The Los Angeles Lakers have exposed the Miami Heat’s lack of personnel.
The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Miami Heat in Game 2 of the 2020 NBA Finals to take a 2-0 lead, a first-time occurrence in the entire career of LeBron James. While this Finals will likely unfold as anti-climactic due to injury, there are still really cool basketball things that go on — and who would’ve thought — things that decide the winner?
Without their 2nd-team All-NBA Defensive selection and leading playoff scorer, the Miami Heat posted a 125 ORTG, .663 TS%, held a 34-17 FTA clip and registered 50/40/90 shooting efficiency on 91 possessions in game two, yet lost by ten.
These box score grabs are usually more than enough to win a basketball game, but Miami found themselves in a dilemma by virtue of the Lakers’ brilliance in attacking the 2-3 zone, which I laid out in my series preview prior to game one.
Once ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that Bam and Goran would sit for game two, the Heat’s opt to shift to zone took even more effect in an effort to combat the Lakers paint dominance.
The subsequent goal is to force LA to take a lot of threes, which worked, as the snake-skinned mamba jersey Lakers took 47 3PA. Their conversion rate however was just 34% which is below league average.
The detriment though, and the main reason why LA overcame poor shooting, was Miami’s lack of necessary resistance personnel once the middle of their 2-3 zone became exposed.
Exhibit A: 0:36-0:44
Since Kuzma flashed to the middle of the zone, Kelly Olynyk must stunt high, thus creating the passing angle for Rondo on the blindside of Duncan Robinson. While I question the lack of ball pressure by Crowder here, Kuzma finds the sweet spot and that intelligence is compounded by Rondo’s patience and LeBron’s leap on the lob.
Spraying the ball around the perimeter against a 2-3 zone is like eating soup with a fork. It accomplishes close to zero until you get the ball into the middle, preferably to a smart passer or a player with a floater-game.
Exhibit B: 0:13-0:23 (video below)
All Alex Caruso and LeBron James are monitoring here are the weak side defenders of Miami as the ball is swung across the zone. It’s eventually dumped down to LeBron in the short corner, leaving the Kendrick Nunn and Andre Iguodala’s of the world left to contain Anthony Davis under the rim. An all-world look by LeBron James to shade Nunn, and well, good luck.
The general positioning of the defense, understandably, shifts way more when you physically enter the ball in the middle of the zone as opposed to using off-ball movement only, because it acts as a release valve. The defense now has to react to the offense and not the other way around, and L.A capitalized on that very often in game two.
Exhibit C: 0:30-0:37
This might be the story of the night in one possession. If you put LeBron James in the middle of a 2-3 zone, good things are, uh, going to happen. Here, you can see LeBron vocally instruct Rajon Rondo to swing the ball to Caruso so that the angle of the entry pass is more optimal.
Think of attacking a 2-3 zone like a triangle. Of the three vertices, the top one would be Rondo, and then the 1-2 pass featuring LeBron and Davis act as the bottom two, all in sync.
Once the ball touches LeBron’s hands, Olynyk is faced with the impossible task of either a) letting LeBron James catch, turn and attack the rim to finish or b) letting him catch, pause and rifle a dart to Davis on the backside.
In Game 2, the Lakers shot 66% on all 2PA, going 33/50. Anthony Davis and LeBron James in the regular season combined for 14.2 FTA, in the playoffs that number is 16, but last night it was just six. What the Heat won in one place, they lost in another.
Similar to the Houston Rockets in 2018, rosters with a recognizable talent disadvantage ought to up the variance of the game by jacking up tons of threes, which works in theory, but at the expense of your other principles. This Miami team represented that quite well in game two, just not having Bam Adebayo on the court to pave over the imperfections really limited the team.
In other words, the strategy was more than there, but the personnel unfortunately wasn’t. The Heat wanted to play zone and designed for L.A to take 47 threes, but for Miami to match the Lakers 66% clip from two, they would need hit 22 of 50 threes or 44%. Miami in game two only attempted 27 threes. (All data per BasketballReference.com
Adebayo and Dragić rub off each other in ways that are fundamental to Miami’s potent offense. Offensively, Goran and Bam’s pick-and-roll partnership creates tons of high-quality threes.
Defensively, Bam’s versatility is pivotal to slowing down Davis and LeBron, and with both doubtful for game three, Miami could encounter the same exact personnel problems as they did in game two. Miami’s depth is prominent, though I’m not sure it’s enough to make the margin for error, manageable.