One of the catchiest cheers in the NBA is in acknowledgment of one of the game’s most thankless missions: “De-fense!” applause. applause. “defense!” It rained this week as the Miami Heat tackled the near-impossible challenge of slowing down two of the league’s most feared players – Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets and Jamal Murray – during the NBA Finals in front of their fans.
The most complex defensive confrontations in the NBA are usually one-on-one clashes, where opposing stars go head-to-head. But this is hard work. very Difficult. Maybe you can stop an explosive scorer like Jokic or Murray for a possession or two. But every time on earth? for 48 minutes? With a leaner roster that endured the long postseason grind?
good luck. For more than 50 years, the NBA has refused to let teams do it any other way. It was a man-to-man defense or bankruptcy. But now, teams can get a lot more creative in the way they try to put the clamps on their opponents. And there is no team more creative than the Heat, who play more zone defense—a scheme in which defenders guard areas of the field rather than individual players—than any other team in the league.
On Wednesday in Game 3, that meant two players edging Denver’s inside pass, two more in the middle zone and one protecting the basket at the far end — a 2-2-1 pressure zone — early in the second quarter.
By the time the Nuggets managed to get the ball in the topcourt, there were only 14 seconds left on the shot clock, and the Heat defense had turned into a half-tight zone—a 2-3 combo, with two players on top at the perimeter and three up the length of the area. border. Nuggets guard Murray missed a 3-point effort from the left corner, and the Heat scrambled away from the tying bucket.
Unfortunately for the Heat, it was as good as it got for them in a 109-94 loss to the Nuggets, who took a 2-1 lead in the series heading into Game 4 on Friday in Miami. Both Murray and Jokic finished with a triple-double for Denver, which, for one game, at least, was largely unaffected by Miami’s shape-shifting defense.
“We didn’t put up a lot of resistance,” said Heat coach Erik Spoelstra, who bemoaned his team’s lack of effort but viewed it as an anomaly. He added, “I think the thing we’ve proven over and over again is that we can win and find different ways to win.”
And one of those ways is to defend the area. There’s a disparity in talent in the series: The Nuggets have plenty of it thanks to a range of professional shooters and the all-around charm of Jokic, a two-time winner of the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award. Therefore, in an effort to slow the pace of play and make up for the lack of volume, the Heat sometimes lets their defense down man-to-man by mixing in an area.
This is nothing new for them. Miami played a league-high 19.7 percent of its defensive possessions during the regular season, according to Sports SynergyIt is an exploration and analytics service. The Portland Trail Blazers, who play in the area 14.9 percent of the time, are second, and the Toronto Raptors (8.4 percent) are third.
Most importantly, the Heat — even in the midst of regular season struggles that nearly kept them out of the playoffs — made great use of their territory, limiting opponents to 0.937 points per possession. By comparison, opponents averaged 1,009 points per possession against their man-to-man defense.
Miami plays a little less defense in the playoffs — District accounted for 15.7 percent of its defensive possessions before Game 4 — but no other team has come close to using it that much. The Heat had some success though, holding opponents to 0.916 points per possession to 1.003 points per possession with man-to-man defense.
“I think it’s effective,” said Heat point guard Gabe Vincent, “because it’s different.”
Jim Boeheim, who recently retired after 47 seasons as the men’s basketball coach at Syracuse University, was so famous for his 2-3 zone defense that he became synonymous with it. But in his early years at Syracuse, he actually coached more man-to-man defense.
“We had territory and we’d play it, but not all the time,” Boehme said. “But then we’ll get in trouble with somebody, and you’ll put the zone in there, and they won’t be able to score!”
Most teams have not practiced it and rarely encountered it in matches.
“Only one can screw one up,” Boeheim said. “And if your opponent is only going one or two on offense, you can kind of cheat on those players, and that can cause problems.”
The area is still fairly new to the NBA, which it basically banned during the first 50 years of the league’s existence. Before the advent of the shot clock in 1954, the concern was that many teams would pack the area around the basket with defenders and slow the game to a crawl at a time when the league was trying desperately to increase its audience.
Later, pundits considered the area a gimmicky way for teams to camouflage poor individual defenders, especially as the league continued to glorify one-on-one games. The low area was stigma. Over time, however, the offenses stopped and the scoring dropped as matches devolved into a seemingly non-stop series of isolation blocks, with players positioned on the weak side of the field to keep defenders off the ball.
Prior to the 2001-2 season, the NBA had seen enough and eliminated the illegal defense rule, meaning teams could play in the zone — or use any other type of defense that suited them. The twist was that the change was designed to stimulate spacing and passing offense.
However, the area remains somewhat uncommon for several reasons. NBA rosters are full of long-range shooters, and when passes fly from side to side, zone defenders are often too slow to react, leaving opposing players with an open eye from 3-point range. Also, defenders are prohibited from camping in the lane when not guarding an opposing player – also known as The three-second defensive rule.
And that changes everything,” said Alex Pope, graduate school boys’ basketball coach at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. NBA coaches are still reluctant to play in the area because you can’t just put a guy in the circle to charge and protect. paint.”
For heat, the area has a value. If initially born out of necessity – as a way for Spoelstra to take on bigger teams and hide some of his weakest defenders – it has become an advantage. For much of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Celtics, Boston seemed bewildered by Miami’s traps, settling more often than not on (errant) jump shots rather than attacking the rim.
Now, whenever the Nuggets bring the ball into the uppercourt, they must do a mental calculation: What kind of defense are they about to see? The area adds an element of unpredictability.
“I think it’s something that can work, especially in short windows,” Boeheim said.
The Heat’s backup point guard Kyle Lowry recently recalled a formative period from his childhood when coaches taught him about zone pressure, traps and the 2-3 starting lineup. When asked about those experiences, he knew where the line of inquiry was headed.
“If you’re getting into the matter of our own, that’s pretty cool,” Lowry said.
Well, what makes it so great?
“It works sometimes,” he said.
The Miami area is not static. It changes from game to game and even possession to possession, with dozens of permutations based on the presence of opposing players on the floor – or even Spoelstra’s whims.
The team’s starting center, Bam Adebayo, said they’re digging the area “to the point where we’re tired of it.”
Spoelstra would rather walk on hot coals than discuss his planning choices in the NBA Finals, but his players have acknowledged the amorphous nature of the territory.
“Spo does a great job of preparing us all year long to be ready for situations like this, to be able to switch in timeouts, switch schemes, switch defenses,” Heat guard Max Stross said before Game 3.
For Game 4, Miami will likely reveal a new scheme or slightly different look. It may not matter—”I think Denver is pretty good,” Boeheim said—but the Heat have been on tough spots before. helped their district.