NBA Finals: LeBron James, Los Angeles Lakers’ defense will shine

LeBron James, Los Angeles Lakers will shine in NBA Finals against the Miami Heat

We’ve finally made it! Living in a global pandemic – somewhat of a real-life horror film – made us cling on to the little things. The old pre-March 2020 reality quickly faded into the rearview mirror and our lives became reduced to the bare basics.

Merely venturing to the grocery store became an ordeal at best, and an impossibility at worst. Daily face-to-face human interactions turned into remote Zoom calls. Those five Last Dance Sundays became a national event. Resuming the NBA season was the last thing on most peoples’ minds.

It’s pretty incredible how much happened in such a short amount of time for the league to reach this point. Four weeks of minicamps/scrimmaging, eight seeding games per team jam-packed into two weeks, and three rounds of playoff basketball completed in about a month-and-a-half (with a brief stoppage where it all teetered on the edge) – all without any positive COVID tests (among the players, at least).

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And that’s not even mentioning all of the legwork it took to implement the Disney Bubble. All things considered, this entire set-up has to be seen as a smashing success.

All of this has led to a clash between two of the most pristine teams in the NBA. The Los Angeles Lakers, the marquee franchise, have participated in a whopping 32 NBA Finals’ and are aiming to tie Boston for the most titles (17). Before this unprecedented dry stretch, the organization almost always stood atop the league’s hierarchy.

While the Miami Heat doesn’t have nearly the same history, they’ve been highly successful themselves. Since Pat Riley arrived in 1995, only five teams have won more regular-season games. Their three championships have been exceeded by just the Lakers and the Spurs during this time period.

All of this winning and glory gives us many fascinating narratives. A 35-year-old LeBron James, in his first playoff run as a Laker, looking for his fourth title with three separate teams. Riley facing one of his old teams, as well as the superstar that left in unceremonious fashion. An ensemble cast of characters against a two-star system. Andre Iguodala in his sixth straight NBA Finals. So what should we expect in this series?

At first glance, this appears to be a David vs. Goliath matchup. The Lakers dominated from the get-go, securing the No. 1 seed by three-and-a-half games. Prior to the restart, they had just wrapped up impressive victories over the Bucks and Clippers in high-profile games on national TV. LeBron and Anthony Davis are the two best players in this Finals by leaps and bounds.

Meanwhile, the Miami Heat had a good, but unspectacular regular season. Their win percentage of 60.3 makes them just the eighth Finals team since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976 to play at a sub-50 win pace, the 2002-03 New Jersey Nets (49-33) being the only other team this century. Miami’s Net Rating of +3.2 pales in comparison to the average of LeBron’s previous nine Finals opponents (+8.9). The weakest team (statistically) that he had ever faced before this was the 2010-11 Dallas Mavericks, at +4.9.

But this Miami Heat team is clearly different from that regular season one. They dispatched the formidable but flawed Bucks in five games – three times with Giannis Antetokounmpo and once without him – and out-foxed the talented yet individualistic Celtics in six. The betting markets pin them as a heavy underdog again, and while it’s dangerous to succumb to the recency of all of this, I view this as a highly competitive matchup.

The Heat offense is dazzling to watch. It’s almost Warriors-like with all of the hand-offs, cutting, screening, and split-actions. Bam Adebayo is the hub of all of this, as he’s developed the ball-skills (combined with his intelligence) to facilitate and toggle between all of these actions so that everything flows smoothly.

Miami’s offense has crumbled without him during these playoffs. Boston was an elite defense in every way – with the personnel and smarts to combat this – and even they were forced into uncharacteristic mistakes by this whirling Heat attack. One tiny mental lapse and you’re cooked. It wouldn’t surprise me if we saw the Lakers struggle to handle it initially – as we saw in Golden State’s heyday, there may be a steep learning curve.

That said, this Heat team is heavily reliant on shot-making and drawing fouls to get its points. They don’t crash the offensive glass and turn it over at an above-average level. In the regular season, they were first in 3-point shooting from above-the-break (38.5%) and second from the corners (38.6%).

The Heat was also tops in the league in free-throw rate, with Jimmy Butler getting to the line at a historic rate. Adebayo and Goran Dragic are also prolific foul-drawers themselves. With the starting group, all of Miami’s motion on offense highly depends on the collective shooting threat of Jae Crowder and Duncan Robinson – who are combining to launch a ridiculous 15.5 attempts per game in these playoffs, at a 37.1 percent clip.

Crowder morphing into a Splash Brother against Milwaukee was one of the key differences in that series, but as we’ve seen throughout his career (and Games 2-5 versus Boston), there’s never been much rhyme or reason to his shooting performance.

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The Celtics eventually had this motion offense figured out as the Eastern Conference Finals went along. Miami even went ice-cold from deep, shooting under 33 percent in four straight games – including a ghastly 7-36 in Game 5. But they showed they could win without the 3-ball by simplifying the game and putting the ball in their hands’ of their perimeter shot-creators.

One of the main stories of this Miami Heat has been the resurgence of Goran Dragic. Despite playing with a knee brace that rivals Professor Quirinus Quirrell’s turban, the 34-year-old is playing his best basketball since his last year in Phoenix. This version of Dragic is a borderline all-star, and the Celtics had no answers for his pick-and-rolls with Bam throughout the series.

Playing it straight-up resulted in layups/dunks. And he basically won them Game 2 by beating Daniel Theis on switches. Boston finally settled on rotating over a third defender, even if that meant (*gasp*) helping off of Robinson. The Celtics essentially coincided with the exact shots that Miami’s offense is designed to seek out – which shows how undeniable this attack really is.

Another star of the Boston series, Tyler Herro, gave the Heat a much-needed infusion of ball-handling and shot-making. His combination of shiftiness off-the-ball, passing vision and pull-up shooting ability befuddled the Celtics’ defenders. We’ve seen across the league that the hiatus was basically an extra offseason for these young players to improve their games. Herro isn’t the same guy from his rookie year – the one who shot 46.2 percent on 2’s and had nearly as many turnovers as assists.

Dragic and Herro taking on much of the offensive load has allowed Butler to cede much of the spotlight and do what he seems to enjoy most: picking his spots, filling the gaps, attacking specific matchups, and feeling out the game until crunch-time in the fourth quarter. He fits in perfectly with this Heat group – you won’t ever see him monopolizing the game like the typical heliocentric superstar.

So how well will Miami fare against the vaunted Lakers defense? I don’t see them having nearly the same type of success as the first three rounds. Boston, despite all of their rangy wings, had a clear weak link: Kemba Walker. Miami hunted him mercilessly throughout the series, and it often undermined the rest of their defense.

The Lakers don’t quite have that. Unless it’s one of their centers switched on to Dragic (I assume that they’ll mix up the pick-and-roll coverages to try to avoid that), I don’t see any specific matchups that the Heat can exploit. You can get away with having a big on Butler at this point in his career.

His regular-season eFG% (effective field goal percentage) of 47.8 percent ranked in the 23rd percentile, per Cleaning the Glass – the key is just keeping him off the charity stripe (the Lakers are a high foul team, especially with Dwight Howard, so that may be an issue). Adebayo isn’t too skilled as an individual scorer, at least not yet, and he won’t be able to beast anyone on the Lakers like he did to Theis at the end of Game 6. Unless Crowder goes back into Bucks series mode, Los Angeles will probably be fine stashing Davis or a center on him should they stay big.

I think the Lakers will do an adequate job at shutting off the Heat motion, too. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Alex Caruso, and Danny Green are capable of chasing shooters around off-ball-screens (Green, in particular, is stellar at this). Even if the bigs are over-exposed in the Bam/shooters hand-off game, I trust them to find a way to manage the potential Miami advantage situations (much like we saw in the Houston series with the 4-on-3s).

Overall, Frank Vogel’s group is elite defensively. LeBron and Davis are monstrous on the back-line, and we’ve seen how effective the entire team is at rotating and flying out to opposing shooters.

The other side of the floor is interesting as well. Priority No. 1 for any team facing the Lakers should be getting back on defense to slow down their unbelievable transition attack. The Heat is generally a disciplined team that emphasizes this, but we saw Boston capitalize on this for stretches in the last round. Live-ball turnovers (Adebayo is still prone to these) and poor floor balance was the driving force for the massive Celtic rally in the third quarter of Game 5, for example. This is death against the Lakers, especially since their halfcourt offense still has major question marks.

Will Los Angeles’ struggles in the halfcourt continue in the Finals? Miami begins from a good starting point, as they sport the bodies (Butler, Crowder, Iguodala, even Solomon Hill or Derrick Jones Jr., though the latter is probably better suited for Davis) to throw at LeBron and a close to ideal match-up for Anthony Davis in Bam. Unlike Denver, Miami won’t just get physically overwhelmed by these two superstars.

We could even see a return of the Giannis-wall from the second round. However, I’m still skeptical in the Heat’s chances of stopping the Lakers. James has a great deal of experience against switching defenses from his battles with Golden State, and I expect him to be ruthless in targeting Dragic/Herro/Robinson. Miami has to avoid giving up the switch in these situations at all costs and live with any of the Laker guards popping. Caldwell-Pope was the only Laker to shoot respectably from above-the-break this year on a major amount of attempts.

This isn’t Kyrie Irving or Cleveland-era J.R. Smith swishing away. Davis 1-on-1 against any of the Heat frontcourt players shouldn’t be too much of a concern. If Miami goes to a more conventional pick-and-roll defense, they’ll pack the paint and force Los Angeles to hit 3’s, but Adebayo isn’t nearly as good in these spots compared to as a switch defender.

I also don’t expect the Lakers to have too much trouble with the widely-acclaimed Heat zone. The Celtics (particularly Jayson Tatum) carved up the 2-3 as the Eastern Conference Finals went along, and it’ll take LeBron a few plays to process and adjust to it instead of a few games – he’s a basketball supercomputer.

A big part of the Heat’s success was that Boston’s main center (Daniel Theis) wasn’t a threat to score on the catch in the middle of the zone (or for lobs on the back-line), nor was he a problem on the glass since he’s about 6-foot-8. Whenever the Celtics went to a bigger alignment (Grant Williams at the 4) or Enes Kanter, things opened up. That should change in this series, given the talents of Anthony Davis as well as the Lakers’ overall size.

You can never count out the Miami Heat, especially since they seem to get stronger late as their opponent wilts to the fatigue/pressure (the Lakers’ woes in crunch-time offense could be a factor as well). But the gap between James/Davis and Miami’s number-one is just too much, even if the Heat arguably has the next five or so best players. Jimmy Butler averaged under 20 points per game on just 8.6 field goals made per 100 possessions – the lowest for him since 2013-14 when he was still mostly a role player –  and he usually drives to pass at this point.

We’ll see if he has it in him to take over as he did in Game 1 versus the Bucks. The last we saw of LeBron in the playoffs before this (back in 2018 when he was only 33) was some of the most dominant basketball of his career, and by the looks of it he still isn’t ready to give up the mantle as the best player in the world. This will be a highly competitive series, but in the end, the Lakers will win with defense and the greatness of LeBron James.

Pick: Lakers in 6