NBA Finals

Couper Moorhead

There was Caleb Martin, in the far corner with the ball. Behind him is the HEAT bench, every player and coach standing. In front is Giannis Antetokounmpo, the two-time Most Valuable Player and Finals MVP engulfing Martin with his wingspan. If you freeze the video at just the right time, all you can see of Martin is part of his face and two shoes.

Down three with just over three to play in the midst of a crucial Game 4 comeback opportunity – Antetokounmpo had just returned from his back injury, and a 2-1 series lead was anything but safe – it’s not a catch-and-shoot opportunity, as Antetokounmpo meets the ball at the target. Martin has time. Time to jab step. Time to size Antetokounmpo up. Time to put his hand over his own face after draining the shot.

No, it wasn’t some hackneyed eighth-seeded David versus Goliath metaphor. Miami was far more than just a little guy slinging rocks at a behemoth. Martin’s moment represented exactly who they were – a group that never cared for one second about who was in front of them, only how they could beat them.

They believed, in the work that got them there and in where they could go, and nobody believed in them more than their head coach, ever insistent that, internally, things looked better than they did to everyone else even as the Play-In Tournament approached.

He also knew when they were beat. Coaches don’t say what Erik Spoelstra said after Game 5 without just cause.

“We couldn't really find, obviously, enough solutions to be able to get us over the top.”

“It wasn’t our time, it was their time,” he added during exit interviews.

They ran into a team that could do to them exactly what they did to Boston and Milwaukee, not just a collection of great talent but a team, and player in Nikola Jokic, built to counter everything about Miami’s identity – by going over the top of a defense that excelled at stopping the ball from going through it – while matching them in toughness, of both body and mind.

Every team in the league has that lack of answers in common, and there’s a decent chance that remains the case for years. When the HEAT ran into a similar problem, a team that played a way that was anathema to their defensive style, in the 2014 San Antonio Spurs, it marked the end of a highly competitive era. But even if that team had stayed together, tweaked the roster and revamped their scheme – the latter of which they did anyway – those Spurs were just as same as these Nuggets. They’re the Western Conference’s problem. Reaching the stage where that matters means being four wins away from a title, and anything can happen when you only need four wins, as the Bucks and Celtics just found out.

Back to Miami. Spoelstra knew the offense wasn’t good enough when the team lost to the Boston Celtics in seven games a season ago. Their defense had given them a chance, hitting the brakes on Boston’s drive-and-kick offense just as did in another seven games this year, but in the half court their attack was stuck in quicksand. So Spoelstra refocused the approach around his stars, leaning into a style of offense – more mismatch hunting, more isolations, more pick-and-rolls and fewer handoffs – that would be able to keep the train on the tracks against Boston’s switching just as they previously had to adjust to Milwaukee’s drop-back paint protection.

“It feels different than last year,” Spoelstra said of the offense after losing to Denver. “And it felt different than what we experienced with Milwaukee 3-4 years ago, where we knew we had to make some schematic improvements and player development improvements at least in key areas.”

Part of that story has been kept somewhat quiet, and it has to do with Adebayo. Where there was some public outcry about his aggression against Milwaukee’s conservative defensive coverage, a different approach didn’t require merely a changed mindset but actual skill development and repetition. Push shots became calm, confident dotted line jumpers that fell over the top of Brook Lopez in the regular season and again in the playoffs. Same deal with attacking switches – opening a season with his team feeding him isolations and post-ups helped to push Adebayo into a new offensive groove that would carry over into the most important games against coverages designed to hinder the previous version of himself.

“We needed to do that,” Martin said, during the Boston series, of leaning into Adebayo’s scoring. “We needed to get him assertive and aggressive and confident to go get a bucket at will. Doing that all season got him to the point, mentally, for these matchups specifically. These were some of the matchups that we struggled with last year. It was glaring.

“The fact that we were getting him the ball all year this year really prepared him for these moments.”

It wasn’t exactly a seamless transition. Behind the new offensive focus, the team’s shooting and overall efficiency cratered. That much is well documented, with the Offensive Rating topping out at No. 25 in the regular season. But a little bit before the All-Star break Spoelstra’s tone started to change. Things were trending in the right direction on the scoring end. The spacing was getting better, the actions were more intentional. The numbers weren’t necessarily that much better – even if you segment the season out the best offensive numbers across small samples tended to veer toward league average – but Spoelstra saw something.

Adebayo, again, took center stage. The way his teammates described it – a characterization Adebayo agreed with during the Eastern Conference Finals – was that with more scoring touches he felt as though he had to live up to the responsibility, single handedly swinging games with the scoring load entrusted to him.

“I think that he was carrying a burden and feeling like he had to carry,” Martin said.

So around the mid-point of the season Adebayo had some “honest conversations with [his] brothers,” as he puts it, and reevaluated his approach.

“He stepped up in a huge way and kind of changed the way he was playing a little bit to help the whole team be better,” Max Strus said during the postseason. “He took a sacrifice on his terms to make our team better overall, the way he was playing. It’s been huge in helping us trend offensively in the right direction.”

It wasn’t a change to be anything he wasn’t, rather one to be everything he had ever been, a playmaker and a scorer, all at once. He found the balance, the glow, a place where he didn’t have to try to be anything but himself.

“He just started to realize, ‘I just do this naturally,’” Martin said. “’I don’t have to try to get 30. I don’t have to try to go make all these things happen. Once I just play and play hard, I get stops. I get buckets.’

“He wills us. He and Jimmy, they do that **** naturally. They don’t have to try.”

Statistically, there isn’t a compelling story to tell. One fewer isolation a game, maybe, and even fewer handoffs after the All-Star break even as players like Strus felt like they were flowing into those actions more fluidly. The usage rate dipped a couple of percentage points, but so did the assist rate. Just as with Spoelstra’s continued positivity about the offense despite inconsistent evidence to back it up, there was a belief in the team that something was going right.

“It just got us more involved naturally in the flow,” Martin said of he and the other role players. “He just found ways, it just opened up for him. The game slowed down for him. Everything moved slow, guys became more open, the vision became more clear.

“When you’re a guy on the pedestal like that, if you lose, it’s on you. The way the season was going all year, that’s a different type of pressure. He’s got a huge chip on his shoulder. This is one of his biggest opportunities in his career. The way the season was going like that, it’s tough to not want to do it yourself. That’s human instinct when you’re in that position.”

Adebayo would be the first to tell you that his postseason wasn’t perfect. “I still have more to learn, more to grow with, more development in all aspects of my game,” he says. But there’s no doubt it was his most dynamic run. When Lopez conceded space, he shot. When the offense bogged down against Boston and he was left one-on-one with Al Horford or Robert Williams, he attacked. After his usage rate fell to 17.9 in the 2022 playoffs, it jumped to 23.8 this year. The efficiency fell off, as it almost always does with greater usage against top tier defenses – more upper paint attempts have meant fewer free throws – but the call, so to speak, was answered. And throughout, he was springing Strus, Martin, Duncan Robinson, Kyle Lowry and Gabe Vincent – his willingness to shoot an absolute necessity after Tyler Herro broke his hand – free for the looks opposing schemes would afford them.

“I was in there with 14 other guys who were willing to do anything,” Adebayo said. “To have those 14, it made my life easier. You don’t listen to outside noise about you should be doing this, you should be doing that. When you get in the locker room with 14 people you trust . . . their opinions matter more. The 14 guys in that locker room made it comfortable for me to figure out what I can be and who I can be.”

There wasn’t much more Adebayo could have shouldered as Miami finished three wins from a title. Playing every style of defense – more on that in a moment – against the league’s best, Adebayo’s energy was consistent and pervasive as he chased every possibility on the court. Even if he wasn’t always the best version of himself in each game, he was the best version of himself we’ve seen to date. Those other 14 played their part, and then some.

Shooting was one thing. In their nine wins against Milwaukee, Boston and Denver – where the shooting was an absolute necessity in order to advance – the HEAT shot 47 percent from three and 49 percent on three Second Spectrum logged as ‘heavily contested’. The shots weren’t necessarily better than they were, with Miami always ranking low in three-point Shot Quality, but with increasingly confident shooters they fell, over and over, everything coming together in the same ways that all levels of production can create perfect movies – Casablanca, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Across The Spider-Verse, pick your flavor. Was it an outlier, historic performance on a team-wide level? Sure. That should be a source of pride. When you make something special, you own that special.

There was so much else, though. There was Martin silencing a raucous crowd in Boston with turnaround jumpers. There was Vincent torturing Milwaukee off Adebayo’s screens. There was Strus saving the season in a play-in game against Chicago, Kevin Love tossing a record number of outlet passes for scores in a single quarter against New York and Robinson freaking Denver’s defense out every time he got a touch. There was Kyle Lowry, pushing the bench units over the top as Butler or Adebayo rested. There was Haywood Highsmith picking Jayson Tatum’s pocket and scoring the other way.

“When we got to the playoffs and you need different strengths for different rounds and different opponents, that really became paramount to our success,” Spoelstra said. “If we didn’t go through all that in the regular season, I think we would have really struggled during the postseason.”

There was very little Herro or Victor Oladipo, their runs cut short by injuries. Herro’s story, for the second year in a row, is left incomplete. His insertion into the starting lineup wasn’t exactly smooth – the new group’s Net Rating, +4.3, was less than half that of the previous season’s starters, before further tweaks were made – even as the individual skill development was there. He took on the blitzes thrown at him by other teams, hit the open man more reliably and boosted his two-and-a-half level scoring – the rim attempt rate actually dropped but his multi-dribble shooting jumped from 45.2 to 50.1 effective field goal. While remaining a target for opposing teams, he had his most competitive defensive season and made a handful of late plays on that end. But there is a chasm between the regular season and the playoffs, one that he is well aware of, and for good or ill he has yet to be afforded a full opportunity to test himself against the best.

“That’s why I was so disappointed,” Herro said the day after breaking his hand in the first game against the Bucks. “It felt like no matter what I did in the regular season wasn’t going to validate until I did something in the playoffs again. I knew that. That’s why it’s just so devastating.”

And of course there was Butler, always insisting that the next game would be a win and the next problem would be figured out, for whom we’ve spilled plenty of ink during perhaps his best, or at least most efficient, regular season and at-times unstoppable playoff performances. We’ll never know the extent to which that ankle injury against New York hampered him, but he was unbelievable all the same, in particular his 56-point comeback Game 4 against Milwaukee truly one for the ages. The efficiency waxed and waned as the run wore on – in particular against New York and Denver defenses that crowded his driving lanes with discipline not to overhelp, as opposed to Milwaukee and Boston generally defending him one-on-one – but you want to know the list of players who have averaged the numbers Butler just did (27 points, 6.5 rebounds, 5.9 assists) in a postseason of at least 20 games? It’s Butler, Jokic, LeBron James and Larry Bird. All-time company, that.

The defense was never quite what it needed to be, not consistently, even if it sometimes was exactly that. When Miami wasn’t doing what it did best, turning other teams over, their man-to-man defense struggled, ranking No. 26 across both parts of the season on possessions ending in shots or fouls. Spoelstra countered creatively, as always, mixing up coverages on the fly – if switching won’t work against this team, then we play drop, if dropping won’t work, then we blitz – and playing a record amount of zone, with the pair of Martin and Vincent leading the way up top, overwhelming teams with their versatility and willingness to adapt in the face of basketball mortality.

It all comes back to the offense. With Adebayo, Butler and the typically competitive players Miami rosters, the defense will always be there. It may not always be idealized, but Spoelstra will always find ways to move his pieces around into a cohesive strategy. Whenever this team finds ways to score efficiently, they become contenders.

Contenders still need things to go right along the way. They need the right shots at the right times. The need moments upon moments upon moments. They need players willing to sacrifice and be, above all, about one thing. They also need to survive, with the blood pressure of their fan base rising, perhaps the most clutch season in league history, with a record 45 games ending within five points or less across both regular and post seasons.

They also need to tap the sign and believe. &nbsp;Believe in the big picture, that they can win, and in the most fleeting of moments, that a jab-step jumper with three minutes to is going to fall over the longest arms in the league.

Four years ago, that first Finals run, it was the start of something. Since then, there have been playoffs each year, with two seven game Conference Finals and another Finals loss to one of the most unique stars in the league has ever seen.

If that’s not success, you may need to broaden your definitions. This group keeps finding a way to find a way, as rosters change and the teams around them evolve. And there’s no reason to think they can’t keep doing it.

Call this run whatever you want. Special. Magic. Inspiring. Wild. Shocking. It was, it is, whatever it meant to you. It’ll be a great story to tell, either way. Not of the plucky underdog, but of the team that never stopped looking for a way forward on their way back to exactly where they’ve been before, and where they believed they should be again.

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Tap The Sign: The 2023 HEAT Were The Team They Believed They Could Be, But It Took Some Honest Conversations To Get There

For almost this entire postseason run, the moments have belonged to Miami.

Whether it was Jimmy Butler sticking jumpers in Jrue Holiday’s face or Caleb Martin torturing the Boston crowd with forceful forays into the paint, the HEAT have been the steady hands forcing their opponents to play on tilt. They found all of your pressure points, stuck their thumbs in them and pushed, wearing on you in ways you didn’t even know you could be worn until your knees buckled and your identity crumbled into the grass as your season drifted off into oblivion.

Derrick White had his moment, sure, one that almost sunk the season, but even that game had gone according to Miami’s blueprint, another fourth-quarter comeback almost completed. The HEAT’s general formula had produced two different flavors, either they rode lights-out shooting to an early eight-point lead that they could use to stiff-arm their way to the finish, or they would come from behind – sometimes also behind hot shooting, but always behind their defense – with a late-game haymaker. The moments were there for both pathways in Games 3 and 4, an 8-0 run from Caleb Martin pushing Miami out front early in the former, an 8-0 run with Nikola Jokic on the bench with five fouls late in the latter, and each time Jamal Murray snatched those moments away with the same crowd-silencing threes that Martin and Butler and Gabe Vincent had just buried Boston and Milwaukee with.

There’s a technical challenge ahead of Miami, down 3-1 with their season on the line in Denver, against a team that has had counters for nearly everything they try. But it’s in those moments where the Nuggets have truly spelled out the difference between this series and those that came before.

The argument was there, quite easily based on regular season resumés, that Milwaukee and Boston were the greater teams – teams that Miami then made into something less than they had been. The HEAT may not have been dominant, but they took the dominance right out of their opponent’s chest, wave after wave of clear eyes and full hearts crashing onto the rocks, an answer always in sight. Denver has been their peer in that regard, just as steady, just as precise, just as tough, taking every faulty step in stride as they march on forward.

And when the hearts and minds are equal, it comes back to the game. Who can get to who, and how often? Through most of these four games, it’s been the Nuggets doing the gettin’, Fairly and squarely, plus-36 in a glacially paced series begetting a plus-9.3 Net Rating.

Miami still has their chance to make history, to become the second team to come back from 3-1 in the NBA Finals after the Cleveland Cavaliers did it in 2016 behind three incredible performances from LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. One last moment to be who they’ve been, floor spaced, lanes shrunk, pressed up and zoned in. They have the weight of basketball history working against them, all of what should happen and what has happened and what everyone thinks is going to happen. Going down like this, on this stage, is a story that ends the same for most teams. The names and logos may change. The NBA script rarely deviates from canon.

But since when has this group cared about any of that? They have their own story to tell, and they only need to tell it once.

For everything the HEAT have tried, Denver has had an answer – every bit of push-and-pull stemming from how Miami approaches the pick-and-roll combination of Murray and Nikola Jokic, that which balances all things.

On paper, that combination has been very good, if not as great as it often is, producing 1.05 points per screen across 99 actions per Second Spectrum. That number also doesn’t include the handoffs between the two, which have produced 1.18 points-per across 39 actions – 25 of which have come in the last two games.

In some ways, the Nuggets have exposed the one primary shortcoming of Miami defense this season – they have the best switch defender in the league in Bam Adebayo but not the personnel to switch anything they want at any time. That’s why they’ve had to dip their toes deeper into drop coverage and zone waters, finding ways to move Adebayo around and maximize his skillset without always using his most maximized skill. There have been times where Adebayo has been able to jump out to Murray and induce a stagnant isolation – Murray has hit a couple of tough shots, but those have generally been Miami’s best defensive possessions in this series – but more often than not the result of any switch is Jokic at the nail or in the post with a smaller defender bracing himself to absorb power dribbles. Those situations have been, for the most part, doom. When anyone other than Adebayo or Cody Zeller has defended a Jokic post-up, Denver has produced 1.56 points for every possession it happens in.

That's the reality of Jokic. Most teams struggle when he gets a catch against a switch. The result is the same, though, in that the HEAT have had to look towards other options.

Through two games, the drop coverage was working reasonably well, Murray and Jokic producing just 0.81 points-per when Adebayo played a bit back of the initial screen as Murray found himself with predictable pull-up looks. Then Murray started out Game 3 hot as Denver worked out their spacing. Now the ball was getting downhill, or Jokic was getting free catches at the free-throw line as Murray, taking wide angles, forced Adebayo to commit to the ball.

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Finals Game 5 Primer: Murray vs. Drop

“The first half, they really got to that two-man action quite a bit,” Spoelstra said the day after Game 3. “They were getting a lot of traction, so they didn't need to go to any other part of their playbook.”

So Spoelstra did what he does when an opposing guard starts dialing into conductor mode a little too frequently and tried to take the conductor out of the game. In the two games in Denver, Miami blitzed Murray just twice. Over the two in Florida, they did it 13 times. A few times it caught Murray off guard and led to a turnover. But again Murray found an answer, accepting the pressure, and again the result was Jokic finding himself with a free catch, a play to make or a space to draw a defender.

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Finals Game 5 Primer: Murray vs. Two

The theme is consistent. If Adebayo concedes too much ground, Murray has a comfortable look – and Miami is not a team that enjoy giving up comfortable look especially not to players who are more than happy to work the mid-range. If Adebayo tries to contain Murray, however the coverage is logged in the tracking data, Murray bursts off the screen and stretches Adebayo out. Even if Murray isn’t outright pushed back by a trap, the result is consistently a Jokic catch against either a closeout or a switch.

“If you put two on the ball, Jamal, and he finds Nikola in the pocket, something good is usually going to happen,” Denver coach Michael Malone said.

Some of that you have to live with. Just because Denver has two players who can do everything doesn’t mean there is suddenly a defensive coverage that can take away everything. You always have to give up something, and the Erik Spoelstra has done well moving his pieces around, being reactive to the moment, and trying to give up something different every time – to force Murray and Jokic to keep making reads, to keep processing the information on the floor. Miami’s best defense hasn’t been any one thing, it’s been cycling through all of their options, including both Butler and Martin on Murray.

“I think we saw everything,” Jokic said after Game 3. “I'm always saying that's why they're so great. They have so many defenses, and they're really good in every defense that they're putting out there.”

That Murray and Jokic have consistently found answers as quickly as they have, within individual quarters rather than requiring film and days off in between games, is why they’re as good as they are.

And yet in Game 4 those two shot a combined 13-of-36 for 38 points, hardly the beacon of efficiency that was their Game 3, 66 points on 43 shots. You can argue the quality of looks they were missing beyond Murray’s one-on-one adventures with Adebayo, but the percentages were there for a Miami win even when the shooting wasn’t touching the heavens.

But Murray and Jokic haven’t just been their percentages. It’s the threat they post that creates the real impact, and that’s where the HEAT found themselves in trouble in Game 4.

For the most part, I thought that that part of the game was okay,” Spoelstra said about defending Denver’s main pick-and-roll combination on Friday. “It's the Gordon dunks or cuts, Porter had a couple cuts . . . those were probably the most costly things.”

The way Synergy Sports logs things, generally with people logging by hand as opposed to the player tracking data of Second Spectrum, there is no more dangerous play than a cutter who get a catch.

The best spot-up team in the regular season, Philadelphia, scored 1.13 points-per-possessions from those play types. The best pick-and-roll team, Dallas, produced 1.29 points-per when hitting the roll man. The best transition team, Denver, averaged 1.20 ppp on fast-break possessions.

The average cut possession, from the No. 15 Chicago Bulls? That was good for 1.33 ppp.

Now, the way Synergy logs those possessions are pretty strict – they include players getting dump-off passes from the dunker spot – and those strict definitions are partially responsible for the value attributed to those possessions. But this is all important because Denver averaged 10 cut possessions a game this season, No. 2 behind Golden State. Here’s how many they’ve been getting in the NBA Finals.

That’s 13 of the most valuable possessions a game. That’s how Denver won two games in this series shooting sub-30 percent from three before coming back around for 14-of-28 in Game 4.

Before Game 2 Malone used one of our old favorite terms, Ghost Cuts, which is how we used to describe how Dwyane Wade would slice through his defender’s blind spot when they turned their head to track the ball. It was fitting, too, because half of Denver’s roster moves as if they’ve watched film on Wade. They don’t just cut to cut. They don’t just cut because the set demanded it. They cut on time and on target, leveraging the attention given to Murray and Jokic with defenders unable to center their cones of vision on two things at once. If you look away, or you step up to help, Murray and Jokic are always looking for their ghosts.

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Finals Game 5 Primer: Gordon Cuts

“I think we were up a little higher, trying to make sure that we showed bodies on [them] coming off the pick-and-roll,” Kyle Lowry said.

The Nuggets only have six more restricted area attempts than Miami in the series, but they’re shooting 71 percent to Miami’s 62 in that range largely because of how those shots are coming about in the margins. Even as the HEAT have been getting some easy stuff of their own, Denver has responded with even more plus opportunities, and at other times Miami is playing through contact where the Nuggets are catching the ball at the rim.

Denver is averaging 20 restricted area attempts per 100 possessions. For Milwaukee, missing their main rim generator for part of that series and lacking consistent entry passing, it was 14.9. For New York, all their paint points drying up after the first half of Game 1, it was 14.5. Boston actually had comparable numbers, shooting 76 percent at the rim on 18.3 attempts per 100, but they were a unique case. When they had Robert Williams on the court, they could manufacture similar catches to those of Denver because of the lob. But otherwise, the Celtics and their drive-and-kick machine were playing breakthrough-and-conquer, their drives often becoming problems – turnovers – as often as they did layups, especially for anyone not named Jayson Tatum. The Nuggets have a team full of players working off the ball like Williams did for Boston, and they have a center who can back down through the defense, rather than having to try and split it.

Trying to take away cuts from the Nuggets is a bit like trying to take away threes from the Golden State Warriors. They’re going to get some. For Miami to extend the series to six, they’ll have to mitigate the damage. They’ve shown they can limit the interior passing, in Game 2, and contest the threes, in Games 1 and 3, but those two areas were the difference in Game 4 as resources were committed to Murray and Jokic.

Denver has, for the most part, put a dent in Miami’s own postseason bread-and-butter when it comes to pick-and-rolls between Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo.

Through three games, Miami’s had gone to that combination 46 times – 25 per 100 possessions and 24 times more than the next combination – and produced just 0.86 points per direct action, per Second Spectrum. Jokic was hanging back a little bit in drop coverage, staying attached to Adebayo, while Denver brought over a third defender, committing less and less to unnecessary help as the series has gone on while still eating into space if Butler gets too side-to-side. Both players have been able to get two feet in the paint with the ball in their hands, but almost always with at least one body in front of them.

The good news was that through those three games, Kyle Lowry’s screens with Adebayo were producing 1.31 points-per, albeit in just 20 total possessions.

So, in Game 4, Spoelstra switched things up. As Denver managed their help discipline against Butler, he and Adebayo ran just five total pick-and-rolls between them while Lowry and Adebayo’s usage jumped up to 10 – producing 1.25 points per. The film doesn’t suggest that this was a light bulb moment, as a handful of those points came from Kentavious Caldwell-Pope biting on a Lowry pump-fake from three and Kevin Love banking in another three from the top of the arc, but you could see where Lowry’s ability to get low and work through the coverage got Denver off balance at times. And getting Butler off the ball only helps when the defense is off balance.

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Finals Game 5 Primer: Jimmy Cut

The HEAT are still going to have to make shots. Denver’s defense isn’t giving up anything easy – Jokic even saved a dangerous pass or three with his feet in Game 4, lunging less with his arms as he did in the games in Denver – but Miami hasn’t always needed to find things easy outside of Milwaukee conceding pull-up jumpers with their conversative drop. Miami’s Shot Quality on three pointers against Denver, an expected effective field-goal percentage of 50.7, is about the same as it was against Milwaukee and Boston. Butler and Adebayo’s combined Shot Quality, 49.05 expected, is about the same as it was against Milwaukee and New York – more similar defensive styles to Denver than Boston’s switching, with New York’s help rules being the closest comparison. The shots just aren’t falling the same as they were, outside of Game 2.

Is that all this is, make or miss? It’s never that simple, but Miami had been doing a lot of making until now and this is only the second series, after New York, where the HEAT have underperformed the expected value of the shots they’re getting. It didn’t matter too much against those Knicks and all of their own half-court struggles, but against a Denver team putting up 120 points per 100 on an average night, every percentage point matters.

Then again, all these stats and schemes, they might not matter at this point. It doesn’t matter what you should be shooting. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, who you’ve beaten or how you did it. It’s been a remarkable run for Miami, full of magic and memories that will last a lifetime, but only Monday night matters now.

The Nuggets have proven themselves different. For six weeks the HEAT were constantly the hunters, reenacting the bar scene from Near Dark – vampires walk into an establishment, run amok, drink blood, leave the establishment in tatters and flames – over and over again. But Denver has had too much life force to drain, their stars steady and their role players – Gordon, Bruce Brown, Nicholas Braun, etc. – stepping up in exactly the same ways, in all those timely ways, that Miami’s role players did against the Bucks and Celtics.

This is no premature obituary on the HEAT’s season, merely an acknowledgement of the task ahead. Denver has earned that respect, and then some. There is no five-point palm exploding heart technique that will turn the tide, only doing what Miami has done best and finding a way to do it even better. The task is monumental, but the HEAT have been scaling monuments for months.

All of the basketball world is ready to crown Denver because that’s what should happen. Miami still holds, as ever, the possibility of what could. And if they’ve proven nothing else, it’s that you’re going to have to shove a wooden stake into their collective heart to put them down.

-As we’ve been tracking all season, Miami’s half-court man-to-man has generally been pretty reliant on forcing turnovers. During the regular season, the HEAT allowed 1.32 points per possession when their man-to-man looks ended in a shot or a foul, ranked No. 25. Against Denver in those same situations, they’re allowing 1.37 points-per. The Nuggets had their second-lowest turnover rate of the playoffs in Game 4, with just six total turnovers to Miami’s 14.

-Miami is 2-4 in the playoffs when committing 14 or more turnovers, though they also committed just four, a postseason best, in Game 3.

-On a related note, the HEAT didn’t use a single possession of zone in Game 4.

-The HEAT are shooting 32.3 percent from three in their three losses.

-Jamal Murray is only producing 0.68 points per isolation in this series, which is largely due to Adebayo’s switching. Butler is up at 1.03, not the heights he’s been at previously – 1.14 across the regular season and postseason – but a workable number.

-In Games 1 and 3, the HEAT scored 0 points on seven Butler drives which ended in a pass. In Games 2 and 4, they scored 20 points on 12 direct Butler drives leading to a pass.

-Duncan Robinson’s handoffs with Adebayo, perhaps Miami’s best action through three games at 1.37 points-per, fell off a bit in Game 4, two points on three handoffs, as Denver continues to key in on them.

-While the HEAT are generally limiting Denver in transition outside of live-ball turnovers, Denver’s 118.8 half-court offensive rating in Game 4 was the highest mark Miami has allowed in the postseason and fifth highest including the first 82.

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Canon Events: Facing Down History, Miami Goes Into Game 5 Armed With What Could Happen Against A Denver Team Proving Their Mettle

Trailing by multiple possessions in the fourth quarter of a postseason game, the Miami HEAT went absolutely bonkers on the offensive end, hitting just about anything they put up on their way to a stunning victory.

They did it to Milwaukee. Twice. They did it to Boston. Now Denver gets to join the club. And then some.

If the HEAT have been painting fourth-quarter masterpieces all postseason, this was their pièce de résistance, 36 points on just 19 possessions. That was good for 1.89 points per possession, the fourth-highest mark in a postseason fourth quarter of the past 10 years – and the third-best final period of this year, including the entire regular season. Better yet, on possessions that didn’t include a turnover in that final period, Miami scored 2.12 points per. This is special, historic stuff in a special, historic postseason.

Let’s go one step further. The HEAT are now scoring 1.25 points per possession in fourth quarters during these playoffs. Of the 80 teams that have played at least 200 possessions of postseason basketball in the past decade, that 1.25 mark ranks No. 2, trailing only the 2021-22 title-winning Golden State Warriors, and just ahead of the 2019-20 HEAT.

That’s the thing about this team. It’s not that they’ve always been dominant – though they certainly have been at times. But when they’re at their best, they’re unbelievably timely, plugging away again and again, never stopping never stopping, until they breakthrough at just the right moment, hitting a handful of threes in a row, while their opponent is left to pick up the pieces and try to salvage a game with minutes remaining.

You can say the ability to do that comes from playing a metric ton of clutch, close games – with a three-point victory in Game 2 Miami is now tied with two teams from the 1970’s at 44 games decided by five points or less, regular season and postseason combined. You can say that’s a shining example of Erik Spoelstra’s coaching, making all the right in-game adjustments, swapping into a press zone when trailing in the fourth quarter again, that can swing a result. You can say it comes from being a tough-minded group that never snaps, never breaks and only bends just enough to make you think it’s safe to get comfortable. You can say it’s what happens when the right kind of talents come together and stay together, playing the way that works for them.

You can say a lot of things. Ultimately this is a team that, up a little, down a little or down a lot, is always hanging around for just the right moment to crack a game open. That’s what got them to the NBA Finals. That’s what has the series tied, 1-1.

If this HEAT run was a movie – and it very well may be a movie at this point – then Three Point Shooting might be the name above the title, the name on the marquee. It’s the thing that brings the entire picture together. We all love Terminator 2. We love James Cameron, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, motorcycles, trucks, helicopters, special effects and liquid nitrogen. Would it have still been a great movie just with all that? Almost definitely. Would it have been a phenomenon without Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Of course, shooting isn’t a person. It’s something a group of people do. Is that interesting? Probably not. Nobody wants to see a movie headlined by a statistic. We want heroes and villains. We want stars and underdog stories.

It doesn’t matter what we want. Miami isn’t here without the shooting. In Game 2, they shot 11-of-22 on heavily contested threes, the fourth time they’ve made as many in the postseason.

While they came one miss away from breaking a tie with the 2015-16 Cleveland Cavaliers for most games in a single postseason run of 50 percent three-point shooting on at least 25 attempts – Miami is currently at four, having done it three times against Boston in the Eastern Conference Finals – after hitting 48.6 percent of their deep shots in Game 2 Miami is also tied with that same Cavaliers team with six games over 48 percent on at least 25 attempts.

“We made shots,” Jimmy Butler said. “That's what this league is, that's what this game is, make-or-miss game, make-or-miss league. We made some shots. They didn't.”

You may look at Miami’s 39.2 percent overall for the playoffs and think that it’s strong but somewhat unremarkable – even if that number alone would be one of the best, if not the best, postseason shooting stretches of all time – but each series is only about what needs to be done to get to four wins. Miami was able to shoot 30.6 percent from three against the Knicks because New York only had one offensive player, Jalen Brunson, who posed a clear and present threat in each game.

How about just to beat superior teams in Milwaukee, Boston and now Denver? In their nine wins over those teams, it’s taken 46.9 percent shooting from three, including 48.7 percent on shots logged by Second Spectrum as heavily contested. Call them Colin Farrell because at those numbers they might as well be up for the role of Bullseye.

Is there luck involved? Of course there is, especially in the statistical sense. That’s just how these things work. Unless you’re dunking the ball every time down the court, there will be natural variance in anything you do. The best shooters don’t make all the time, the worst shooters don’t miss all the time.

But does being lucky mean your achievements are unearned? Hardly. Especially when you set yourself up to take advantage of luck. Plenty of teams have shot well in the playoffs, including 50 percent from three on at least 25 attempts. Most of those teams have had their runs cut short because they didn’t defend like Miami, they weren’t as tough as Miami or they didn’t have flexible, two-way stars like Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo. The only way you can keep enjoying great shooting nights is by staying alive and playing more games.

It also helps that the HEAT don’t rely on any one player for their three-point volume, which means there isn’t any one player for a defense to key in on. What might make their shooting less narratively interesting – they don’t have a Steph Curry making a million threes or a LeBron James setting the table for everyone with cross-court slings – is also what makes them so potent. In Game 2 it was Gabe Vincent and Max Strus each hitting four threes, but Kevin Love, Jimmy Butler, Duncan Robinson and Kyle Lowry all hit at least two.

They spread the defense thin with options, and options playing at pace forces the other team into plenty of mistakes.

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Nuggets Game 2: Forced Errors

And here’s what Denver coach Michael Malone had to say about them.

“It was definitely a breakdown in communication. It was definitely a breakdown in our game plan,” he said.

Granted some of those plays are fairly simple switches that Denver will likely clean up, but they happen because the HEAT aren’t giving the defense time to process. The more mistakes you force just by playing your game, the more your tough makes are going to matter.

And then your tough makes are also going to induce mistakes, like an overzealous closeout or putting two on the ball when Jimmy Butler has the ball at the arc a couple possessions after draining a contested corner three.

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Nuggets Game 2: Jimmy Reactions

If Miami goes on to win this series, the shooting is going to be part of their story. There are only five games left in the season, maximum – hardly enough time for true regression to the mean to play out. And they only need to shoot well in three wins, anyways. If they go on to win, they’re going to be known as the team that got hot at the right time, in the right games against the right opponents. That shouldn’t be taken as a slight or an insult. There’s blood, sweat and tears behind everything that they do.

They’re also winning in the way they need to win, and that’s a heck of a lot better than losing.

If it wasn’t made clear already, this has been an offensive series for Miami so far, at least when it comes to their own win conditions. Through two games, Denver is scoring 1.16 points-per-possession against Miami’s half-court man-to-man with Bam Adebayo on the floor.

That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of good things happening on defense – Nikola Jokic had just 13 passes leading to a shot in Game 2, down from 31 in Game 1 – but Denver, as they’ve shown all postseason, continues to show an ability to adjust on the fly, take punches and keep chugging along scoring at a very high rate. Miami’s answers, such as they are, have been to vary up coverages, giving Jamal Murray and switch here or a containment trap there, and do it with precision, pressure and discipline. This is not a case where, as against Milwaukee and Boston, a specific scheme is going to cause the other side to unravel. Denver may have a weird possession here or there – they’re scoring better against the zone than the man-to-man, even if the zone changes the rhythm of the game – and they will have stretches of missed shots, but everything we have seen from them in this series suggests a resistance to discombobulation.

If the HEAT want another ring, then, they’ll have to keep scoring – and their margin for error on that end is quite small. In Game 1 they were a 40 percent night from three, with Denver below 30 percent, away from a tied game in the final minutes. In Game 2 it took making nearly half of their threes, with Denver just a tick above average, to win by three.

The good news is that beyond the make or miss of it all beyond the arc, there are specific actions that are getting under the skin of a Denver defense that is better than you might think.

Through two road games, Miami’s shot quality against Denver has been marginally lower than it was against Milwaukee and Boston. With the Nuggets dropping back with size and helping in the paint, the HEAT are generating just 17.4 shots per 100 possessions in the restricted area, about what they got against the Bucks. On all other shots, their Shot Quality, per Second Spectrum, has been the equivalent of what it was against Boston – their lowest of the postseason. On only threes, their Shot Quality is again equivalent to what it was against Milwaukee and Boston.

On paper Denver is the inferior defense to those two teams, but they’re doing things in their own way – helping more in the paint and switching more than Milwaukee while being more strident in their paint protection than Boston was. They also have a weak spot in Jokic who, while proving himself an excellent rim deterrent, isn’t the most mobile of centers. If Jokic is dropping back and Bam Adebayo is getting a catch around the free-throw line – with the other Nuggets defenders creating a pocket around him without obvious passing lanes – then Adebayo is getting shots Denver can live with. But when Jokic has to play higher up on the action because the HEAT’s shooters are making them pay, then Miami’s offense comes to life.

To the Nuggets credit, they know this. Part of the reason for their huge second quarter run with Jokic on the bench was because they upped the pressure on Miami’s bread-and-butter actions and forced turnovers – something which required more of a mental adjustment rather than anything Erik Spoelstra could draw up on a clipboard.

“Just kind of having an approach and a disposition to not kind of just let them take me out of what we're trying to do,” Robinson said. “So that's a start.

“Doing it with a brain, as well, and, you know, not just going out there mindlessly and just trying to run off a hand-off,” he added. “Instead being a little more patient, a little more thoughtful with it.”

Across 86 pick-and-rolls with Jokic as the screener defender, Miami is producing 1.07 points-per-screen including assist opportunities. That’s already good, but there is a significant split when it comes to Jokic and the varied depth he’s playing at. This isn’t Milwaukee, with Brook Lopez in such a deep drop that Vincent can simply come off any screen and find a comfortable look.

“Jokic switches up what he does in pick-and-roll a lot,” Vincent said after scoring 23 points on 12 shots. “You know, they kind of keep you thinking, so I'm just trying to be aggressive and find my spots when I can.”

When Jokic has been dropped back in a pick-and-roll, 27 of them in total though not all have been directly used by the HEAT, then Miami is producing 0.55 points-per. About two thirds of those have been Butler actions, with Denver daring him to shoot. The Butler-Adebayo actions, Miami’s bedrock during this run, have yet to find traction at 0.78 points-per so far.

But when Jokic is up to touch, as tracked by Second Spectrum, or otherwise at the level of the screen, Miami is producing 1.33 points-per across 18 screens.

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Nuggets Game 2: Jokic Touch Bam Dunk

Miami’s best fourth quarter possession looked like this, too, with Jokic worried about Robinson, though it ended with an awkward turnover despite Adebayo getting a dangerous 4-on-3 catch.

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Nuggets Game 2: Jokic Touch Duncan Pocket

“We know they are going to try to stop Duncan from shooting threes,” Adebayo said. “You know they are going to guard him.”

Miami didn’t score a single point on Robinson’s handoffs in the first half. In the second, they scored nine points on six of his handoffs. Robinson’s 12 off-ball screens also produced 19 points, both directly or indirectly, for the HEAT in the fourth-quarter alone.

Denver deserves credit for jamming Miami up as much as they have in stretches. Miami deserves credit for drawing mistakes out of them, too. But it’s these actions, where Jokic is drawn out of the paint, where the HEAT have most consistently had their best half-court flow. It doesn’t solve everything but knowing you can get a defense scrambled with the right execution – or otherwise get a relatively clean look – matters in a series as tight as this.

As long as Miami isn’t getting much at the rim, it’s all going to come back to their shooting. If they keep touching history from beyond the arc – barring a deep slump from Denver – &nbsp;the title is well within their grasp. And there’s nothing wrong with that being a major part of their story and success. You dance with who you brought with the dance, and when you’re making a sequel you bring back the Austrian bodybuilder you started the franchise with.

-Denver scored 1.31 points per possession against zone in Game 2, an improvement on Game 1, and 1.20 points-per with Jokic on the floor (10 possessions). They also only scored a modest 110 points per 100 possessions with Jokic playing overall, but that is largely impacted by them shooting 30 percent from three in those minutes.

-After driving just eight times in Game 1 for 0.66 points-per, Jimmy Butler had 19 drives in Game 2, for 1.00 points-per.

-Jokic is producing 1.71 points-per across his 18 post-ups so far. Any Denver possession that features a post-up has been worth 1.66.

-Denver had just one hockey assist in Game 2 – the passes that lead to the assist – after seven in Game 1.

-Jamal Murray scored 1.16 point-per in pick-and-roll in Game 2, though just 0.75 against drop coverage versus 1.80 when Miami switched. That includes assist opportunities, such as a pass to Jokic on the switch.

-When it comes to shotmaking on threes – actual effective field-goal percentage over expected – Miami now owns the first, second, third, fourth, and seventh (Game 2) and tenth best games of the 2023 postseason. That’s out of 174 total games, including the play-in rounds.

-Miami’s 1.32 points-per-possession in Game 2 was their best mark of the postseason against half-court, man-to-man defense.

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Timing Is Everything: The Main Character In Miami’s Story Is Shooting, And It Has Them Three Wins Away From A Title

In the grand scheme of things, Game 1 wasn’t all too surprising.

That’s not to say you go into that game expecting a loss. There’s just no denying that after three straight series of bludgeoning Eastern Conference basketball against the paint assaulting likes of the Bucks, Knicks and Celtics, Miami struggled a bit with the uniqueness of the Denver Nuggets and their everything-is-an-option offense.

Sure, it’s not exactly like going from playing the 2014 Indiana Pacers to the 2014 San Antonio Spurs but it’s not too far off. The HEAT knew exactly how to get under the skin of their previous opponents. Denver is an entirely different bag. As far as styles of play, Miami essentially just spent the past two months watching gritty 1970’s Japanese gangster movies and then they get to Denver and the (genuinely nice and a good hang) theatre kid from down the hall throws on 1964’s pastel-colored The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – in which every single bit of dialogue is delivered in singsong.

Just like the Knicks and Celtics, who each opened up rental properties in the paint during the first half of their respective Game 1’s before the HEAT adjusted, the Nuggets were able to get to everything that makes them special – perfect entry passes into mismatches, cross-court slings to open corner shooters, the most dangerous guard on the floor springing free in the paint off a series of screens – on their way to a 131.1 Offensive Rating across the first two periods.

“It was kind of a figure it out game,” Caleb Martin said. “Well, a figure it out half.”

The question, then, is how much of Game 1 – a nine-point loss where the deficit at one point ballooned to 24 – was just Miami going through an adjustment period, as Denver scored just 93.8 points per 100 after the mid-game break, and how much of it was Denver presenting equations without elegant solutions.

It would be dangerous, and perhaps unwise, to distill Game 1’s margin down to a mere difference in makes and misses. Sure, Miami was a few threes – 13-of-39 overall – away from making this a real game down the stretch, but Denver – even worse at 8-of-27 – was a handful of good looks from winning by 20. The HEAT had a solid, good-for-the-postseason-but-still-just-below-average Shot Quality of 51.2. They also only underperformed that expected effective field-goal percentage by 3.8 percentage points. Playing the deserves game, who deserved to make more of their looks, can lead to mental hurdles which skip over the things that matter.

As incredible as Miami’s shooting has been at times, mostly against Milwaukee and Boston, we have to acknowledge that those were probably – depending on your measurements of choice – two of the best shotmaking series, in the sense of exceeding Shot Quality, in the history of the league. Repeating those feats can’t be the only solve, nice as it would be. It doesn’t have to be, either, just keep in mind that three more makes from anyone would have both knotted the final score – the game would of course have played out differently – and put Miami over 40 percent from deep for the eighth time this postseason.

Can’t get too greedy with those percentages. There’s too much else to dive into with what should be a fascinating clash of styles. You can be sure Erik Spoelstra isn’t back at the team hotel thinking, ‘Make more shots and we’ll be fine.’ He’s probably doing what he does best, in the lab with a pen and a pad.

Miami and Denver know each other a little better now. They’ve met in the park and exchanged phone numbers. It’s time to bring things back to their circles, to the honest and unwavering opinions of Hugh Grant’s eclectic bunch of restaurant friends, and talk about where things should go from here.

Asked before the series about whether he expected to continue seeing a crowd in the paint coming off New York and Boston series where he routinely saw a third or fourth man swarming and stunting toward his mid-floor catches, Bam Adebayo responded in the affirmative.

“I feel like that’s been the biggest thing in a lot of series, not letting me be comfortable in the paint and get to my spots,” he said.

A day later, things didn’t quite look play to expectations. While it wasn’t quite to the extreme degree of Milwaukee’s straight-up two-on-two coverage on pick-and-rolls – with defenders staying within arm’s reach of shooters – the Nuggets were generally content to allow Adebayo ample space to operate around the free-throw line. As a result, toward the end of the third quarter Adebayo had already tied his career high in field-goal attempts at 23, and he finished with 26 points on 25 shots.

“They were kind of making him probably a little bit more of a scorer,” Martin said.

Asked following the game whether he had more space than expected, Adebayo again responded in the affirmative.

To his credit, Adebayo didn’t waste any time. With room available early and often, he was decisive in getting to his spots and his shots. All those dotted-line reps of the past year came in quite handy. The question now is whether or not Adebayo being left to operate in his own fortress of solitude is good, sustainable offensive process for the rest of this series. Results are a little mixed.

There are really two things we’re talking about here. The first set of examples are fairly straightforward pocket catches, most specifically with Nikola Jokic dropping back deep enough off screens to deter a drive and stay in front of Adebayo on the catch. In those situations, Denver was happy to leave Jokic to deal with Adebayo, though notably other defenders were either one-foot-in or close to the paint to enforce a literal pocket around Miami’s center, making his possible kickout reads a little less obvious while offering Jokic some protection should Adebayo try to work side-to-side with his speed advantage.

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Nuggets Game 1: Bam No-Help Catches

These shots do bring into question the years-long discussion of what a good shot for Adebayo is. Without diving in too deep to that particular lake, the more aggressive Adebayo gets the more it often leads to mid-range and upper paint looks of average-ish efficiency. On a night like Game 1, when Adebayo shoots 5-of-5 from mid-range, it looks great. But even shooting 50 percent on those looks isn’t producing much more, given the lack of free throws – Miami took a postseason record two from the line – than a point per possession. Against Denver’s offense that might not be good enough. There’s a reason the Nuggets were happy to concede that space.

But then there were the catches where Adebayo was able to get in front of Jokic, generally because Jokic had to adjust his level of coverage and get closer to shooters coming off screens at the three-point line. Instead of kicking at the ball like he did during the regular season, Jokic was often lunging at pocket passes with his long arms. Every time he whiffed, which was mostly every time, Adebayo was left with an advantage situation where he was quick on the creation, with Haywood Highsmith and his 18 points playing the perfect foil along the baseline.

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Nuggets Game 1: Jokic Whiffs Bam Catches

That’s some of the best offense Miami had all night, with the HEAT getting literally 2.00 points per possession, on six pick-and-rolls, where Adebayo got the catch and made another pass. If Denver wants to deter some of Miami’s pull-up shooters by varying Jokic’s drop depth, Adebayo is going to get these situations. Are the Nuggets willing to give a few of those up, maybe with Jokic stabbing less at passes he isn’t likely to tip, if it means they can otherwise contain Adebayo, and thus Miami’s offense, to more upper-paint and/or mid-range attempts?

That remains to be seen. For now, Denver can look at Miami’s 0.89 points-per on Adebayo’s 36 screens and be content. But consider the splits – Miami didn’t score a single point out of their 10 Jimmy Butler-led pick-and-rolls with Adebayo, with Jokic dropping far back into the paint, while all other pick-and-roll ballhandlers produced 1.21 points-per. A good sign if and when Tyler Herro, with his drop-punishing game, is able to return to the rotation.

Both teams have something to build on here. Before we move on, here’s what Nuggets coach Michael Malone had to say about this particular give-and-take.

“You've got to read the game,” Malone said. “If you're giving up tough mid-range contested twos, that's better than them getting a lot of open threes. Obviously, we can do a better job of contesting some of those mid-range shots that Bam was getting, and I think we have to mix up our levels. To your point, Kyle Lowry, Gabe Vincent, they hit a couple of pull-up threes. I was imploring our guys, imploring Nikola to be up higher. When you do that, now Bam gets behind you and you have to trust your low man and trust your weak-side help.”

Jimmy Butler, with just 13 points on 14 shots, did not play with a ton of force in Game 1. That much needs to be added as a caveat before we dive into his evening. A handful of possessions could have been different had he been as aggressive as he’s been at other points in the postseason. Even if he’s coming off a seven-game series of heavy minutes and now playing at altitude, chances are his disposition will be different at some point in the near future. That’s the pattern of self-correction he’s established and a pattern that has to be respected.

That said, Denver has their say in things, and how they chose to defend Butler matters.

As much as Miami gets deserved credit for being masters of toggling between different coverages on the fly, they don’t have a patent on that ability. There was clearly a general plan for Butler, playing Jokic in his deepest drop of the night. Denver also varied up how his primary defender, typically Aaron Gordon though the Nuggets threw in a bunch of switches, played the screens, sometimes going over the top, sometimes going under, sometimes forcing Butler toward the sideline.

Most crucially, there was regularly a third defender stunting into Butler’s potential driving lane, shrinking the floor on Miami’s star in the same way the HEAT recently did to wings like Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.

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Nuggets Game 1: Jimmy Sees Three

And if Butler tried to find a mismatch, often Kentavious Caldwell-Pope or Jamal Murray, to post-up, Denver was more than happy to bring over an extra defender to the strong side just as the Knicks regularly showed.

NBA Finals

Tap The Sign: The 2023 HEAT Were The Team They Believed They Could Be, But It Took Some Honest Conversations To Get There

Canon Events: Facing Down History, Miami Goes Into Game 5 Armed With What Could Happen Against A Denver Team Proving Their Mettle

Timing Is Everything: The Main Character In Miami’s Story Is Shooting, And It Has Them Three Wins Away From A Title

Genre Shift: And Now For Something Completely Different As Miami Adjusts To Denver’s Funky Groove On Defense While Bam Adebayo Finds His Fortress

Meet Cute: The Nuggets, With Their Unsolvable Problems, And The HEAT, With Their Endless Stash Of Solutions, Prepare To Get To Know Each Other On The Grand Stage

An Unprecedented Run

Jimmy Butler Is That Walkin' Dude

HEAT Show Fight, But Fall to Lakers 124-114 in Game 2