The Heat are a .500 team! The Heat are a .500 team!
This is incredible.
The Miami Heat were done as of about 2 quarters into this game. They were struggling against the lowly but athletically stupendous Philadelphia 76ers. Keep in mind they were up eight points at halftime.
The problem with this Heat team is they’re still getting used to each other. Yes, that’s an easy excuse to make but it doesn’t make it wrong. You can tell in the way they’re running the offense. Defensively, I don’t believe it to be an excuse because that’s just a matter of awareness and effort. But offensively, there is a certain timing and understanding amongst all the players (outside of Haslem, Wade and Arroyo who play well off of knowing each other’s games) that is lacking.
Does that mean when they get this timing and understanding down they’ll run through the entire league and manage to win three championships in two seasons, cure cancer, defeat the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and put out a folk album that makes The Beatles’ White Album look like a Ricky Martin interpretive dance cover band’s mixtape?
No, not necessarily.
It just means we won’t see them be so careless with the ball and have LeBron James turning the ball over enough times to make Darren Collison blush. Or maybe they will still turn the ball over from trying to do too much. Look at the Celtics. They have great chemistry together and still turn the ball over an obscene amount of times.
The things I noticed about this Heat team is when the defense is clicking, they’re pretty special to watch. In the second half of the loss to the Celtics, they locked down defensively and made enough runs to make this game extremely interesting. In the third quarter of the win against the 76ers, the clamps were applied and the Sixers had nothing they could do about it. Some of that had to do with a young point guard like Jrue Holiday still feeling his away around a good perimeter defensive unit.
In the ultimately decisive third quarter, Philly had more turnovers (six) than made baskets (four). Elton Brand scored three of those buckets and two of them were inside. The rest of the Sixers offense got chased all around the perimeter and forced into poor decisions.
Hey, let’s talk about the role players for a minute.
James Jones can fill in for Mike Miller. Maybe you don’t want him to do that when it’s playoff time and you need a better playmaker in case the defense chases him off that 3-point shot. But as of right now, James Jones can get hot and will always have open spaces to shoot. He knocked down six 3-pointers in this game and was sort of ridiculously hot all game. When the Sixers made a couple of runs, he answered with 3s, especially in the second quarter.
Carlos Arroyo isn’t really that good but he had a nice steady hand in this game. He’s going to get abused by the Rondos of the world but so do most point guards. Put him against a young guy like Holiday and the talent discrepancy is diminished because of a little veteran savvy.
Udonis Haslem should not guard athletic 3s posing as terrifyingly athletic 4s. Thaddeus Young abused Haslem every time he had to guard him. Young was simply too quick for Udonis and blew by him whenever he wanted. In the later rounds of the playoffs, you’ll see more and more matchups with Haslem guarding more traditional 4s but if you can stretch out the offense a bit (I’m looking at you, Orlando) then you might be able to expose that part of Halsem’s game.
Key Stat of the Game
Dwyane Wade had 12 shot attempts at the rim. 12 is not an absurd number by any means but it was a lot better than what we saw against the Celtics when he had seven attempts and the majority of them were not all that aggressive and composed. It’s probably easier when you don’t have the Celtics help line to contend with and Wade took full advantage of Spencer Hawes and Elton Brand being the stopgaps.
