Ever since their mind-boggling collapse against the Dallas Mavericks in the 2011 NBA Finals, the Miami Heat have been a different team. At various points in the past three years, LeBron James became the team’s clear-cut alpha dog, Chris Bosh stretched his offense farther and farther from the paint, and Erik Spoelstra developed devastating offensive continuity built on spreading the floor with shooters. Miami fully embraced its natural identity as a small-ball outfit, basically, and the result has been something close to a dynasty. It’s when the Heat have the ball that the merits of their speedy, undersized lineups are most obvious, but it’s on the other end of the court where Miami’s Finals rematch against San Antonio will be decided.
It’s no secret that the Heat took a step back defensively during the regular season. Their 102.9 defensive rating was 11th in the league, marking the first time in the Big Three era Miami has failed to rank among basketball’s seven best teams on that side of the ball. While the Heat have looked their aggressive, frenetic defensive selves at times during this postseason, too often they’ve let the tenuous commitment and frequent lethargy from the regular season creep into playoff games.
Miami has shown recently and in the past that it can flip the proverbial switch on that end when absolutely necessary; the question now is if the Heat can keep it flipped for an entire series against a team like the Spurs.
There’s no clear answer. Miami is a collective year older and step slower than last season: Shane Battier is sick of banging with power forwards, Ray Allen can’t be hidden, Dwyane Wade struggles to keep up with quick perimeter players whether he’s engaged or otherwise, and even LeBron – who was named to the NBA All-Defensive Second Team yesterday after earning a place on the First Team the previous five years – has received rightful derision for his defensive performance during the playoffs and regular season.
Still, there’s no team like the Heat when they’re swarming the dribble, rotating hard from the weak-side, and getting their cat-quick hands on the ball. Miami isn’t the group of rangy athletes it was in 2011 or 2012, and Spoelstra has dialed back its commitment to trapping high pick-and-rolls with all-out hedges. But the Heat will kill indecisive team offense and prey on weak individual playmakers nonetheless.
That’s what makes their matchup with San Antonio basketball nirvana. No team in the league is better served to exploit Miami’s defensive strategy than the Spurs. Their 19.1 assist rate during the regular season led the NBA, and they’ve averaged a staggering 421.3 individual ‘touches’ per game in the playoffs – over 24 more than the second-place Pacers. It’s just a single possession within a game of 100 or so, but the stats support legitimacy of this mesmerizing GIF:
Nobody moves the ball like San Antonio, a nod to the unparalleled intelligence of its coaching staff as well as the nuanced skill of its players. Manu Ginobili and Boris Diaw are among the league’s most creative passers regardless of position, Tony Parker and Tim Duncan have long been underrated playmakers, and the other Spurs space the floor (Danny Green, Marco Belinelli, Matt Bonner), finish inside (Tiago Splitter), or do both at levels close to elite (Kawhi Leonard and Patty Mills).
Miami’s offense is superior statistically and has a burst that San Antonio’s can’t quite match. But San Antonio’s might be better; it’s hard to believe the Spurs would ever struggle to score the way the Heat do from time to time, a realization that gives them a crucial advantage in a series that seems bound to barely tilt either way.
But the Spurs – or Heat, for that matter – can’t play nine guys at a time. It’s the stars that make this rematch so exciting on the surface, but the so-called role players who will have a huge part in deciding it, too. Choosing which ancillary pieces and five-man units to deploy is a bit easier for Spoelstra than Gregg Popovich. The Heat are married to small-ball – though Bosh and Chris Andersen will play together some in this series – for a game’s majority now, whether it’s Rashard Lewis, Battier, or James acting as nominal power forward. There’s an obvious drawback to that lack of flexibility, but a major benefit too: the Heat know who they have to be irrespective of opponent.
It’s trickier for Popovich, especially against Miami. San Antonio’s starters of Parker, Green, Leonard, Duncan, and Splitter have played 161 minutes in the playoffs so far, double that of any other unit. It’s the Duncan-Splitter tandem that’s of greatest interest here. Popovich and company worked hard during Splitter’s first two years in the league to make that interior combination a viable one, and finally succeeded last season due to the pair’s unbelievable impact on defense.
Overall, the Spurs have been an elite team on that end the last two seasons: They ranked fourth in defensive efficiency this year and third in 2012-2013, with both numbers coming in at approximately 100.0. But when Duncan and Splitter share the floor, they morph from awesomely stingy to historically so. Duncan-Splitter have compiled a defensive rating below 95.0 for each of the past two years, numbers that would lead the league by wide margins. Unsurprisingly, that dominance has extended to the playoffs: Of the 18 San Antonio duos that have played at least 200 minutes during the 2014 postseason, Duncan-Splitter’s 95.8 defensive rating ranks first.
Defense is only 50 percent of the game, however, and putting two traditional big men on the floor against a team like Miami can be offensive death. We saw it in Games 5 and 6 of the Western Conference Finals. With his team’s offense struggling against the speed and athleticism of the Oklahoma City Thunder, Popovich went small full-time, starting Bonner and refusing to play Duncan with Splitter and vice versa. The results of all the space and playmaking created by that wholesale switch were staggering, but not exactly surprising. Not unlike the Heat, Oklahoma City relies on its physical advantages to wreak havoc defensively. Offensive stagnance and traffic against the Thunder will doom you, and that’s what Popovich avoided by utilizing downsized lineups.
San Antonio will likely need to go that same route in the Finals. Splitter was overwhelmed by Miami’s activity last season, averaging 3.0 turnovers per 36 minutes and costing his team almost 12 offensive points per 100 possessions. This was the crux of the problem:
Like most seven-footers not named Dirk Nowitzki, Splitter just can’t handle the Heat’s athleticism and anticipation when he catches the ball in space. Winning those 4-on-3 battles below high pick-and-rolls is crucial when facing Miami, and there are well-established adjustments to doing so. Placing an extra player on the wing like the Spurs did in that awesome GIF is another option. But you need the proper personnel on the floor to make those changes, and Splitter – though clearly more advanced from a skill perspective today than a year ago – simply doesn’t have the tools.
Diaw, on the other hand, definitely does. Not only is he a brilliant passer on the catch or move, but he’s developed enough as a shooter this season to act as a legitimate threat from beyond the arc. Miami will certainly make him prove it from there, but Diaw has recently shown – he’s shot 7-14 from deep in San Antonio’s last three games – that he’s a capable enough shooter to consistently draw defensive attention when stationed outside the three-point line. That’s vital against Miami.
The Spurs went gangbusters in the 2013 Finals when Diaw and Duncan made up their frontcourt, netting a 108.5 offensive efficiency by owning the offensive glass and taking full advantage of that extra space by dominating isolation situations. And defensively, Diaw-Duncan fared better than the team’s average rating of 106.1. Whether that defensive mediocrity is sustainable is the question that could ultimately decide this series.
Like the overarching theme of this rematch, though, there’s simply no way to know for sure. Diaw and Duncan were surprisingly adept on that end against the Heat last season, but have been awful – with a 109.3 defensive rating – so far in the playoffs. Diaw defended LeBron capably when he was thrust into the fray last year before the world’s best player adjusted for Games 6 and 7, but James shot a combined 14-33 versus San Antonio during the regular season when Diaw was his most frequent defender.
A popular prediction for this Finals rematch has been San Antonio in seven games, but that’s barely a pick at all. Choosing the home team in a seven-game series amounts to a coin flip where the side turns ‘heads’ six times out of 10. We don’t know what will happen, basically, but we know the games within the game will go a long way to deciding what does. And whichever team exploits the benefits or pitfalls of the Spurs’ lineup conundrum will have a leg up on winning a championship.
*Statistical support for this post provided by nba.com/stats.
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