Celtics face familiar discomfort in Game 2 loss to Heat: 8 takeaways
On Wednesday, the Heat broke their franchise record for 3-pointers made in a playoff game, finishing a staggering 23-for-43 from behind the arc.
The Celtics won’t get the cathartic first-round sweep many fans hoped for against the Heat after suffering a 111-101 loss in Game 2 on Wednesday.
Here are the takeaways.
1. Wednesday’s game was a harsh reminder that Jimmy Butler – who will miss the entire series against the Celtics – was not the primary reason the Celtics lost the Eastern Conference finals last year. The reason the 8th-seeded Heat beat the second-seeded Celtics was because 1) the Heat made an outlier number of 3-pointers, shot mostly by role players, and because 2) Erik Spoelstra really is an excellent basketball coach.
On Wednesday, the Heat broke their franchise record for 3-pointers made in a playoff game, finishing a staggering 23-for-43 from behind the arc (53.5 percent!). They set the tone early, burying eight 3-pointers in the first quarter. None of the eight were particularly difficult or well-contested, which was surprising given how clear it seemed that Miami would need to take and make a lot of 3-pointers to win against the Celtics after Game 1.
“I just thought they made a lot of shots that we normally feel comfortable with,” Jaylen Brown said. “But it’s the playoffs. It is what it is. We’ve got to adjust and we’ve got to play ball, so you’ve got to respond.”
Jrue Holiday felt similarly.
“The guys that we wanted to shoot, not that we let them, but it wasn’t like a get out to them and put it on the ground,” he said. “It was kind of like, ‘Protect the basket but still get a close-out.’ But they started knocking them in. We know Martin can shoot, but they had guys out there that were knocking in everything, even Jaime Jaquez just knocking it in. So they’re shooting them confidently and they’re taking them, and they made them tonight.”
On the one hand, the Heat are the 21st-best offense and the 19th-best 3-point shooting team in the league, so statistically, they were unlikely to shoot this well. Maybe they made shots the Celtics are normally comfortable seeing them take.
On the other hand, Jaquez shot 32.2 percent during the regular season, which isn’t particularly good, but he’s not a non-shooter. As Jayson Tatum put it: “Maybe some of those easier ones earlier in the game got them a little more comfortable, and then some of those tougher shots become a little bit easier when you’re already in a rhythm. But it’s something we’re going to talk about.”
That seems likely, and – again – given that the Heat looked hopeless shooting twos against the Celtics in Game 1, it was odd watching Nikola Jovic fire up two utterly uncontested 3-pointers to start the game for a Heat team that beat the Celtics with a barrage of unlikely 3-pointers in the Eastern Conference finals last year.
The Heat should regress to the mean, if statistics are to be believed. Statistics, however, utterly abandoned the Celtics last year.
2. Kristaps Porzingis had a brutal game – six points on 1-for-9 shooting from the floor and 0-for-4 from 3-point range. The Heat threw a number of defenders at him and aggressively kept him far enough away from the hoop to mitigate the mismatch advantages he enjoyed in Game 1.
That needs to change in Game 3. Porzingis should be the Celtics’ game-breaker – the piece they added in the offseason because it made their team virtually unstoppable offensively. On Wednesday, he was -32 in a game the Celtics lost by 10.
“We’ve just got to fight for our spacing,” Brown said. “Got to be just as physical and look forward to it. Own our space, catch the ball with physicality, don’t look for the ref to make the call, and embrace it. I think that it’s a mindset, it’s a lifestyle. We’ve got to just embrace it, and I don’t think we did. I think they embraced it a little bit more than we did tonight.”
3. After a rough Game 1 spent harassed by Jrue Holiday, Tyler Herro finished with 24 points and 14 assists.
“That’s the best playmaking you’ve ever done,” Erik Spoelstra told him in the locker room after the game.
The Heat got their best playoff 3-point shooting performance in franchise history, and the best playmaking game of Herro’s career, according to his Hall-of-Fame coach. Not for the first time, the outliers piled up.
4. Brown and Tatum both had odd games.
Brown struggled at times in the first half, especially defending off the ball, but he ended the second quarter on an 11-point flurry that included three consecutive 3-pointers and a steal/layup that pulled the Celtics back from a five-point deficit to a three-point lead going into the break. He finished with 33 points on 13-for-23 shooting, but he shot 3-for-6 from the free-throw line and turned the ball over three times and was -22.
Tatum, meanwhile, scored 14 points in the first quarter, and the Celtics lost a lot of ground when he went to the bench early for his rotational rest. He finished with a respectable but modest 28 points to go with eight rebounds and three assists, along with three turnovers.
Tatum and Brown weren’t the reason the Celtics lost – an average game by Kristaps Porzingis and more reasonable shooting by the Heat (even 10 percent lower 3-point shooting would have seen them finish above 40 percent) probably would have made a difference. Still, Tatum’s performance in particular was forgettable after a big start.
5. Joe Mazzulla noted that the Celtics won the margins. They grabbed six offensive rebounds to Miami’s four, took 80 field goals to Miami’s 75 and shot 21 free throws to Miami’s 18.
“We’ve been built on taking what the defense gives us and being able to win in different ways,” Mazzulla said. “So over the course of a season, winning the shot margin in the way that we did from the free-throw line and more offensive rebounds and less turnovers, that’s a recipe for long-term success. So I think that’s the balance of where you can get better, but also not overreacting, because if you do that, it opens up more to what they’re capable of. So you really have to fight for that balance.”
We don’t mean to belabor either of these points, but 1) the Celtics should be fine if the Heat don’t continue to outscore them by 33 points from behind the 3-point line 2) that might be cold comfort for Celtics fans who watched the Eastern Conference finals unfold last year.
6. For his part, Butler contributed some perfectly Jimmy Butler trolling via social media.
7. Mazzulla, meanwhile, gave a perfectly Mazzulla answer when he was asked if it’s good that the Celtics are facing some adversity.
“I mean, to think you’re going to a playoff series, however long it lasts and have – it’s unfortunate that losing a game is adversity,” he said. “I would say it’s just the nature of the playoffs, which is adverse itself. So to think that you’re not going to have ups and downs throughout a run, you’re not being realistic. You just have to go back and look at what we did well and what we didn’t, and then figure out the areas that we can improve upon.”
8. The Celtics will have a chance to redeem themselves in an innately adverse environment on Saturday when they travel to Miami for a Game 3 that suddenly means a lot more than anyone expected it to mean.
The game tips off at 6 p.m.
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