Knicks vs. Heat: 8 things that will matter
Everything you need to know about the next two weeks of your life
And then there were eight.
Eight teams remain vying for a championship. Some are historic franchises with so many titles their fans can’t be bothered to show up to playoff games until midway through the first quarter. Others are so starved for any modicum of success that their fans make hype videos after regular-season victories. The beauty of sports is that the only thing that really matters is what happens in that 94-by-50 foot rectangle. The Miami Heat and New York Knicks will play some basketball games over these next few weeks. It could be as few as four or as many as seven. Everything else is (mostly) window dressing. So with that in mind, here are eight things I believe will be relevant to dictating the outcome of this upcoming series.
Shooting (duh) and Moneyball
The NBA being a make-or-miss league is a cliche so tired that all the fish in the sea, of which there are plenty, have fallen into a deep slumber. But cliches stand the test of time because there is at least a hint of truth to them. The NBA has turned into a math equation. Certain people are paid a lot of money to help these teams decipher which shots provide the most value, thus giving their team the best chance of winning.
There was a time when shot charts fluctuated more. Not everyone bought the “3-point trend.” Some teams were losing before the players even stepped on the court. Those days are gone. Every team in the NBA, on some level, understands the value of the 3-pointer. Of course, there are teams who do it better than others, but the overall strategy is pretty universal. Shoot a lot of 3-pointers and shots at the rim; hope for the best.
In 2003 Michael Lewis released one of the greatest books about sports ever written, Moneyball. In it, Lewis details the rise of the low-payroll Oakland Athletics and how Billy Beane overcame his financial disadvantage using analytics to create an edge where one didn’t exist. For years, there was an enormous misconception about Beane’s strategy. People would focus on the what (the details of the game that Beane valued) and not the why. You see, Beane wasn’t emphasizing walks and drafting players from college just because they were good, he was doing so because he calculated them to be underrated by the market. So when the entire league caught up to Beane, and all of a sudden it was mostly teams operating the same way (reintroducing a payroll-based imbalance), Beane had to find a new market inefficiency.
How is this relevant to a second-round basketball series in 2023? In a world where every team is shooting threes and hunting the shots with the highest EV, the Knicks have found a way to overcome a dependency on the volatility of successful 3-point shooting. They’ve found their market inefficiency. In a manner of speaking, they’ve created their own math. Rather than focusing entirely on points per singular possession, they’ve decided to focus on ensuring they create more possessions than the other team. In the regular season, only one team in the entire league ranked top 5 in OREB% (offensive rebound percentage) and TOV% (turnover percentage): the Knicks. It is safe to say that the Knicks had more possessions where they had a chance to put the ball in the basket than any team in the NBA.
This isn’t to say that the Knicks don’t shoot 3-pointers. They do. Throughout the season they were 15th in 3-point attempts and 16th in 3-point percentage, the definition of average (though both of those numbers jumped significantly once Quentin Grimes joined the starting lineup). But, as we just learned, the Knicks are not reliant on making or missing. In fact, they just won a series where they were the betting underdogs and shot just 28% from 3. They hit 42 3-pointers compared to the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 50. They lost that math. Yet they cruised through the series in five games. How? 12 fewer turnovers and 29 (!) more offensive rebounds. The Knicks earned 41 more possessions than the Cavaliers in five games. That’s how they dominated.
On the other side of the table sits the Miami Heat, who are a paradox. In 2021-22, the Heat led the league in 3-point percentage. They rode that to the number-one seed in the East and game 7 of the conference finals. This past season, the eighth-seeded Heat were 27th in 3-point percentage. Surely this was regression coming back to bite them, right? Wrong. In their first-round series against the Milwaukee Bucks, the Heat came out scorching, shooting 45% from 3 and blitzing the NBA’s best team. Six different players shot 40% or better from 3.
Even with some regression, it’s not unreasonable to expect the Heat to outperform their lowly regular season percentages. This is a veteran team that is mostly battle-tested. Jimmy Butler, Bam Adebayo, Duncan Robinson and Gabe Vincent have all been on the team since 2020, a stretch in which they’ve made an NBA Finals and Eastern Conference Finals. Kyle Lowry won a championship with Toronto in 2019 and has been a presence in the playoffs for nearly a decade. Kevin Love has a similar resumé, winning a championship in Cleveland in 2016 and being a part of mostly playoff teams since joining them in the summer of 2014. This team will be locked in and unfraid of the moment.
They create 3-pointers mostly through their two best players. Butler is a brute force who requires multiple defenders to stop him from scoring easily. Adebayo is one of the league’s best passing big men, who regularly sets up teammates with kick-outs and dribble handoffs. Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau will be ready for this. And while I believe the Knicks can win this series without shooting lights out themselves, they need to do a better job than the Bucks did of shutting down the Heat from distance, or they could face a similar fate as the boys in Milwaukee.
Jalen Brunson, quarterback
The Heat enter this series with one the league’s most aggressive defenses. They were sixth in the league in steals per game. They offer a potential threat to the Knicks’ math. When Jalen Brunson gets a ball screen at the top of the key, the Heat will hedge aggressively (especially with Love involved) and sometimes full-on blitz the screen to get the ball out of his hands, trusting their backline defenders to cover for them.
On March 29th, the Knicks faced the Heat for the last time in the regular season. This game should offer a template for the Knicks as to how to handle the Heat’s aggressive defense. You cannot dribble around or through these double teams. You need to make quick passes to your outlet man and trust your teammates to make the right plays. If this series goes well, Brunson will lead the series in hockey assists.
Interestingly enough, it was not Brunson who showed this to the Knicks. Rather, it was backup point guard Immanuel Quickley running the show to end both halves as the Knicks dissected the Heat defense. If Brunson has struggled in one area this season it has been handling traps. But the Knicks cannot win this series without Brunson being his typically wonderful self. And he showed an evolution as a distributor in the Cleveland series. How Brunson handles these coverages could very well determine the outcome of this round.
Defending Jimmy Butler
Depth often gets dismissed in the playoffs, but the Knicks seem determined to prove its merit. Butler is one of the league’s best players who somehow finds a way to get better when the playoffs come around. He is both methodical and a brute force. He just took on a team with one of the league’s best on-ball defenders (Jrue Holiday), best help defenders (Giannis Antetokounmpo) and best rim protectors (Brook Lopez), and he absolutely steamrolled them. Stopping Butler is not a reasonable expectation.
But there are ways to make his life more difficult. Thibodeau, who coached Butler for five seasons on two different teams, often says that you don’t stop a player like him with one defender; you have to do it collectively. This season against the Knicks, Butler’s success seemed dictated by where the games were played. In Miami, he thrived, scoring 33 and 35 points on 53% shooting. But when the Heat traveled north to New York, Butler struggled, scoring just 10 and 12 on 43% shooting.
Thibodeau will likely feel the series out and adjust his coverages based on the flow of the matchup. If healthy, Grimes will get the initial assignment, with Josh Hart backing him up as Butler’s primary defender. Hart has had a ton of success against Butler, often making his life difficult. As outrageous as it feels to say, given what happened in 2021-22, Knicks fans should trust Thibodeau to feel out the flow of the series and make the necessary adjustments to slow Butler down, should he get off to a hot start.
Tom Thibodeau vs. Erik Spoelstra
Speaking of Thibodeau, after completely outclassing Cavaliers head Cocch J.B. Bickerstaff, he faces a much tougher challenge. Heat coach Erik Spoelstra is in any discussion for the best coach in the NBA. He is an absolute master, particularly within the paradigm of a series. Those adjustments I was just talking about with Thibodeau? Expect even more from Spoelstra. If the series calls for something, Spoelstra will not hesitate to try it. There are two areas I expect Spoelstra to attack:
The Knicks’ lack of spacing, especially in lineups that feature RJ Barrett and Hart at the 2 and the 3.
The Knicks playing 48 minutes of paintbound centers
Spoelstra realizes that it may be fruitless to try and match Mitchell Robinson and Isaiah Hartenstein in the minutes All-Star Adebayo sits. Rather than try to meet size with size, it would not surprise me in the slightest to see him go small in those minutes and try to shoot an abundance of 3-pointers with Love at center.
Despite the Knicks’ overwhelming success in round 1, they still struggled in the minutes Hart and Barrett played together. While they outscored the Cavs by 27 in the series, the Knicks’ net rating with Hart and Barrett on the court was -3.8. With Barrett, who was wonderful in round 1, still struggling from distance, and Hart a reluctant shooter, the pairing feels close to untenable. It would take one or both of them revamping their style and effectiveness from deep to make it work. Look for Spoelstra to amp up an already aggressive defense against these lineups, looking to create more turnovers while being willing to live with 3-pointers from either of these players.
How Thibodeau adjusts throughout the series will play an enormous role in the Knicks’ success.
Julius Randle, a compounding effect & that damn ankle
I’m not a doctor. I have no idea if Julius Randle will or should play. I’m hopeful that he does. But if the team rules him good to go, we need him to be close to the best version of himself. Randle’s struggles against the Cavaliers were loud, but didn’t start in Cleveland. Before Randle injured his ankle against Miami, he was having one of his worst halves of the season. Miami exploited his inattentiveness on defense and forced him into only those shots they wanted him taking.
As I have mentioned frequently, the Heat deploy an aggressive defense. The way to exploit an aggressive defense is with quick processing that maintains an advantage. Randle is purely a methodical player. He operates on Randle time. Against many teams, the physical, athletic, and skill advantages he possesss make up for poor processing. Unfortunately, Miami is not one of those teams.
This is why backup Obi Toppin has thrived against Miami. Toppin has many limitations relative to Randle, but one edge he has (not just on Randle, but much of the league) is as a processor. You rarely see Toppin stop and assess a situation. He already has it figured out. When the ball touches his hands he’s already started his next action. Whether that’s shooting, making the proper swing pass, or dribbling into a hand-off, he is ready.
But there is something Randle brings that Toppin does not. You see, Randle is such a force with the ball in his hands that the Heat have no choice but to stick Adebayo on him. If the Heat try to put Love or someone smaller on Randle, Randle might average over 40 points per game. Adebayo is their best and only solution for him. But sticking Adebayo on him moves him away from the basket, which gives Robinson more access to offensive rebounds. If Randle is out, the Heat can feel much more comfortable with a non-Adebayo defender on Toppin (or Hart as the backup 4) and use Adebayo more around the rim. Randle provides compounding value that the Knicks need.
The best version of the Knicks has both of these players and tries to maximize their particular skill sets. If Randle is healthy he will be enormous, acting as an outlet option for when the Heat blitz Brunson. But if Randle labors or shows signs of struggle as he did against Cleveland, Thibodeau should not be afraid to go to Toppin.
Hart or Love?
The bench battle!
The Knicks have the best bench in the league, led by runner-up-but-deserving Sixth Man of the Year Quickley and Hart. On the other side, the Heat enter battle with a hodgepodge of undrafted players who have been infused with whatever miracle therapy they have down in Miami that allows players to toss on a Heat jersey and immediately become effective. Oh yeah, they also have Caleb Martin, who flew under the radar as one of the most impactful role players of the first round. Remember that name, Knicks fans.
I expect Kevin Love to play the majority of the back-up center minutes. I also expect Butler to be on the court for almost all the minutes Adebayo sits. These minutes, ones that will feature Butler and four shooters, terrify me. As good as Adebayo is, the Heat’s spacing can feel a bit clogged when he and Butler share the court. While Hartenstein has shown himself to be more adept at defending stretch 5s than Mitchell Robinson, it is still asking a lot of someone who is most comfortable around the rim.
The Knicks have won these minutes all season. Their bench units have been a staple of the Thibodeau era. They NEED to win these minutes to advance.
Broadway Barrett
I wish I could write 10,000 words on Barrett’s renaissance in round one. As a sports fan it is the type of thing that keeps you coming back. Almost everyone reasonable was aware of just how disappointing Barrett’s regular season was. Most of those people expected the same in round one of the playoffs. How could a struggling slasher succeed against a team with two rim protectors?
Sometimes a player just has something special between their ears, something unidentifiable in even the most accurate of analytics. Simply put, Barrett was ready for that moment in a way no other Knick was. Even amidst his struggles, Barrett has proven overwhelmingly he has the mentality to be a good player. It’s always been about putting it together on the court.
On the surface, his series against Cleveland started slow, but there were bread crumbs that gave fans who were paying attention reasons to be optimistic. While shooting 6 for 25 from the field in games 1 & 2, Barrett was defending, rebounding and passing at a level he hadn’t all season. In games 3 through 5, he put it all together: Barrett shot 24 of 43 from the field while maintaining the all-around impact he displayed in the first two games. It is not hyperbolic to say that these were the three best games of Barrett’s career.
What Barrett did changed the trajectory of this franchise. He showed the team that he is capable of scoring efficiently against tough defense. He showed his coach that he can do the little things — battle for rebounds, operate as the low man defensively, make multiple rotations — that impact winning and will keep him on the court for major minutes. Most importantly, he showed the fans that he is not just an inefficient scorer. He can be more. Much more. In the regular season, Barrett passed out of just 28% of his drives, a woefully low number. In his five games against Cleveland, that number skyrocketed to just south of 50%. Any time Barrett foresaw a difficult shot, he made an early read and kicked it out to a teammate.
If Barrett continues playing like this, the Knicks will come away from this postseason feeling as good as they could have possibly expected. But if the Knicks want to defeat the Heat, Barrett must continue impacting the game like this.
Mitchell Robinson
Speaking of impact, while Barrett had the best stretch of his Knick career, Mitchell Robinson may have been the best player in the series, period. Robinson was dominant on both ends. In just five games, Robinson had 29 offensive rebounds and 11 blocks. That’s a 40 possession advantage created by one player. For comparison, the Cavs frontcourt of Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley combined for 30 offensive rebounds and 11 blocks in the series.
The Heat are a different challenge. Adebayo is a true All-Star who can give Robinson fits on both ends. More importantly, both Adebayo and Love will pull Robinson from the paint. Will Robinson’s focus on defending Miami’s staple dribble hand-offs deter his ability to protect the rim? What about when he’s matched up with Love, who operates purely as a spacer? How Robinson responds (and how Thibodeau adjusts should he struggle) could very well be the deciding factor in this series.
Prediction
Butler is a great player and Spoelstra is a wonderful coach. The loss of Tyler Herro will hurt them more in this series than the last. I think Thibodeau and the Knicks will be prepared for most of the challenges thrown their way. Knicks in 6.
