Playoff Miami
The Miami Heat got their inaugural in-season tournament underway Friday night with a bang! Maybe I should say they started off with a “kaboom” and
November 4, 2023
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The Miami Heat got their inaugural in-season tournament underway Friday night with a bang! Maybe I should say they started off with a “kaboom” and
With one swift swoop the Milwaukee Bucks shocked the basketball world around 2:25 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday. I was literally driving in my car
“Orange and blue skies,” they said! “It’s going to be different in ‘The Gahhh-den,’” they said! “Knicks in 5,” they said! “Won’t be any hot
I awoke this morning still on an all-time high! It’s not every day you get to see an artist compose a masterpiece in real time
The Heat is not on currently as the beginning of this season feels more like the post bubble run season than it does like the
In the most must win of must win circumstances, Wardell Stephen Curry II stared into the green abyss that is TD Garden and he didn’t blink. The arena was going mad with deafening noise around him from the moment he stepped on the floor. A Boston fanbase desperate for their first championship in over a decade was so close they could taste it. All the Celtics had to do was stop 30 from going for 30 and they would put a 3-1 stranglehold on the series. However, the dish that Chef Curry was serving up was not what gang green ordered. Chef Curry with the pot was serving up sweet revenge and you better believe it was served as bitterly cold as a Boston winter. Whenever the crowd is at a deafening frenzied fever pitch and Curry hits a deep 3 to silence the fans, I call that a “Stephening” of the crowd. That’s exactly what Steph came out and did early by dropping 12 points in the first quarter to keep his team in it when Boston was dominating early but unable to pull away.
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.
The two best defensive teams in the NBA took the floor last night in game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals. It was a tale of two halves. Boston asserted their dominance early and often as they blitzed the Heat right out of the gate. Robert Williams was a menace in the paint. Constantly finishing around the rim with lobs or catches in the paint and put backs over Bam Adebayo from offensive rebounds. Conversely, Williams was protecting the paint and denying access to the rim like an overzealous bouncer at a night club on South Beach. The Celtics were battle tested in the previous round against Milwaukee and were clearly there for a street fight. Jayson Tatum couldn’t miss a shot and the Celtics were outscoring the Heat in the paint by a significant margin. The Heat simply were not ready to match Boston’s fight and physicality early on and found themselves down 13 at home with 5 minutes to go until halftime.
Jimmy Butler went back to Philadelphia on a mission to end their season and he accomplished his objective in a masterful two-way player performance in game 6. The Philadelphia 76ers got booed by their home fans throughout the game as they watched their team get defenestrated by a much better team. The frustrated Philly fans booed, left the game early in the fourth, and were escorted out with “bye bye” beauty pageant parade waves from the CEO of Big Face Coffee.
t was anyone’s guess how Golden State would fair against Denver. The Warriors came into the playoffs with injury concerns. They were playing against the 2021 MVP, Nikola Jokic. Throughout the season the Warriors roster was never fully healthy. Klay Thompson returned to the lineup on 9 January 2022. However, his play was sporadic. He did not become a consistent fixture on the court until mid-March. Draymond Green suffered a mid-season back injury, holding him out for weeks. Then, on the cusp of the playoffs, Curry sprained a ligament. He was out for a month. Steve Kerr designated Curry the sixth man coming into the playoffs. As the playoffs loomed, the Warriors biggest stars had yet to spend meaningful time on the court with each other. Yet, this had little effect on their performance.
