First, a few truths: the Miami Heat are the best team in the NBA on both ends of the floor. Hands down. They have the best player on the planet in MVP LeBron James, and are quite rightly overwhelming favourites to win the NBA championship. The Heat won 66 games in the regular season, including a 27-game winning streak (the second best of all-time), brushed aside the Milwaukee Bucks 4-0 in the first round of the playoffs before seeing off a depleted Chicago Bulls 4-1 in a round-two slugfest.
The Heat’s high-octane offence is perfectly tailored to create driving lanes for James and sidekick Dwyane Wade. This allows open looks for sharpshooters Chris Bosh, Mario Chalmers and a bench featuring Ray Allen, the best three-point shooter in NBA history. And their defence is even better. Coach Eric Spoelstra’s swarming, suffocating schemes were keeping opponents to just 92 points per game on just 40.5 per cent shooting, leading to fast-break after unstoppable fast-break for the juggernaut that is LeBron.
So let’s just gift-wrap the Larry O’Brien Trophy and post it to South Beach right now, shall we? Hang on, not quite yet. The Heat they are not infallible. So how, if at all, can this history-making Heat run be extinguished? Can anyone beat the Miami outfit in a seven-game series?
Indiana Pacers
Chicago showed that, like every team in NBA history, the Heat are not unbeatable. The Bulls ended Miami’s 27-game win streak in the regular season before taking game one of their playoff series. How did they do it? Defensive intensity. That playoff win didn’t end well for the Bulls – turns out they don’t like James when he’s angry – but they were without superstar point guard Derrick Rose, All-Star forward Luol Deng and defensive irritant Kirk Hinrich. Had the beaten-up Bulls had these three guys, or indeed anyone with the ability to create his own shot efficiently on the offensive end, who knows how the series would have looked? One thing is for sure, Miami certainly did not like the Bulls’ bully-boy tactics on the defensive end. If the Indiana Pacers manage to put the Knicks away on Saturday night in the Eastern Conference semi-finals, the Heat face more of the same. An Indiana defence ranked number one in field goal defence in the regular season, and number two in points allowed, turned the previously hot-shooting New York Knicks offence ice cold. The Pacers are also the NBA’s best rebounders. What they have that the Bulls didn’t is an offensive threat. With no star - coach Frank Vogel says the team’s go-to guy is ‘the open guy’ – the Pacers score by committee. The biggest threat to the Heat could be 7ft 2in centre Roy Hibbert. Can they beat the Heat over a series? Well, they did it twice in the regular season.
Memphis Grizzlies
On an NBA landscape dominated by small ball, this Memphis Grizzlies team is a throwback to an old NBA, that of twin big men such as McHale-Parish in the 1980s or Robinson-Duncan in the 1990s. Like the Pacers, Memphis plays with two bona-fide post players, and this could spell trouble for the Heat – should the Grizzlies navigate the San Antonio Spurs in the Western Conference finals. Spanish centre Marc Gasol is the best passing big man in the world and also the NBA Defensive Player of the Year, while power forward Zach Randolph is among the best post-up scorers in the league. The pair are combining for 38 points per game in the playoffs. Miami allowed opponents to hit 41 per cent of their shots from 5ft to 10ft of the hoop – fourth-worst in the NBA – during the regular season. Could a Grizzlies’ twin towers combination operating this close to the hoop expose the champs’ soft centre?
San Antonio Spurs
When Regular Season Steph Curry disappeared into a phone box and emerged as Super Playoff Steph Curry, the Golden State Warriors became the NBA’s new darlings and the Spurs were written off as too old. Again. But that message never reached it to Texas. With a veteran crew featuring future Hall of Famer Tim Duncan and point guard Tony Parker, and led by arguably the league’s best coach in Gregg Popovich, the patient Spurs remained steady and won when it mattered, eventually eliminating Golden State in six games. If Memphis get a couple of wins early in the Western finals, San Antonio will be written off once more, and that’s just fine by them. The Spurs have been there, done that and own the T-shirts, literally, from title wins in 1999, 2003, 2005 and 2007. They have the size with 7ft pair Duncan and Brazilian centre Tiago Splitter, and the patience to cope with the Heat’s pressure defence. They may be old, efficient and uninspiring, but they could also be the best match-up for anyone hoping for another Heat finals upset.
Dywane Wade’s knee
The single biggest obstacle in the way of Miami repeating as NBA champions comes from within. Dwyane Wade is having the worst postseason of his career, averaging under 13 points per game as he nurses a knee injury. So far, this has not caused the Heat a great deal of trouble – their defence alone has been enough to see off the Bucks and Bulls without the usual 20-plus points of one of the top-five shooting guards in history. But they haven’t had a true test in the playoffs so far – the Bulls defeat proved to be fool’s gold for those hoping for a Miami collapse – making it impossible to gauge what effect the injury will have on his team’s title repeat hopes. They could become over-reliant on James. Or ‘The King’ could be forced to raise his game yet another level. Scary.
The Heat are not ‘clutch’
Yes, clutch – that strange US sports intangible that doesn’t seem to exist in any other sphere of life. For those scratching their heads, clutch is the ability of a player to perform with the game/series/season on the line. The Heat are not clutch, or so the popular theory goes. James was labelled a ‘choker’ with repeated fourth-quarter disappearing acts in the 2011 finals against Dallas. The truth is this: Miami are the most clutch team in the NBA. This season’s Miami team are one of only two teams in the past 17 seasons to have outscored their opponents by more than 30 points per 100 possessions in ‘clutch time’ – fewer than five minutes to go in the fourth quarter or overtime. The other team? The 2008-09 Cleveland Cavaliers, led by, yep, you guessed it, LeBron James..
