The Miami HEAT are 45-36, No. 8 in the Eastern Conference with a Net Rating of +1.7, No. 16 in the league. With one game remaining to settle all business and determine seeding for the Play-In Tournament and Postseason, here’s what we’ve been noting and noticing.
CONFIDENCE MEN
One of the major questions coming into this season centered around which players were going to step up and become trusted closers with spots theoretically up for grabs after some roster shuffle. There were plenty of promising skillsets on the roster, but few players who had earned Erik Spoelstra’s confidence in big, postseason minutes.
Terry Rozier figures into that equation now, but as he was essentially a straight swap with Kyle Lowry, already one of those trusted veterans, his arrival didn’t change much as far as the roster calculus. Tyler Herro being healthy helps, too. Josh Richardson had a chance to be in the conversation, but he’s out for the season. Jaime Jaquez Jr. is most certainly still in the conversation, though he’s struggled on the offensive end of late after leading the team in fourth quarter minutes through the first few months of the season. The playoffs require an adjustment for every rookie, no matter who you are.
This is a fluid conversation, of course, with availability always a factor – neither Duncan Robinson nor Terry Rozier have factored into the last two fourth quarters due to injuries, for example – but the players who have been earning trust lately are Haywood Highsmith and Nikola Jovic.
Highsmith was an obvious candidate for potential high-leverage minutes coming into the season largely because Spoelstra had shown trust in him before, making appearances in both the Eastern Conference Finals – including Game 7 – and the NBA Finals. His defense is a known quantity. Whenever he checks in he’s either at the head of the snake of the press-zone or being assigned to the most talented guard or wing on the other team.
“He’s so inspiring right now,” Spoelstra said. “He just continues to grind, continues to work, continues to get better and does all the little things for a team to help you win. You need players like that in this league.”
The shooting has been plenty encouraging, at 40 percent today and oscillating between 36 and 40 percent for most of the season. But as we’ve discussed often in this space, the effect your threat of shooting has on the defense goes far beyond percentages and it’s worth considering how closely Highsmith would be defended by the best defenses in the playoffs.
If he’s going to take and make these shots, in spots like this, you can eliminate much of that concern. A reputation still has to be earned over an extended period of time, but those are reputation building shots.
Notebook 76: Highsmith Three Knicks
“We all have confidence that he can do that,” Kevin Love said. “He’s shot the ball well since training camp. We’ve seen that from him. His confidence is there and is continuing to grow, especially in these last two weeks, but he’s become so much more than just a spot-minute and defender type of guy. You can really trust him to make plays and make shots, to put the ball on the floor and defend 94 feet, he just does a lot of things for us in this game. He just continues to grow and you love to see it.”
Highsmith is typically quiet, a go-about-your-business sort of player who is rarely demonstrative on the court. It says something that after he hit that shot against New York he gave everyone in the building a settle down motion with both hands after the Knicks had stormed back to tie the game.
“We needed a bucket so I just wanted everybody to calm down, we got this, we’ve been here before,” Highsmith says.
Jovic, on the other hand, had plenty to prove this season. He played just 204 minutes last year, most of those concentrated in a November/December period when the team was dealing with injuries before he himself got injured. He wasn’t in the rotation to begin this year, but in early January began getting starts alongside Bam Adebayo before joining that lineup full-time on February 13.
The results so far have been somewhat mixed with Miami’s most-used lineup of the season, Rozier-Robinson-Butler-Jovic-Adebayo, a -23 in 181 minutes, but the HEAT are +8.2 per 100 possessions with Jovic on the floor overall, +6.7 per 100 since he joined the starting lineup for good. The latter numbers are more encouraging when you consider how in flux Miami’s starting groups have been all season – Tyler Herro was out for most of that stretch – and when you isolate the Jovic-Adebayo pairing those two are +9.7 per 100 in 628 minutes. You can’t ask for much better than that.
It's not as though those groups are blowing teams out of the water with offense, either. Jovic being a high volume, high efficiency shooter (8.9 threes per 100 possessions at a 40.3 percent clip) who can push in transition and throw darts on the move, both in drive-and-kick situations and setting up Adebayo and Butler’s posting and cutting work, checks a metric ton of boxes for what you’d like as a frontcourt partner for Adebayo, but strictly from a statistical perspective the Offensive Rating has been 116.3 with Jovic and Adebayo on the floor – just a tick above league average this season. The defense, however, at 106.6 per 100, would be No. 1 in the league. There’s some luck in there, teams shooting 30.7 percent from three with that duo on the floor, and Adebayo makes every lineup work on defense no matter who is with him, but that’s part of why the pairing has been effective with Adebayo offering a high defensive floor and Jovic accentuating the offense with his varied skillset.
Jovic is being protected a little bit by Spoelstra’s rotations, sure. There are games where he doesn’t play much more than the starting shifts at the beginning of the first and third quarters, Spoelstra opting for other rotational options if he doesn’t think the matchup is right. Typical for a younger player and nothing to hold against Jovic, but worth keeping in mind in the bigger picture. The next step is regular minutes as part of the regular rotation, playing through all kinds of matchups even when you aren’t at your best.
To that last note, bringing this back around to trust, that’s why it was something of a milestone moment for Spoelstra to use Jovic down the stretch of both the Indiana – possibly the biggest regular season game of the season – and Atlanta games, and for Jovic to respond as he did, scoring 41 on 22 shots across those two games, including 7-of-13 from three. Spoelstra didn’t just have Jovic out there as a pure floor spacer, either, as Jovic was still pushing in transition in overtime against the Hawks, running two-man actions in the fourth quarter against Indiana to get Butler the switch with Tyrese Haliburton, triggering after-timeout sets and inbounding on some of the biggest out-of-bounds possessions. Injuries may have influenced why Jovic was out there, but he earned the opportunity and did little to dispel any growing trust. Even the defense worked as Jovic held up well enough on switches, and since February 13 he’s allowed just 0.97 points-per-isolation, 0.90 points-per-pick-and-roll.
It's not all perfect, nor should it be for a 20-year old. The finishing in the paint comes and goes, especially when Jovic is on the move or in traffic. The defense is good enough to keep him on the floor right now, but there’s work to be done. As Spoelstra put it Friday night after another strong game against Toronto, 22 points on 9-of-18 shooting, you never really know until the postseason. For now Jovic has improved where he’s needed to improve, fit in exactly how he needs to fit in and it’s showing in how he’s been deployed. It’s a different game in the playoffs, but you can’t take a test until it’s put in front of you.
STRONG SIDERS
There’s only so much you’re going to learn at this stage of the season. Even with a team like Miami that has dealt with so many on-again off-again injuries across their rotation, with so many different starting lineups, we’re generally familiar with who they are and what skillsets they rely on. We’re days away from diving deep into very specific matchups which leave the regular season in their dust.
But that doesn’t mean trends can’t continue to develop, and through much of the second half of the season we’ve seen more and more teams packing the paint with a variety of similar-but-different schemes and coverages all meant to deter Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo from their comfort zones. Some teams send early help, some teams send it late, some position a defender in a strong-side zone against isolations and post-ups, some bring a defender across the paint on the first dribble while others bring hard help from the opposite elbow or swarm the ball as soon as it’s within 10 or 12 feet. Each team has their own rulesets to follow in how they execute these details, but the intention is the same. Butler isn’t allowed to attack mismatches one-on-one, nor is Adebayo, Adebayo isn’t going to get clean rolls to the rim or clean touches in the paint, and neither gets going downhill without a second or third body in their way.
The teams which employ these strategies have to make some sacrifices. You overload one side of the floor then by simple math the other side, the weakside, is underloaded. If you force Butler and Adebayo to pass, then the places they have available to pass to will be more open. It’s a bet that’s paid off for some teams, some seemingly fine with allowing 40 percent shooting from the arc if that means shutting down the middle of the floor for a Miami team that generally thrives on drive-and-kick sequences.
When we first wrote about this trend back on March 11 the teams we focused on were Dallas – which may have started all of this in earnest last season – Oklahoma City and Washington, and in the past couple of weeks we’ve also seen it from New York (many of these concepts were pioneered by Tom Thibodeau after the defensive rule changes in the early 2000’s), Philadelphia, Atlanta and Dallas once again.
Notebook 76: Strong Siders
“There’s details for sure that we have to pay attention to,” Spoelstra said after the loss to Dallas on Wednesday. “As teams start to scheme against Bam, that’s a great compliment. We have to be able to counter that, and we’ve worked at that for the last several weeks because more teams have been doing that. And we still need to get him to his strength zones. It takes being connected and working together to be able to do that, they’re not as easy as reads as they were at the beginning of the year. You can’t expect them to be. But there has to be intention in every single possession, there has to be a motor, there has to be things done with pace and detail, and then moving the ball. It’s gotten a little sticky of late.
“I think the competitive nature of our group, guys really want to will it, and we’re holding it a little bit longer than what is appropriate for our team, and we’re missing some moments. But we’re going to fix that. We’ll get this right.”
Even Toronto tried to use some of these concepts Friday night, but that was more an example of how scheme alone can’t build a great defense as Miami earned wide-open three after wide-open three.
It would be nice if we had great metrics to help illustrate any of this, but it’s tough even for the tracking cameras to follow without custom coding. We can say that Adebayo has been double teamed – doubles logged in the tracking data are typically hard doubles – in the post 51 times this season, twice as much as in either of the past two years, and he’s seen more double teams on isolations, too, while Butler has seen twice as many isolation doubles as he did in 2021-22. Altogether, Miami as a team saw 79 post-or-isolation double teams two seasons ago, 100 last year. This year the combined total is 167. That may not seem like all that much in the grand scheme of things but again the tracking data is only going to show a very specific type of double team. The amount of clean isolations or post-ups they’ve seen, with no help defenders present, have dwindled. When you see box scores where you wonder why Adebayo or Butler didn’t take more shots, chances are it’s because the other team was deliberately jamming up their shooting possessions the same way that Spoelstra’s schemes can take attacking guards out of a game.
This is all especially relevant now because the game slows down in the postseason and those isolations and post-ups become even more important. Even when Miami was shooting the lights out during last season’s run to the NBA Finals, they still needed stretches of self-creation from both of their stars to keep the offense chugging ahead. Notably, neither Boston nor Milwaukee employed schemes like this, Milwaukee in their deep drop coverages conceding the upper paint to Adebayo while relying on Jrue Holiday to defend Butler one-on-one without help, while Boston’s switching scheme similarly trusted individual defenders to guard their respective yards. It was New York that jammed the paint, and thus Miami’s offense, up the most of those three Eastern Conference series.
For now all we can do is wait and see. Both Butler and Adebayo have been willing passers when they draw two or three defenders and it’s not like these schemes have always been a problem. It’s just that we’re seeing more and more of them over the past two months that matters, part of the continued evolution for how teams plan for Miami’s attack.
SUPER SUNDAY
If you’ve been scratching your head as to how all the various tiebreaker scenarios work out pending Sunday’s results, here are all the scenarios for how Miami can finish anywhere from No. 5 through No. 8.
Heat Finishes No. 5 IF
-Miami wins
-Orlando, Indiana, Philadelphia lose
Heat Finishes No. 6 IF
-Miami wins
-Orlando loses
-Either Indiana OR Philadelphia Loses
Heat Finishes No. 7 IF
-Miami, Orlando, Indiana Win
-Philadelphia Loses
OR
-Miami, Indiana, Philadelphia Win
-Orlando Loses
OR
-Miami And Orlando Win
-Indiana And Philadelphia Lose
Heat Finishes No. 8 IF
-Miami, Orlando, Indiana, Philadelphia Win
OR
-Miami, Orlando, Philadelphia Win
-Indiana Loses
OR
-Miami loses
The key for Miami to get out of the Play-In Tournament lies in Orlando loses and Miami winning, as that would unlock the multi-team tiebreaker scenarios where the Southeast Division title would be settled between Miami and Orlando first, and Miami’s resulting division title handing them the trump card over the other teams. But at least one of Philadelphia or Indiana still must lose in order to unlock a scenario for the No. 6 seed.
TIDBITS
-Entering Sunday the Heat have a Top 5 defense (111.5 Defensive Rating) for the second time in the last three years and have been a Top 10 defense in 12 of 16 seasons under Erik Spoelstra.
-Over the past five seasons, ballhandlers have only reached the restricted area 8.6 percent of the time when attacking Adebayo in isolation (106 out of 1,226 possessions).
-While Miami’s offense will likely finish in the Bottom 10, their half-court offense, as tracked by cleaningtheglass.com, is actually ranked No. 13. It’s their transition game that has harmed their overall numbers, which is more encouraging than it sounds because postseason success is far more about halfcourt offense. Miami was No. 23 in halfcourt offense entering the playoffs last year.