BOSTON — As Kyle Lowry took the floor Sunday, the Heat were a rare sight to behold. Everyone was healthy, for the time being.
A team that has looked like itself no matter who was out there finally had everybody. Most teams would feel a placid sense of ease, with everyone seeing one of their OGs back and thinking they can step back and relax a bit. But then Lowry made it clear from the beginning that the Heat are a team perpetually on edge, one that sees defense as just another type of offense.
The first time he touched the ball in weeks, he immediately went into a sprint in transition. His last play of the night was a deflected pass and then a trap up at half court with the game certifiably over, because this is what he and his team do. The Heat’s 109-103 victory gave them a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven Eastern Conference finals.
“They were just like a wounded animal,” Al Horford said. “They came out fighting, and for whatever reason, we just didn’t have that same sense of urgency.”
Miami had 19 steals, a franchise playoff record. The record-setter was just a gift, a lazy inbounding of the ball by Grant Williams that Lowry swooped in to intercept. It was another casual blunder just as Boston thought it could just maybe make one last run.
Lowry had to be the one to put the game to bed since he was the person who set the tone for the entire evening. He had played just 78 minutes in the past month and wanted to control the game from the very beginning. Thirty seconds into the game, he kicked ahead an outlet pass off a rebound from a missed Jayson Tatum layup and Max Strus trailed in for a wide-open 3, taking a 3-0 lead they would never surrender.
“Well, I mean, that’s what he does,” Celtics coach Ime Udoka said of Lowry. “That’s the impact he has on the game, but when you give them 24 turnovers it’s obviously a lot easier to get out and run, and he’s the head of the snake as far as that, pushing the pace and tempo. But we made it too easy on them in that regard. Obviously getting stops or scoring the basketball, they can’t get out and run to that extent, but scoring 33 points on our 24 turnovers is hard to overcome.”
Lowry stepped in and immediately augmented Miami’s best defensive attributes, particularly when it came to squeezing gaps and pre-rotating around corners to play peek-a-boo in passing lanes. He is the perfectly manufactured cog for Miami’s defensive strategy, in which guys like Lowry will foresee spots where they can help early so they are in a perfect position to reroute an attack.
It was on display from early in the first quarter, when he spotted Tatum drawing Strus and P.J. Tucker into a seal by Daniel Theis in the lane. Lowry abandoned Marcus Smart in the weakside corner to get into charge position as soon as Tatum got downhill, going right to the place where he knew Tatum’s Eurostep would take him. Meanwhile, Jimmy Butler’s spidey senses kicked in when he was face guarding Jaylen Brown, felt Lowry rotate over, then positioned himself perfectly in the weakside gaps to easily pick off Tatum’s kick-out pass.
As great as Milwaukee’s defense is at high pressing and walling off the paint, Miami is clever at layering its pressure points in weird spots to make life unpredictable. The Heat’s defense in Game 3 exposed Tatum and Brown for the pre-prime stars they are, taking them out of their comfort zones by making it hard to find a rhythm for their dribble patterns and finishing moves. Even on the first play of the game, you could see how Miami does things differently.
When Tatum squared up Strus to drive through him late in the shot clock, Miami briefly shifted into a zone at the top level, with Tucker leaving Smart in the strongside corner so he could make Tatum pick up his dribble early. Meanwhile, Bam Adebayo left Brown on the weakside wing to cover the other drive slot if Tatum wanted to make a spin move.
That left Lowry and Butler down on the baseline against Boston’s bigs. Tatum went headfirst into the trap and missed Smart in the corner, then bricked a tough floater. Lowry got the ball and flew in transition. Tatum didn’t bother getting back after his miss on the first play of the game — a harbinger of things to come — and his man, Strus, walked into a wide-open 3.
“We didn’t come out with the right intensity or we didn’t come out with the same intensity as them as a unit, and it showed,” Brown said. “They came out all connected with urgency. Defensively, we gave up a lot of points. Defensively, they were more physical than us, and it showed in the first half especially, and then we tried to dig ourselves out in the second half and fell short.”
Tatum had 10 points on 3-for-14 shooting in 40 minutes, with all of those shots coming before the frightening stinger from which he quickly returned in the fourth quarter. It’s the second series in a row Tatum has had a 10-point game. He shot 21 percent from the floor on both occasions.
Brown was the saving grace most of the night, the only person pushing the pace for Boston to try to keep up. As Tatum’s game has come and gone throughout the playoffs, Brown has always tried to leak out in transition and drive into the teeth of the defense when nobody else will. He shot the Celtics back into it, but he just as often fumbled things away.
“Did a shit job today taking care of the basketball,” Brown said. “Keep getting to the basket and keep doing what I do, but be stronger when I get in there. (The officials) let a lot of stuff go tonight. Especially when I feel like I drive and I get to the basket, I feel like it’s two hands on me all the time. I never get those hand-checking calls. But I don’t make excuses. We get better. I did a shit job taking care of the ball today. I’ve got to do better.”
Brown tends to stick with it even when he isn’t getting his calls, but the Celtics have struggled with their composure all season when the whistle isn’t working for them. Smart got a vital technical when he fouled out in the final minute on a play in which he gave Tucker a bear hug before trying to take a charge. Grant Williams committed a flagrant a few plays later when the Celtics still could try to play the foul game and sneak in a win. But every time they had a chance to finally turn the game in their favor, they blew it.
“It looked like we were kind of wilting to their pressure and started complaining to the refs and took us out of the game from the start,” Udoka said. “But disappointing to come out that flat in a conference final game.”
It felt like every time Boston saw an opportunity to patch up its mistakes, it geared up for a knockout punch. But with that big a windup, it was easy for the Heat to sneak in jab after jab to keep the Celtics at bay.
“That’s possible, playing extremely fast, trying to get it back. But every time we came to the huddle, we talked about we can’t get it back in one play, that we’ve just got to keep playing the right way,” Tatum said. “It’s not going to just happen at the snap of our fingers. But obviously, human nature plays a part. You’re down so much, you just want to get back so bad that you can just kind of move a little too fast sometimes.”
The Celtics finished with more turnovers than assists, incredibly. Brown had a playoff-career-high 40 points, but he, Tatum, and Smart combined for 18 turnovers. With Adebayo having one of his best games of the year, Butler’s second-half absence didn’t even matter. The Celtics were just in this situation last series, down 2-1 and looking like they didn’t have the physicality to survive or stars who could manage the game under that level of pressure. They managed to turn that around against the Bucks, who were missing an All-Star. Butler limped out of the arena Sunday, and Smart is certain to have plenty of swelling in his rolled ankle when the adrenaline wears off, but both players have seemed to play through it all. It’s going to be on Boston’s top dogs to solve this one.
“I have the utmost confidence in my guys,” Horford said. “Time and time again, Jaylen figures it out, Jayson figures it out. Those guys are battle-tested.”
They’ve proved they can adjust over the course of the series, but they also squandered a chance to beat a team in the conference finals whose best player never made it out of the halftime locker room. This deep into the playoffs, those are the kinds of golden opportunities you must seize. The Bucks series at least showed Boston can get backed into a corner and Udoka can go back to the film and figure things out. Their turnaround from Game 1 to 2 showed that they can look like a completely different team 48 hours later.
But Udoka has a true quandary to unravel if he is going to find a solution against a fully loaded Heat team.
“(The Heat) are a team that’s going to hustle. They’re going to make it tough. I just want to see what it is,” Horford said. “But coach Udoka has been doing a good job with us all year making adjustments, and especially in the playoffs from game to game. We see things that we need to fix, figure it out, put it together, and move forward.
But it was the Heat who went all-in Saturday night. It’s how they always survive, no matter who they have left standing. This was the kind of performance that gives tangible authenticity to the Heat Culture trope. The night made Boston’s identity, established deep into the season, seem too heliocentric to survive an inverted assist-to-turnover ratio.
“I’ve just got to play better. It’s as simple as that,” Tatum said. “This time of the season, everything on the line, I’ve just got to play better.”
(Photo of Jayson Tatum guarding Miami’s Kyle Lowry: Brian Babineau / NBAE via Getty Images)
