It’s here! It is September 30 instead of May 30, but the NBA Finals are actually here. It has been a tumultuous year, to be polite. But sports are one of the easiest ways to focus on something other than the stress of 2020. And this year’s Finals, between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat, has no shortage of excitement, even for the most casual of fans.
Lebron James is back in the Finals
Lebron James is, at worst, the third-best basketball player of all time. He is 35 and in his 17th season in the NBA. From 2006 to 2018, his teams were in the playoffs every single year, and he went to the Finals ten (10!) times during that streak (winning 3 times). The disruption to that streak only occurred when he decamped for Los Angeles and the organization rebuilt the roster and coaching staff around him.
You already likely have strong feelings one way or another about Lebron, so I leave it with this: he is one of the best passers that I’ve ever seen and he’s one of the all-time great players. You’re watching basketball history when you watch him play. When he dials into a game, you can almost feel reality shift (look at his last game against the Nuggets, when he scored 38 points, 16 rebounds, 10 assists, and only 2 turnovers).
But the natural order has righted itself, and Lebron is back in the Finals, and he has one of the most talented teammates of his career. Which brings us to:
Anthony Davis is finally in the Finals
Anthony Davis (AD) is one of the most fun players in the NBA. He’s extremely agile for a big man, has pretty solid ball control (stemming from the very famous story about him, as a point guard, growing nine inches in height from his junior to senior years in high school), and has a preternatural proprioception when it comes to the rim. It may not happen every play, or even every game, but every so often, AD will take an alley oop with his back to the rim and contort at the exact perfect second to lay it in or dunk (sometimes he never turns toward the rim when he does this). I’ve found myself cheering aloud when this happens.
AD was drafted by the Pelicans and spent most of his career playing there, before finally getting an out when the Lakers dumped most of their young players in the trade for him (the Pellies also ended up with a different titan of jaw-dropping physicality in Zion Williamson via draft, which surely took away some of the sting. I’d take AD over Zion any day, though.). The Pelicans teams were always not-quite-there in the stacked Western Conference, so AD had that perennial moniker of “top 10 player languishing on a bad team” (Kemba Walker also had this with the Hornets before joining the Celtics).
Anyway, AD is a very tall boi who is a pretty good defender, but he doesn’t like playing the Center position. He’s adapted to it as other teams have gotten shorter, but he still prefers to play alongside a big man. This brings us to our next point.
The Lakers are far better than they look on paper
The centers who play alongside AD are the leadfooted JaVale McGee and the uber-troll Dwight Howard. Howard played a lot more in the Nuggets series than he had in the earlier part of the playoffs, but on the season is averaging under 20 minutes per game. McGee is averaging under 17 minutes per game. I imagine that the Lakers will use Howard more against the Heat, but it remains a huge question whether he can stay out of foul trouble against Bam Adebayo.
Rajon Rondo also has been playing his best ball in years during these playoffs. The Lakers roster, as constructed, basically has two purposes: stand around the three-point line to give Lebron and AD space on offense, and harry and troll the opposing players on defense. Despite looking like a bunch of creaky veterans, the long limbs of the Lakers are very good at clogging passing lanes, and the three-point shooting has been decent enough to fill in the scoring gaps around AD and Lebron. They were the #1 seed in the West for a reason: this team wins a lot of games.
One last Lakers point, and then on to the Heat.
It’s the Lakers, so you already love or hate them
The stuff above is just some context for the season. The Lakers are the preeminent NBA franchise. Regardless of your age (…I guess if you are under ten years old, maybe this doesn’t apply), you’ve been alive through a Lakers dynasty, whether it be Shaq and Kobe; Magic and Kareem; or West and Baylor and Wilt. Their jersey is iconic, their former point guard is the NBA’s logo (and <cough> parody law <cough>, Alleged Beef’s NBA coverage logo), and the only outcome more hyped than a Lakers Finals would be a Lakers/Celtics Finals.
We almost had that this year, but there was the inconvenient matter of the Miami Heat laying waste to the Eastern Conference Playoffs. Maybe next year, Boston.
The Miami Heat don’t care about your storylines
The Miami Heat were the 5-seed in the East. That’s a very low seed to be in the Finals. Some context is needed.
The seeding is a little wonky this year because there was a massive disruption to the schedule, so it is impossible to know how the full 82-game season would have played out. For most of the season, the Heat looked like a spunky team that would cause some nervousness in the playoffs, but they looked mostly like being a first-round spoiler was their best-case scenario. The Heat were also mediocre during the bubble seeding games, going 3-5 (although I’ll note that their wins were against the Nuggets, the Celtics, and the Pacers). However, their record was good enough to keep them in the 5-seed, a game behind their first-round opponent, the Indiana Pacers.
Then… well, let’s move on to the next point.
The Heat smashed the East
First round, the Miami Heat sweep the 4-seed Pacers. There’s not much to say here, other than that Victor Oladipo didn’t look entirely healthy and Domantis Sabonis never rejoined the team during the restart. The Pacers were outclassed and outgunned thoroughly.
Second round, the Miami Heat beat the 1-seed Milwaukee Bucks, 4-1. Yes, the Bucks team with the best record in basketball, with back-to-back MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo at point guard, with a ferocious defense and a potent offense. The Heat mopped the floor with them. (For a Bucks postmortem, I’ll suggest the always-excellent NBA coverage over at The Ringer).
Third round, the Heat play against the 3-seed Boston Celtics. Finally, the Heat are going to lose, right? The Celtics are young, they have a deep bench, and they are tall at every position (except for Kemba, but we stan Kemba no matter his height). Also, they have the annoyingly talented Jayson Tatum as their best player, and like five guys on their roster who are very good defenders and passable shooters. The Heat win the series 4-2 on the strength of a zone defense and the fact that Bam Adebayo (much like AD on the Lakers) is a fiendishly talented big man who can pass, shoot, dribble, and defend (OHHH BUT IS HE CLUTCH?) against anyone on the court. So anyway, the Celtics are out of the bubble and the Heat moved on.
But just how did the Heat go 12-3 across three playoff series so far?
Underdogs, late bloomers, and the second-best coach active in the NBA
Erik Spoelstra is second among active coaches in my rankings (released next week! Sure to be pure click-bait!), behind only Gregg Popovich. Spoelstra (and the illustrious Heat president Pat Riley) has won two titles as head coach of the Heat (and a third as assistant coach prior to that), and I’ve always been impressed by his acumen. He’s great at in-game adjustments, his use of zone defense in this playoffs has been a thing of beauty, and he and his staff seem to have a magic touch when it comes to handling… let’s just big personalities.
Which brings us to the star of this team, journeyman Jimmy Butler. Butler bounced around for several years after leaving Chicago, and the fit was uniformly bad. His exit from Chicago was preceded by him being fined for sniping at his teammates. The infighting among the Timberwolves was painful to watch, and the 76ers felt like the embodiment of the “entire band is electric guitars” joke from Idiocracy. The expectation among us cynics was that he’d clash with Riley and Spoelstra and then be on to another team next year. But, to my knowledge, that didn’t happen.
Instead, Jimmy’s burning commitment to being 100% at all times was a welcome shot in the arm among Spoelstra’s very young/very old roster. The younger players looked up to him and have talked about how they want to win this one for Jimmy; the veterans like Goran Dragic have deferred to him, and the overall fit has been great.
This is not more apparent than with the two rising stars of the Heat, Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro. Bam’s production level since the playoffs has been off the charts. He has, for most of this postseason, looked like Nikola Jokic if Jokic was quick on his feet (so visions of Hakeem Olajuwon dance through my head). Tyler Herro is a rookie who was born in 2000, if you want to feel super old. He’s been mercurial but his potential must thrill Spoelstra. Herro can score (such as his 37-point game in Game 4 against Boston) too, making it easier to get Bam or Jimmy a few minutes of rest without worrying that the wheels will fall off.
The Lakers versus the Heat
We’ve talked a lot about Bam and AD, but only a little about the actual centers for the two teams. This is because the NBA is super weird right now, and traditional, lead-footed centers are a liability against teams like the Bucks (who often play offense with all five players behind the three-point line), the Warriors (LOL RIP), and the Rockets (who would shoot a contested, fadeaway 3 in the hopes of drawing a foul before they’d take an open layup).
Now that these two teams are facing each other, it will be interesting to see whether Howard or McGee or the Heat’s Kelly Olynyk get more minutes. Both teams have dynamic power forwards (Bam and AD) and dynamic swiss army knives (Jimmy and Lebron), so how will they choose to defend each other? Will Spoelstra use the zone defense again, forcing the Lakers to beat them with the three-pointer? Will Lebron defend Bam… or Jimmy… or Tyler Herro? Can the sneaky veteran point guards (Rondo, Dragic) make any buckets?
And lastly, we have yet to discuss the fact that both of Spoelstra’s championships (and two of Lebron’s three) were when Lebron was on the Heat. How have their two brilliant minds evolved since those days? Can Spoelstra metagame with such an intimate knowledge of Lebron’s tendencies? Can Lebron bulldoze his way through zone defenses?
We didn’t get Celtics / Lakers, and I for one am very happy about that. I think that convenient storylines are the bailiwick of sportswriters who have weekly columns to fill. I personally don’t think that there is something more magical about Celtics / Lakers just because the two teams squared off a bunch 30 years ago. Heat / Lakers has recent history (between Lebron and the Heat), it has a 1-seed who coasted through the bubble games facing a 5-seed who demolished the East, and it has talent and question marks on both rosters.
I can’t wait for tipoff.