Miami Heat vs Milwaukee Bucks Game Breakdown 24

Welcome to Simply Ballin’s game breakdown of the Miami Heat. After each game, you will see my thoughts on the game, film breakdown, and other interesting bits that stood out to me.

Quick Thoughts

What is there to say?

Yes, the Milwaukee Bucks were without Giannis Antetokounmpo, but they are still a solid team if they have everyone else. Plus the Heat were without Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo.

This game was over real quick and once the Heat got down, it was an extremely low chance that they could have come back — by the end of the first, they were down double digits already, and by halfway through the third, they were down by 20 plus.

Without Butler, any time the other top three players combine for 36 points on 12–39 shooting, you’re most likely losing.

The Heat don’t have the firepower if any of them struggle.

But it wasn’t just the offense that wasn’t working — their defensive rating was 128.1 (7th percentile).

It was just a bad game, but there were still things to touch on, some trends, and some key plays.

Offensive Breakdown

The Heat’s offense in general was poor. It wasn’t just missing good looks, but instead, it was poor sets that either took too long to set up or lead to nothing.

There were many possessions where nothing was created — no rotations were forced, no advantage created, but it took time off the shot clock.

The possession started with a play for Duncan Robinson and all that resulted in was a poor drive and a kick out to Lowry. At that time, however, it was around 11 seconds on the shot clock. So, what happens? It turns into a Tyler Herro ISO against two defenders.

The same happened here — wasted time and a bad shot.

With plays like this that lead to a late shot clock or poor shots, the players won’t get into a rhythm. In the first half, I counted nine isolations. That won’t win games, nor help the offense especially when the players aren’t that good in isolation.

Enough of the bad, though. There were some interesting plays that were effective.

Here, Herro does a great job to attack the rim and recognizes the entire defense collapsing to kick out to Robinson. Unfortunately, he missed — and he missed again off of an offensive rebound. But those are the shots you want as a coach.

Despite not shooting the ball efficiently or having a great scoring night, Herro made a number of great decisions in the pick-and-roll. Here, he effectively worked through that blitz and found a rolling Dewayne Dedmon.

There were three possessions with that double screen for Herro and all worked well into creating an advantage.

Finally, despite Herro starting, the bench has been productive. I don’t care if it was in garbage time, it still takes skills to put up those numbers. The bench combined for 56 points.

Defensive Breakdown:

The Heat allowed the Bucks to score 34, 35, 36 in the first three quarters. Granted the Heat are without their two best defenders and props to Erik Spoelstra to mixing up with zones and press.

The Bucks were feasting right at the rim — 19–28 at the rim.

And if they stopped that, the Bucks were shooting 3s at a high rate — shooting 18–50, with Pat Connaughton leading the way with 7 3s.

The biggest issue came from simple laziness and backcuts.

And this has been an issue, not only in this game but also throughout the season. Too many times, someone loses their man in the corner, or someone goes behind them and cuts to the lane.

All that means is whoever drives will have drawn help and have an easy dump-off pass.

Some of it is bad effort, miscommunication, or generally bad and late rotations.

Take the second clip — Herro is late tagging Portis and that leads to Robinson stepping up to help and his man is right there on his own.

One of the main problems was too many open 3s. And that happened for a number of reasons — not knowing who’s guarding who, miscommunications, and against PnR when blitzing.

Here, after a double from Dedmon, both Herro and he stay with Khris Middleton. It takes them way too long to either decide that they have switched and have Herro run back to Portis or Dedmon should have instantly have gone back.

This mistake has been the most common and it always results in open shots. The defense needs to tighten up with these. It shouldn’t take either defender to realize who they are guarding or communicate when switching.

On a brighter note, players shot 6–18 against Caleb Martin and 5–13 against Gabe Vincent — good to see your role players stepping up on defense.‍

Originally published at https://www.simplyballin.com.