was a tradeoff they were willing to make when Butler only scored 14 on 12 shots, and with Miami’s Offensive Rating finishing at just 114.9 even with excellent perimeter shooting means Dallas’ plan worked out well enough regardless of what their pregame whiteboard actually said.

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Coup's Takeaways: Luka Doncic And Mavericks Find Their Range Late As Terry Rozier Keeps Miami Close

When you hear it said out loud, the concept of Enjoying Someone Else’s Success sounds a bit like corporate gobbledygook. Some executive read some team-building book and here’s the phrase that leads off the next staff meeting. They finally greenlit In Good Company 2 and here’s the follow-up speech Topher Grace has been waiting 17 years to make.

Nobody can really blame you for thinking that, but Erik Spoelstra believes what he says. He lives what he says. He’s made Enjoy Someone Else’s Success such a fixture of his locker room airspace that you can practically hear it being whispered in your ear whenever you step foot in HEAT facilities. It doesn’t matter if that sounds corny to you, reader, the maxim is as much a part of the fabric of Spoelstra’s teams as any scheme or strategy he employs. Sure, there are years where words ring hollow if the talent isn’t there and the losses pile up. But when the talent is there, and the talent buys in and lives it. Shazam.

“Everybody is so stoked and excited whenever somebody else would make a shot or get a big stop,” Jimmy Butler said after the HEAT beat the Dallas Mavericks by featuring four 22-point scorers for the first time in franchise history. “With this group, we really do enjoy each other’s success like that.”

For as much talk as there has been about Miami’s league-leading defense, it’s also the side of the floor that has, at least generally, undergone the least amount of change. It’s better, to be sure, thanks to drastic upgrades in defensive personnel, but the profile is relatively consistent. Switch a ton, seal off the paint, send liberal and creative help and if you happen to give up a high volume of threes, so be it. Better, but not different.

Offensively, this team is almost unrecognizable from the past handful of years. They isolate and post-up a ton at the cost of pick-and-rolls and handoffs. They mismatch hunt. Shots at the rim are down a little and threes are down a lot. Mid-range attempts are on the rise. Assists are inconsistent night-to-night. Were it not for the team getting to the free-throw line, there’s little in the profile that would indicate much of an analytical slant.

And yet here’s Miami, sitting today as the No. 2 offense in the league (114.3 points per 100 possessions) after a pair of highly efficient, though low volume, three-point shooting nights. Same coach, same forward-thinking mindset as always.

“I think the most important thing is your offensive efficiency,” Spoelstra said. “It’s two things. Are you getting to your strengths and are you doing it efficiently? That’s regardless of whether you’re getting it from the three-point line, the free-throw line or at the rim. We have a team that has an aggressive bent by nature, so we want to play to that. As teams and defenses start adjusting, we have the three-point spacing and shooting that, when it’s needed, we might have some games where we shoot 45-50 attempts to keep the defense honest. We just have to take what’s given.”

Take What’s Given may as well be painted on a sign hanging above a locker-room doorway because it’s the best explanation for why everything is working as it is.

This could change overnight because it’s November 3, but right now the HEAT are one of only three teams featuring three players all with a usage rate over 27 percent (their share of team possessions that end in a shot, foul or turnover). For the Lakers and Timberwolves, that includes their starting point guards. For Miami, it doesn’t, as Kyle Lowry sits all the way down at 15.2 despite leading the team in assist rate and sitting second in average time of possession. In other words, Miami has four engines under the hood of the offense. Somehow, despite Lowry’s presence freeing up Adebayo and Butler for mismatch-targeting post-ups and iso’s and Herro playing with such go-ahead he may as well be playing in a Green Man outfit from Always Sunny, it has never once felt like those four players were participating in the proverbial taking of turns.

“You want to be able to maximize your offense in all the different ways in your menu, without it feeling like you’re taking turns,” Spoelstra said. “I don’t think anyone would say that about our team. It’s an unselfish group, they like sharing the ball, they like enjoying someone else’s success. If they can help someone else score they want to see that happen.”

Throughout Miami’s win in Dallas, in was always one of the four leading the offensive way. And it was also another one of the four enabling them to do it.

Jimmy Butler has never seemed to care about leading the team in either shots or points, finishing each of the last two seasons with more games of single-digit field-goal attempts than over 20. But he’s always had a sense of the moment. Whether the team was stuck in the mud or getting too sped up, he was always ready to steady the moment with a drive down the right side of the lane and a trip to the free-throw line. As the HEAT started slow against the Mavericks, Butler proceeded to either sprint down the floor for a post route or methodically take his screens from Lowry, find the advantage on the switch and go. Twelve points worth of go. Twelve points worth of take what’s given.

“We got a bunch of guys who are really unselfish,” Herro said. “Guys who can go off in any quarter, whether its 10 or 20 points in quarter, we got multiple guys who can do that.”

It was Herro’s turn next. With Luka Doncic at his Luka-iest on the other end, Herro matched him shot-for-shot and then some to the tune of 15 second-quarter points as teammates kept feeding and feeding. We’ve been over the narrative surrounding Herro already. His role on the court is probably the easiest to explain. Very few players in the history of the league have posted a usage rate approaching 30 despite coming off the bench all season, and Herro is primed to become the next, doing it all with a finger on turbo as time has slowed around him.

Sure, Herro’s efficiency is going to fluctuate, wildly at times, because he’s generally taking a ton of pull-up jumpers. Nobody seems to care. His job is to score and score at volume. If the other team tries too hard to prevent him from scoring, his job is to leverage that attention for the benefit of others. It’s a simple role, despite the playmaking reads becoming more complicated as scouting reports evolve. Herro is thriving in the simple. In the take what’s given, or in Herro’s case, take what you make.

“My best attribute is probably to score the ball,” Herro said. “I can score, I feel like with anyone. Just making the right play, whether its setting a teammate up or looking for my shot.”

Herro has led the HEAT in attempts in four of their seven games, carrying 57.8 true-shooting along with him, and it seems the only time he’ll lose popularity in the locker room are the games in which he doesn’t threaten to earn the night’s badge for volume and creativity.

“The world knows that he can score the ball with the best of them,” Butler said. “We need him to keep doing that, keep the confidence high and come out and jack them up there like he always do. That’s what we tell him to do. We love that Tyler. Keep that confidence high because we’re going to need it all [season] long.”

Nobody has seen more of a role shift this season than Adebayo, newly the every-night aggressor in part due to Lowry shouldering more of the playmaking burden. Last year Adebayo was third in the league in setting handoffs at 17.7 per 100 possessions, per Second Spectrum. That number has plummeted to 10.1 per 100, No. 36 among his peers, and as a result his assists have dropped from 5.4 to 1.5 a night. Clearly his talent for passing wasn’t stolen by some malevolent force. He’s simply been placed in position to finish possessions rather than process them.

After a six-point, three-foul first half that Adebayo called “terrible”, Lowry, Butler and Herro all fed their All-Star big as he posted 10 points in the third. There was a pair of geometrically perfect lobs from Lowry, sure, but the rest was New Bam. Post. Re-Post. Attack.

“It’s all about the matchups,” Butler said. “Who got the hot hand, and if I’m being brutally honest who hasn’t touched the ball in a while. I think we have a good grip of that, we’re paying attention to that because we want everybody to be successful. You’re playing with a bunch of guys that do better with the ball, and Kyle is phenomenal at getting everybody the ball where they want to have the ball.”

“We’re playing free basketball,” Adebayo added. “Like Jimmy said we’re sharing the ball, playing together, we know where the shots are going [to come from].”

If any of the four is the butter spread across the toast, it’s Lowry, the team leader in Take What’s Given. Clearly content to play the elite ball-deliverer, as Spoelstra put it earlier this season, Lowry might never take 10 shots in a quarter much less 20 in a game, but he’ll sprinkle in small bursts of aggression between the hit-aheads and pocket passes. On nights when the shot is falling like it was in Dallas (6-of-9 from three), you look at the box score at the end of the game and there’s Lowry with 22 points on 10 shots, including eight in the final period as he plays the perfect quick-trigger, pull-up capable compliment to Adebayo in pick-and-roll.

It’s not taking turns if all you’re doing is flipping the switch on and off.

“Nobody is like, ‘Oh, I have to do this job, or I have to do this, I have to be this certain way,’” Lowry said. “We’ve learned very early that everyone has their own type of job and jobs can be switched. Positions can be turned and flipped and no matter what just go out there and be successful and play hard. We’ll figure it out.”

As hinted at earlier, the mixture of these four fluid offensive roles has produced unusual, if seamless and effective, results. You don’t have to dig too far to find that the team’s efficiency is being sustained by jumpers and floaters. The Lakers are the only other team with similarly low volume drives – Miami is No. 25 in drives per 100 possessions – and three-point attempts. All the added post-ups and isolations aren’t exactly blowing the bloody doors off. Teams may start scouting those quick transition passes more effectively, and the early-season offensive rebounds may dry up a bit given how few bodies the team is actually choosing to crash.

All that might be true to the point that the HEAT are more of a Top 10 offense than Top 2. All that might be enough to explain a few losses down the road. It might not matter. As long as the HEAT are simultaneously capable of scoring nights like they had against Dallas and Memphis, and defensive symphonies like those against Milwaukee and Brooklyn, they’ll be more than just fine. Maybe truly great, in the end. Maybe just very good, if things cool and normalize and do all those things that things do over the course of six months. They’re built for the playoffs, either way. A team full of talent more than happy to play Choose Your Fighter night-to-night, quarter-to-quarter, with a diverse-enough menu to send any caliber or style of opponent home to be a family man.

“It’s not about stats with these guys, and I think that’s so unique,” Spoelstra said. “You can talk about it, you can teach it, you can rant about it as much as you want, it’s a league that is based on celebrating a lot of other things, and rightly so, but ultimately it’s about winning.”

They should be taking turns, these talents. Maybe on some base functional level, they actually are. But to them, they aren’t. And that’s that little something special that can carry you though a season no matter your schemes, shot profiles and rotations.

“It is [rare],” Butler said of the blend. “But it’s because we don’t really care who scores. As long as we win, we’re all happy. As long as we win, we all did our job. No matter if someone scores two points, no points or 25 points.

Theorize all you want on what the league’s next big thing is. What new type of shot or pick-and-roll coverage or lineup concoction is going to spark a trend that defines the next five years. The HEAT have been that team before, and someday will be again under Spoelstra. But today, maybe the market inefficiency they’re poised to exploit is something far more simple. Maybe this team is just all about Good Vibes.

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The Four Furies: It Doesn’t Look Like Jimmy Butler, Kyle Lowry, Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro Are Taking Turns Because None Of Them Care Whose Turn It Is