Jimmy Butler, Miami Heat built perfectly for Milwaukee Bucks challenge
Watch Miami Heat @ Milwaukee Bucks Game 2, live on Sky Sports Arena on Wednesday night at 11:30pm
Wednesday 2 September 2020 23:30, UK
The Heat’s victory over the Milwaukee Bucks in Game 1 was no upset win. In fact, Miami – and Jimmy Butler in particular - are perfectly built for the challenge they face.
Long before their second round series began, it had been said that the Miami Heat would be a good match-up for the Milwaukee Bucks.
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With the Heat having taken two of the three games in the season series to date against a usually dominant regular-season Bucks team - and with the one loss coming in the bubble in a game that Jimmy Butler did not play in - there was quantifiable evidence to back up that hypothesis.
The idea behind it is that, by being one of the better three-point shooting teams in the league, the Heat are well positioned to take advantage of a deliberate Bucks defensive strategy that is designed to allow a high volume of opposing outside jump shots.
Certainly, the Bucks do not intend to allow a high volume of open three-pointers - they want teams to be forced/goaded into heavily-contested shots as a means of avoiding their excellent paint protection, and in allowing only the 18th-highest opponent three-point percentage (plus being the league's best defensive rebounding team to clear up the forced misses), it works.
Nevertheless, allowing the fourth-most three-pointers in the league is perhaps poking the bear with a Heat team that, having shot 37.9 per cent from three-point range during the regular season, was the second-best long ball shooting team in the NBA.
Combined with that, the Heat's plethora of long and defensively-engaged players in the frontcourt avails them of plenty of theoretical options to throw at Bucks star forward, Giannis Antetokounmpo, in both man-on-man and switching situations. With enough discipline, the Heat could form a defensive wall to try and stymie the Greek Freak's endless drives, especially in transition and semi-transition, where he feasts the most.
Notwithstanding a wobbly ending, the Bucks entered as favourites after another dominant regular-season showing, but they were vulnerable, especially against this opponent.
A 40-point first quarter for the Bucks in Game 1 of this series saw the latter of these two supposed advantages tested early. However, the Heat put up the aforementioned wall on the paint after that and allowed only 64 further points (including only 41 in the second half) to close out an 11-point win in which Giannis scored only 18.
Miami shot well, too, hitting 38.7 per cent of their three-pointers as a team despite the prodigious shooter Duncan Robinson hitting only one in 26 minutes, and so the game plan worked.
If this is the 'three-and-D' era, the Heat are the 'three-and-D' team. With the strong man-to-man defensive performance of Jae Crowder on Giannis, the excellent versatility of breakout third-year star Bam Adebayo on both ends of the court, the veteran savvy of Andre Iguodala and Goran Dragic, and helpful shooting and scoring contributions from Tyler Herro and Kendrick Nunn off the bench, the Heat played an excellent team game.
But of course, if you saw the game, or even just looked at the box score, you will already know where this is going. The star of the show was Jimmy Butler, who scored 40 points on only 20 shots, hitting 13 of them, and going 12-of-13 from the free throw line in an excellently poised performance.
It was the exact kind of game that Miami brought him in for. In fact, they have essentially made Butler the point guard this season, giving him the ball in his hands at every opportunity precisely so that he would be the man to take them to - and through - important clutch situation such as this.
The Heat acquired Butler not to be the three-and-D player, but to be the engine that made the rest of it work; to be the other guy, to be the thorn in the side of the opponent, to be the penetrator whose presence opens up the court, and whose sheer gumption was made for the big moment.
For all the modern analytical tools in the world, there still exists no accurate measure of the sporting concept known as 'it'. 'It' is extremely hard to define, and even harder to find, yet it is not nebulous. 'It' is the quality that only some have, the thing that makes them want to rise to the challenge rather than wilt away from it, the instinct to be the leader in more than name only.
Leadership in team sport is itself hard to define, often wrongly conflated with just being vocal, yet it surely follows that to be a leader in a team sport, you have to be the one to whom everyone else turns. There is surely no doubting that Butler is that for Miami, and that he has 'it'.
Butler sought Miami out last summer, leaving the Philadelphia 76ers with the single-minded focus on joining the Heat, partly for the city but also for the franchise. He has long known that he has 'it' and has chafed in stints at previous teams if he felt the team around him has not worked as hard as he or appreciated what he offers enough.
The Heat were similarly enamoured with his qualities and his quality of play, so once the intricacies of the transactions were pulled off, the pairing was logical, with a focus on immediate gains.
Having languished in the mid-range of the Eastern Conference standings for a few years, the Heat had nevertheless managed to do what they always seem to do and picked up some excellent value young players, not least of which were Adebayo and Robinson.
They needed an 'alpha dog' to put them around, someone who would lead the charge without stepping on other's toes, and who would demand the exacting standards from his team that he would give back to them. More practically, they needed someone who would seek to get to the free throw line on every possession, and who could pull strings with the ball in his hands - even if he did not have the athleticism of many of his All-Star peers, he would bring it on both ends of the court and make the right decisions in the big moments.
In Game 1, Butler let it be known that he still had 'it'. It was not a seamless Heat performance, especially in the first quarter, but it was a fairly seamless one from Butler, who was the best player in the game.
He might not go on to be the best player in the series, because Antetokounmpo is going to come back at them, but whatever happens going forwards, take note that this Heat victory was not an upset.
They, and Jimmy Butler in particular, were built for this.
