Beatdown by Boston
The Miami Heat played with fire in the first half of game two and got burned like Usher during all of his confessions. The early strategy was clear and obvious: play a Milwaukee Bucks style drop coverage early and allow the jump shooting happy Celtics to shoot a lot of threes. The strategy went a little deeper than that. It was clear that Miami wanted certain guys taking those shots, so they gave space to Marcus Smart, Jaylen Brown, Grant Williams, and Payton Pritchard when he came in for Jayson Tatum after he picked up an early second foul. Not only did they give those guys space to shoot, they also ran soft closeouts at them as well. The Heat doubled Tatum when he caught the ball at the top of the key and then rotated the bigs slowly on the backside to entice dangerous passes through the paint that they would try to deflect and force into a turnover. The calculus of the Heat was that by allowing the less efficient jump shooters on the Celtics to shoot perimeter jump shots early, they would get stops and be able to run out in transition and get easier relief buckets on the other side. Their calculus was wrong.
