Heat-76ers Reaction: Miami SNEAKY DANGEROUS behind Norman Powell’s leap & Tyler Herro returning

Heat-76ers Reaction: Miami SNEAKY DANGEROUS behind Norman Powell’s leap & Tyler Herro returning

All right, moving on to Heat Sixers. I caught this game in its entirety yesterday. I was having kind of a lazy Sunday and just was hanging out on the couch and instead of watching football, I was watching basketball and and uh typically, it’s funny because typically I do most of my rewatches in the morning on Synergy, but I ended up catching this one live. It was a very fascinating game and you could literally tell from the opening tip that Miami was in complete control of the shot quality dynamic. They were just getting better shots throughout the game. And so it kind of felt throughout that they were most likely going to win comfortably. Like even when Philly would make their runs and get back into it, Miami would immediately respond and get the lead back up to five to seven. And you could kind of see that dynamic building in the first quarter. Philly had a couple like nice runs of jump shooting. Crazy one in the second quarter. I think they had a 160 run at one point in the second quarter, but outside of those runs, Miami basically controlled the game from start to finish. And I thought it taught us a lot about both teams cuz on the one hand with Philly, one of the things that stood out in a big way is, you know, their dribble penetration attack is very based on speed right now and not a lot on power. So when they run into other teams that have quickness that can kind of keep them in front and keep them out of the paint, their offense can struggle a little bit. I think that’s where like having a guy like Embiid as a counter is something that’s important to look at for future potential for Philly. like, you know, when they run into fast guards that can make life more difficult for their fast guards, they got to have somebody that can kind of get that second defender and get the defense in rotation. And ultimately, a guy like Embiid could provide that power dynamic. And then on the other end of the floor for Philly, like just especially in that second half, they’re just so small. And Miami has these power players, particularly Haime Hakees, where it was like at any given moment, you would look on the floor and you’d be like, there’s three dudes out there who have no shot to guard Haime Hakees. And like that to me is a severe defensive limitation of that Philly team. Just like in terms of their personnel, that’s going to be really difficult for them uh to to overcome. But let’s get back to Miami. I I want to set Miami’s offense to the side for a minute because we’ve talked about it quite a bit as of late and it was every bit as impressive yesterday. Norman Powell was amazing in the first half. I thought Hameh Hakez really controlled the second half. We’ll get to that in a little bit. I want to focus on Miami’s defense for a minute. For all that we talk with Miami’s pace and attack on offense, right? Like kick aheads, early drives, getting good dribble penetration, playing off of it. Their defense is very, very good at stopping those same types of attacks on the other end. Like this is a fast Millie ro Philly roster. Like even without VJ Edgecom who sat out yesterday like Philly has so much quickness on the perimeter and they get out in transition a lot and Miami just shut all of that off. They run the floor in transition so well. Even their bigs like it was really fun to watch Kellair and Bameabio just run up and down yesterday just keeping up with the pace of that game. I think they probably keep up with the pace of games in transition better than any set of bigs in the league right now. They they held Philly to just 22 transition points. That tied a season low for Philly who’s been getting out in transition quite a bit. And then in the half court, steady diet of just chasing them off the three-point line. Really good point of attack defense. I thought both Da’Von Mitchell and Drew Smith in particular did a phenomenal uh job on ball all game. And again, like Philly is still going to get a lot of threes up just because they have some guys like Tyrese Maxi and Quinton Grimes who will take some super tough threes off of contests. like Maxi will shoot like a step back 30footer three or four times a game. So like that’s going to get three-point volume up regardless of what defense you’re playing. Quinn Grimes will just kind of elevate off the catch even when he’s guarded. So they ended up getting 21 threes up just between the two of those guys, but they only made seven of them. They were well defended. And then I thought Kellaware and Bam were both awesome at the rim all game when they when they would chase Philly off the line. So they would just end up running into rim protection and Philly missed a lot of layups in this game. Like Quinton Grimes would kind of slither into the lane and the he players would be there without fouling walling up and so it’ be this really difficult layup that would roll off of the rim. And Maxi really difficult layup would roll off the rim. Andre Drummond had like a bunch of offensive rebounds that he tried to put back and he just couldn’t finish them because Bam and Kell were there all game bothering shots around the rim. Philly uh ended up shooting just 53% at the rim in this game, which was their second lowest rim efficiency number of the entire season according to Synergy. Miami is fourth in defensive rating to start this season. Number one in half court defense according to cleaning the glass. They’re allowing just 87.6 points per 100 halfcourt possessions. I was just really impressed with them yesterday on the defensive end of the floor and they were equally impressive on offense yesterday. Norman Powell really controlled things in the first half. He’s just the perfect guy to give a green light to in this system because he’s your textbook like simple shooting readmaker, right? Like he gets a clean look, he’s taking it every single time. And he gets so many like trailing the play in transition. Like they’ll run the ball up the floor and like pitch it back to Bam. And then here comes Norman just like sweeping across like at an angle and he’ll just rise up off the catch and take like a 27footer and knock it down, you know? Or in those driving kit chaos situations, every time he gets the slightest bit of separation, he’s rising up. And he was hitting so many of them early in the game that he started to draw fouls as Philly was closing out too aggressively. I think he ended up drawing three three shot fouls in yesterday’s game. And then from there, it’s just very simple uh like reads, right? Like if he gets chased off his left shoulder, he’s ripping right. If he rips right and there’s a rim protector there, he’ll just stop and pop from 15. If no one’s there, he’ll slash. If he ends up getting late help, he’ll kick it out. It’s all just like very basic read making off of the power of his shooting. And like he just dominated the early stretch of that game. And then in the second half, like we talked about earlier with Philly’s defense, it just became abundantly clear that Philly just couldn’t guard Haime. They had too many guys on the floor that were easy targets for him. And he just played really simple one-on-one basketball out of cleared side postups and ISOs. And like Haime’s got an a very uh a very unique gift for like understanding the physical leverage battle that happens in the post. like he’s really good at like feeling which one of his shoulders you’re leaning on and then from there kind of like using little little pivots and little bumps to kind of get additional separation off of you. He had this nasty spin move off of the right wing where he like set it up with a hard dribble to the left and just pounded into a full spin and just completely dusted his man off the dribble for an easy layup. And so he’s become like the very simple postup mismatch problem for opponents cuz it’s like if you leave him one-on-one, he’s really good at either getting to some sort of short hook or a little easy right shoulder fade or god forbid he just completely toasts you off the dribble and gets all the way into the lane for a layup. And then as soon as you bring that second defender over, he’s really good at the easy kickout reads, the lob to kill when the big man steps up. He just is he just makes simple decisions based on how the defense reacts to him there in the middle of the floor. And I also want to shout out Bam and Kell. I thought their short range spacing was key in this game. Like Bam was killing Philly with these like little like seven eight foot jump shots where they get right up to the front of the rim and everyone on Philly would react and they would just drop it off to Bam there like seven feet from the basket. Easy jump shot. Knock it down. Keller hit a couple of threes. He was also providing that vertical spacing window. But Haime can go through these runs where he straight up dominates the offense for like a five, six minute stretch and gets great shots every single time. It was just a wireto-wire dominant performance from the Heat on the road against a good team. They’ve now won four in a row. They’re up to 11 and six. They have sole possession of the four seed out east, just one game back of the two seed. A couple other final shout outs for Miami. Keller has been getting a lot of direct coaching behind the scenes uh about directing his talent towards the margins rather than scoring. A lot of like, hey dude, like focus on the things that you’re great at right now that help the team win and the scoring will just kind of come naturally with that, right? So like sprint up and down the floor in transition, clean up the defensive glass, make those helpside rotations at the rim, attack the offensive glass. He was a monster on the offensive glass yesterday. He had eight offensive rebounds. And as a result, like he’s been taking that to heart and it’s been awesome. Another 20 points and 16 rebounds yesterday. In the last seven games, Kell is averaging 15 and 15 on 57% from the field and 46% from three. Just outrageous stuff from the young fella. And again, early in the season, it was like a lot of attempts to try to get some of that to work. The Kell wear units when Bam’s off the floor, some of the two big stuff. and it wasn’t pretty to start the year, but they’re starting to gain some real momentum in both their two big looks and their Kellar on the floor without BAM looks over the course of the last uh couple of weeks. And then lastly, DaVon Mitchell. You know, it’s interesting because he was such a, you know, a one-dimensional type of player before coming to Miami, very much just a primary point of attack guy who was pretty mediocre at everything else. but refining one of his weaknesses, particularly his spot up three-point shooting. And then Spolster just weaponizing a couple of his kind of like underdiscovered strengths has turned him into a really high level starter in this league. He’s always been fast. He’s always been a good point of attack defender, but in Miami, he’s become a reliable catch and shoot guy. For instance, if you leave him open this year, unguarded threes 45%. Last year with Miami, 54%. So, he’s been consistently knocking down the catch and shoot threes in a Heat jersey. And then Spolster’s found his offensive talent, which is like he can beat dudes off the dribble and make simple kickout reads. He’s averaging 9.1 assists per 36 minutes this year. His previous career high was 6.4. And it’s just a very simple dynamic. He’s sneaky, one of the best rim finishers in the league, and he can get to the foul line by getting into your body. So that causes teams to kind of react to his drives and then he just makes those simple reads. That’s very much the meat and potatoes of Miami’s offense. Generate dribble penetration through defense to transition and highle driving and kick attack from Himemehakez and from um DaVon Mitchell while having the kind of counterbalance of the over top shooting from Norman Powell. And it’s just working. It’s just working at a really really high level. And now Tyler Harrow is coming back. So, uh, going to be really interesting to see how he kind of fits with the dynamic with Norman Powell, if their rhythm competes with each other or if it turns into just 48 minutes of that highlevel aggressive jump shooting that actually ends up helping them. Very different system than last Tyler Herrell played. So, I’ll be really curious if I I wonder if they’ll more or less use him the same way they’ve been playing or if they kind of use him as a counterbalance to their attack by running more pick and roll with him and Bam. That’ll be something that’ll be interesting to see with his return.

Jason reacts to the Miami Heat beating the Philadelphia 76ers and breaks down why Miami is more dangerous than people think with Bam Adebayo getting extra help in the form of Norman Powell and Tyler Herro.

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