The Heat caught an expected break Wednesday when the league decided not to suspended Dwyane Wade for his flagrant foul on Darren Collison, according to ESPN.com’s Brian Windhorst.
Here’s the foul in question:
We all knew this was coming, even though Wade’s dangerous shoulder-check was not so different from Jason Smith’s takedown of Blake Griffin during a March game in New Orleans:
The league suspended Smith two games for this. What’s the difference? There are a few, but only some of them should have played any role in the league’s decision to let Wade skate. Read More…
The criticism of MVP LeBron James for his play down the stretch of Miami’s 78-75 Game 2 loss to Indiana on Tuesday will be much louder than the barbs aimed at Dwyane Wade, who shot 1-of-5 in the last 3:30 of the fourth quarter and missed one of his two free-throw attempts.
It is slightly inaccurate, though, to suggest that James shied away from the ball for the entirety of crunch time. He took a three-pointer with 3:35 to go and attempted a driving layup — snuffed out brilliantly by the Pacers’ Paul George — with less than 90 seconds remaining. He crashed the offensive glass hard on three of those Wade misses. A player who wishes to hide does not chase offensive rebounds, especially when grabbing them often leads to free throws.
The nice thing about having three All-Star players is that you can get by against most teams without one of them, especially when your best All-Star is the most versatile player in the league. The Heat should overcome the Pacers in the second round without Chris Bosh, who is out indefinitely after straining an abdominal muscle in the second quarter of Miami’s 95-86 victory in Game 1 on Sunday. And if the power forward’s absence extends beyond that, the Bosh-less Heat would still be favored in the Eastern Conference finals against a Sixers team that is 1-11 against Miami over the last two seasons and a ferocious Celtics club dealing with its own health issues. The gap is smaller, though, and the chances for an upset against any of those three teams increase. The Heat may still reach the NBA Finals without Bosh in the worst-case scenario, but beating a team like the Spurs or Thunder would require Miami to be at full strength.
Now, LeBron James will play huge minutes at power forward in “smaller” lineups that have done quite well this season, with and without Bosh. Counting only lineups that logged at least 10 minutes together in the regular season, the Heat used James at power forward for 376 minutes and outscored opponents by about 14.5 points per 100 possessions — a number that would have led the league by a long shot, according to Basketball Value. The two such units that recorded the most minutes did not feature Bosh, as the Heat often used James as power forward when one or both of the other stars rested.
David West was unable to punish James in the post in Game 1, both because Miami makes it a chore just to enter the ball, and because LeBron is just as big and strong as the Pacers’ power forward. Miami’s move to sign Shane Battier and retain Mike Miller has it stocked with defenders capable of guarding small forward Danny Granger, sparing each of the LeBron/Battier/Miller trio the full-game burden. The Pacers were unwilling to go small/fast along with Miami on Sunday, forcing West into an awkward matchup on defense with Battier. That pulls West from the paint, opening driving lanes, and over the course of the series it will provide Battier some good looks as West scrambles around in an unfamiliar, perimeter-oriented assignment.
David West will be the difference-maker for the Pacers in the second-round series against Miami. (Ron Hoskins/NBAE via Getty Images)
I spent the regular season watching the Pacers and asking two questions:
1. Will this team ever score efficiently enough to be a real threat to the league’s best teams?
2. When is Darren Collison going to make a leap?
The second question basically amounted to: Why doesn’t Collison look more like Tony Parker on the pick-and-roll? Why is he always pulling up for long jump shots? Why can’t he see the passing lane open for just a beat? Or: Why doesn’t he keep his dribble alive a bit longer to create passing lanes that don’t otherwise exist?
But these were the wrong questions, and not just because the Pacers replaced Collison in the starting lineup with a less traditional point guard in George Hill and got even better. Indiana could use an ace point guard — any team could — but it doesn’t really need one, because it’s built to create offense in a different way. The Pacers are not all that different from the Lakers, both the Phil Jackson and Mike Brown versions, in that they use their big men instead of their point guards to get into the teeth of the defense and create shots.
Among playoff teams, only the behemoth Lakers devoted a higher percentage of their possessions to post-up plays than the Pacers, per Synergy Sports. Roy Hibbert will have a huge height advantage over every Miami big man in this series, and how he responds to the quickness of Miami’s bigs and help defenders will be a key factor in how this series goes.
Again, one way to penetrate a defense is simply to toss the ball to a tall person close to the hoop. But over the last 25 games or so, the Pacers have gotten very good at creating penetration through a second method. And with that in mind, I present the player who gives Indiana the best shot at giving Miami an honest run: David West, and his passing skills.
West has been slipping screens for nearly a decade in the NBA, which is a fancy hoops guru way of saying that when West sets a screen in a pick-and-roll, he cuts straight toward the basket almost before he actually sets the pick. He is not interested in lingering there or nailing an opposing point guard with a cement wall pick. He wants to get in the way for a second and then leave, hoping to catch the ball in an open space somewhere just below the foul line and to the left of the paint. This is penetration via the pass. Read More…
The more I watch basketball and talk to people involved in the game, the more convinced I am that it’s just not possible for teams with multiple star players to maximize all 90 or so offensive possessions they get in every game. We complain often about Miami’s Dwyane Wade and LeBron James “taking turns,” Oklahoma City’s James Harden working as a glorified decoy at times when he plays with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, or New York’s Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony seemingly having difficulty working away from the ball.
We demand perfection — constant activity, clipboard brilliance, screening, passing and the kind of whirring selflessness that would seem to make any fully engaged Heat or Thunder possession almost unguardable. But lulls happen in games, and they are probably inevitable. Basketball is too mentally and physically exhausting, defenses too good and well-prepared, for every half-court possession to be a masterpiece.
Still, there is a long continuum between extreme stagnancy and perfect five-man activity, and Miami has proved for two seasons now that it is vulnerable when its star-laden offense falls too far toward the stagnant end. The Heat have a better bench this season, but when the pressure is high, their three stars will play more minutes together, and they will have to score effectively in the half court. Two of those stars, Wade and James, have similar skill sets, and neither is a knockdown three-point shooter who can space the floor simply by running around screens. Miami has to be more creative than that.
At its best, Miami is a fast-moving beast with Wade, James and Chris Bosh working off each other to create openings. The Heat are beatable when they go through long stretches of “your turn, my turn” predictability. Coach Erik Spoelstra can stop these funks only periodically by calling a timeout, drawing up a play or two and sending his team back out. The Heat too often looked uninspired in going “just” 19-13 after the All-Star break, including several losses to their main championship competition — teams with defenses that generally chew up predictable, spacing-challenged offenses. Could Miami rediscover the gear it showed earlier in the season?
Bad news for the league: Through two playoff games, it’s clear that Miami is reinvigorated on offense. Good news for the league: It has been only two games against an overmatched Knicks team whose best defender, center Tyson Chandler, suffered a poorly timed case of the flu and whose second-best defender, rookie guard Iman Shumpert, is out for the season with a torn ACL. Still, the early results are encouraging: Miami — which goes for a 3-0 series lead on Thursday in New York — is leaning on some basic actions in which its star players work together on and off the ball, rather than having everyone stand around while James or Wade runs a high pick-and-roll.
None of this stuff is complicated, which makes it frustrating when it vanishes from Miami’s offense. Take the simple cross screen that Bosh set for Wade under the rim on three consecutive possessions during Game 2:
Chris Bosh could miss Game 3 to be with his wife and newborn baby. (Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images)
Chris Bosh flew from Miami to New York in the wee hours to be with his wife upon the birth of their new baby, and could miss Game 3 Thursday in New York. (David Aldridge reported Thursday morning that Bosh is expected to play, but Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said Bosh will be a game-time decision.)
The appropriate reaction here is to congratulate Bosh and his family, and to commend both him and the Heat for having their priorities in order. Players handle this kind of thing differently; Bosh’s teammate, Shane Battier, famously hit a game-winning three against the Spurs in the playoffs last season and flew back home to see his newborn baby later that day. No two such situations are identical, in terms of timing and family preference, and it would have been perfectly fine for Bosh to skip a playoff game and see his new son.
On the other hand, some Toronto fans still haven’t forgiven Vince Carter for attending his college graduation on the morning of Game 7 of the 2001 conference semifinals against the Sixers — probably because Carter shot 6-of-18 in that game and missed a potential game-winner at the buzzer. Results always inform perception.
Those of us applauding Bosh should theoretically do so in the future regardless of whether the player in question misses a Game 3 with his team up 2-0 or Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Thankfully, we don’t have to confront the dilemma, since the Heat are up 2-0 against a depleted Knicks team with one healthy big man who actually plays like a big man offensively. In other words: While the Heat are very thin up front without Bosh, the Heat shouldn’t need him to beat New York on Thursday and extend the Knicks’ 11-year playoff winless streak.
With Amar’e Stoudemire out, the Knicks will start Carmelo Anthony at power forward, an ideal time for Miami coach Erik Spoelstra to go smaller and shift LeBron James to the same position. The Knicks confounded opponents during a late-season stretch in which Anthony played power forward, but the Heat are better equipped than any team to deal with this wrinkle. If Bosh misses the game, Udonis Haslem will play center, and as John Schuhmann notes, that would leave the Heat starting a lineup that has either played about 16 minutes together this season (if Battier starts for Bosh) or one that has played just five minutes this season (if Miller starts for Bosh). The Heat have mixed and matched all sorts of small lineups this season, but the most typical involve LeBron playing with at least one backup as Spoelstra substitutes for Wade and/or Bosh late in the first and third quarters. Read More…
Paramedics had to stitch up Amar'e Stoudemire's non-shooting hand after Tuesday's game in Miami because he punched a glass-encased fire extinguisher. (AP)
The Knicks, obviously, cannot go through the NBA season like a normal team. Every team has its share of drama, and much of the craziness that engulfed the Knicks this season was of the good variety, like the rise of Jeremy Lin from nowhere and his transformation into one of the biggest sports stars in the world.
But there has also been much ugliness, peaking with the 24-hour period in mid-March when anonymous sources leaked that Carmelo Anthony had requested a trade, other anonymous sources leaked that Anthony’s teammates were furious with him for hijacking Mike D’Antoni’s offense upon his return from injury, and D’Antoni finally resigned after concluding he would be unable to coach Anthony. Mike Woodson replaced D’Antoni, and suddenly Anthony could be bothered to work hard on defense, even admitting that he was focusing under Woodson at bringing an “energy” he hadn’t played with under D’Antoni.
The drama stopped for a while as the Knicks improved defensively under Woodson and Anthony began hitting an unsustainable number of isolation shots. But it returned in true New York fashion after Game 2 in Miami on Tuesday night, when Amar’e Stoudemire, frustrated by something, punched the glass enclosure of a fire extinguisher, cut his hand, received an unknown number of stitches and left Miami in a sling. He will miss Game 3 and may be done for the rest of the series, which the Knicks trail 2-0.
As I and others have noted repeatedly this season, Stoudemire just hasn’t helped the Knicks, mostly because the Anthony/Stoudemire combination has been a disaster. The Knicks outscored opponents by about 3.2 points per game, but with Stoudemire on the floor, opponents beat them by about three points per 100 possessions. That number got even worse — about four per game — when Stoudemire and Anthony shared the court, per NBA.com’s stats database.
The Knicks have suffered from something of a catch 22 with this pairing: They cannot play the Anthony/Stoudemire duo without Tyson Chandler because it would be defensive suicide. But playing Chandler with the two stars has sabotaged the offense because Chandler and Stoudemire play roughly the same role in any functioning offense — pick-and-roll screener — and are not skilled enough perimeter shooters or off-ball cutters to work a secondary role. Read More…
Boston allows 4.5 fewer points per 100 possessions when Kevin Garnett, a potential DPOY candidate, is on the court. (Greg M. Cooper/US PRESSWIRE)
“Defense wins championships” has always been an inaccurate cliché in the NBA.
It’s true that below-average defensive teams have a hard time winning four straight playoff series, but the same has long been true of below-average offensive teams. Evidence suggests that the elite defense/so-so offense combination is slightly better for postseason success than the so-so defense/elite offense model, but the difference isn’t huge, and the simple reality is that championship-caliber teams are very good on both ends of the floor.
Boston, though, might be ready to test the viability of the all defense/no offense model of winning. It now leads the league in points allowed per possession, having passed the Sixers over the weekend, and in the last 15 games, it has been downright terrifying. For the season, the Celtics have allowed 95.3 points per 100 possessions, making them roughly 6.3 points per 100 possessions stingier than an average defense this season. That is obviously really good, but that margin of 6.3 points is only slightly larger — if at all — than the typical margin we see between the league’s top defense and an average one in any particular season.
Over the last 15 games, Boston has allowed 92.9 points per 100 possessions, about 8.5 points per 100 possessions better than the league average. Over the last 10 games? That number is down to 89.1, a ridiculous 12.5 points per 100 possessions below the league’s overall average. It’s not unprecedented for an elite defense to have a 10-game stretch like this, but Boston is pushing the limits right now.
Bottom line: The Celtics’ season-long defense has been very good, but their defense over the last 15 games would qualify as historically good if they can duplicate it over the long haul. And “historically good” at least gives them a chance to be interesting in the playoffs, because their’ offense has continued to produce at a bottom-five level even during this hot streak.
Boston’s defense has improved in all aspects over the last 15 games, a stretch that has coincided with Avery Bradley seizing rotation minutes and then a starting spot in place of Ray Allen. Over this stretch, the Celtics have fouled less often, cleaned the defensive glass at a slightly above-average rate (an improvement for them) and held opponents to sub-40 percent shooting from the floor and sub-30 percent shooting from three-point range. The only metric they haven’t improved upon over the last 15 games is the rate at which they force turnovers, and they’ve ranked among the top half-dozen teams in that category for virtually the entire season. Read More…
The Heat rank 27th in the league in opponents three-point percentage and 29th in three-pointers allowed. (Larry W. Smith/EPA)
The Heat rank among the best defensive teams in the league, but they would appear to be terrible at one important thing: defending the three-point shot.
Only the Nuggets’ opponents attempt more three-point shots per game. And only three teams — the Nuggets, Clippers and Nets — have “allowed” opponents to shoot a higher percentage on three-point shots. This would seem a lethal combination: How can you win when your opponents attempt a lot of three-pointers and make them at a very high rate?
Interestingly enough, recent NBA history says you can’t. Of the 48 teams that have made the conference finals since the 1999 lockout season, only two of them have allowed both an above-average number of three-point attempts per game and an above-average opponents’ three-point shooting percentage. One of those teams is the 2000-01 Milwaukee Bucks, who played in a very different NBA and ranked 16th in opponents’ three-point shooting percentage — just about average, much better than Miami’s current standing at 27th.
The other team is the 2005-06 Phoenix Suns, who watched opponents jack 17.4 threes per game, the seventh-highest number in the league, and hit 36.3 percent of them, just above the league average of 35.8 percent. But even those Suns come out much better than the Heat, in terms of three-point defense, for two reasons:
1. The Suns played at an insanely fast pace — the fastest in the league. Phoenix that season averaged about five more possessions per game than the typical NBA team. This season’s Heat team averages 91.8 possessions per game; the league average is 91.4, meaning Miami has slowed way down after sprinting out of the gate. In other words: Pace cannot explain the huge number of three-point shots Miami yields.
That 2005-06 Phoenix team, once you adjust for pace, allowed about half a three-pointer more per game than an average team from that season. After making the same adjustment, this year’s Heat are allowing about 2.7 extra three-point attempts per game, relative to an average team. The only conference finalist in the last dozen years to allow more three-point attempts per possession than the Heat: the 2001-02 Celtics, a mediocre team that advanced so far only because the Eastern Conference was so bad. Read More…
A Dwight Howard-Chris Bosh tandem in Miami is a longshot. (Gary Bassing/NBAE via Getty Images)
Before all of Wednesday’s craziness, with Dwight Howard reportedly willing to pick up his option for 2012-13 then not pick up his option for 2012-13, Chris Mannix, my colleague at SI.com, tweeted that some folks in the All-Star center’s camp indicated that he would have interest in signing long-term with the Heat or the Clippers.
Howard is eligible for a starting salary of nearly $19 million next season on a new free-agent contract with a team other than the Magic, and neither the Clips nor the Heat will have anything like the kind of cap space necessary for that kind of deal. The Heat are totally capped out years into the future and will likely pay the luxury tax for at least the next four seasons. The Clippers can work their way to a middling bit of cap room if they use the amnesty provision on Mo Williams, but once you factor in charges for empty roster spots, you’re talking about $5 million to $6 million in cap room. Howard probably doesn’t want to go to the Clippers that badly.
But in theory, it’s interesting to talk about whether the Clippers, Heat and a few other teams uninvolved in the Howard bidding should get themselves involved — assuming Howard’s flakiness and inability to commit on Wednesday didn’t deter teams from gambling on him. Howard is indisputably one of the league’s top-five players, its best big man and defender, and he just turned 26 a few months ago. He has already logged nearly 25,000 minutes between the playoffs and the regular-season, but there is not reason to expect any major drop-off in his level of play over the next half-dozen seasons. This is a transformational player, and transformational players are worth having out-of-the-box conversations about.
To wit:
MIAMI HEAT
It has been popular almost since “The Decision” to suggest that the Heat think about trading LeBron James to Orlando for Dwight Howard. James and Dwyane Wade have overlapping skill-sets, the theory goes, and the Heat would jump another level by trading one of them for a player that has no duplicate anywhere. The Heat don’t have a “true center,” and they compensate in part by over-rotating in order to protect the lane, a strategy that can leave perimeter shooters open — provided Miami’s opponent is smart, quick and savvy enough to thread swing passes through lanes the Heat close faster than anyone. LeBron has the salary necessary for an easy trade match, and the Magic could never do better than getting the very best basketball player in the world. Read More…
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