Miami Heat Disembowel Sixers in Game Two
by Michael Levin on Apr 18, 2011 8:30 PM PDT
in 2011 NBA Playoffs
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PrintEach sport has a unique kind of frustration behind each loss. Football frustration goes right to your biceps. Baseball frustration stays in your hands. Hockey frustration camps out in your eyes. But basketball frustration is the worst of them all. It sits right in your chest. Festering like a virus. Crawling through your bloodstream and into your appendages. It gets in your mouth, you taste it. And there's nothing you can do. When the Heat jumped out to an early lead on the Sixers, it nested. Then it grew at halftime and expanded over the third quarter until it was incorrigible.
Let's simplify this.
Bad List Good List
Andre Iguodala Lemonade
Doug Collins "It's like a super soaker!"
Rod Thorn
Refs
Global Warming
Reggie Miller
Mila Kunis
Ed Stefanski
ESPN - this.
Khaki Shorts
#showyaluv
For as much actual analysis as I can muster for a game like this, hit the jump.
Thad missed everything. Turner wasn't on the court. Brand looked old. Iguodala looked hurt. Jrue seemed hesitant. Hawes appeared handless. Speights was disappointing. Lou was himself. Tony Battie was...playing. Absolutely everyone is to blame tonight. Pick your scapegoat, but there's a laundry list of people that are just as at fault as the one you pick. LeBron James scored as many points (29) as the entire Sixers starting five. That's all you need to know.
Miami did what they had to do. They won both games at home against a significantly worse Sixers team. Game One was close. Game Two was not. Not for a second. From the tip to the horn, the Heat outplayed, out-hustled, out-manned, and outclassed them at home. They protected their home court advantage. Could the Sixers give it right back to them in games three and four? Logic and neatness dictates that it's possible. But if you watched even a minute of this putrid stank game, you're not optimistic.
For the greater part of the game, the Sixers shot under 30% from the field. Joel Anthony gave Thad fits all game, but the Sixers best player in Game One kept shooting. He kept attacking, but without a few easy and highly meaningless 4th quarter buckets, he'd have shot 3-14 for the game. With Lou playing like a stale chicken breast, Doug needs Thad to lead the bench to an advantage over Miami's reserves. Tonight, playing a lot of probably ill-advised minutes at the center position, Young could do absolutely nothing.
If you're not worried about Andre, I don't really know when that switch gets flipped for you. 4-15 shooting and 9 turnovers in two games. He did a nice job on Dwyane Wade for a good chunk of the game, holding him to 4-11 shooting and just 7 trips to the foul line. But he's not Shane Battier or Bruce Bowen -- we (not "we") are paying him to play a bit of offense also, and aside from a few nice passes, he's been completely miserable.
The lack of an actual big man is murdering this team. This idea needs its own post so stay tuned over the next couple of days.
What was Doug Collins thinking in keeping Turner out of the third quarter after he was hands down the team's best (only) offensive weapon in the first half? And why run Thad and Andre as frontcourt mates for the first time in ever? Rotation questions like these are the biggest problem I have with Doug as a coach. He stuck to his word and didn't play Andres Nocioni but really the team played bad enough that he may as well have held everybody out of the game and seen what happened. A shellacking is a shellacking. He got T'd up at the end just for funsies.
Nothing we can do about this but suck it up and regroup for Thursday at home. In the meantime, stay off the ledge. This team wasn't as good as you thought they were to begin with. Check out the general malaise at Peninsula is Mightier where they're sipping their mojitos and waiting for round two to start.
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hard to really find fault with doug’s rotations in a game like this. just grasping at straws at this point.
don’t really get speezy’s sudden inclusion in the rotation though. battie was our best big today (which says a lot)
That was disheartening
Clearly this team can win a playoff series as currently configured. That said, this game was all sorts of frustrating. Our two highest paid players (making approximately 32 million total) scored a grand total of 8 points. The energy and team play from the first quarter of game one was replaced with a lot of one on one and standing around. And Mo Speights continues to make rebound attempts look like someone trying to grab a greased watermelon in a swimming pool. It was gross.
Some random thoughts.
On the rotation issue. I have found this odd all series. Why is Speights suddenly the first big off the bench in the playoffs when he was receiving DNP-CD as late as the last week of the season? Why is Collins so reluctant to go with the hot hand – ie – limiting Thad’s minutes in Game 1 and Turner’s in Game 2. Both were struggling defensively, but because this team struggles so much to score you almost have to play a guy who’s hitting his shots.
Second, yes this team needs a big man, but just as much they need a guy who can carry them offensively for a few minutes when the team is struggling. Yes, that player can double as a big man, but they need a #1 option on offense. Maybe that guy could be Turner down the road. But right now they don’t have one. And the Sixers are probably the only team in the playoffs that can say that.
The Speights thing really confuses me (#freespeezy). He seemingly has tons of offensive talent. But he has a bad motor and awful footwork on defense. Even worse, he can’t get on the court for a middle of the pack team like the Sixers who have every reason in the world to give him PT to see what they have in him. I always liked him – mainly because big guys who can score 20+ points in this league don’t come around too often. But he’s looked awful the past two games.
Lastly. Regardless of how this series ends, can Stefanski and Thorn finally make some roster moves? For the past four years this team has been trying to rebuild and compete at the same time. The league doesn’t work that way. We need to add some more young talent to the Jrue-Turner nucleus and the front office needs to realize that we can’t ever obtain that talent if we continue to strive for a bottom tiered playoff seed. I know some people in this town love Iggy, but let’s face it, he’s not the type of player the franchise needs at this point. He’s a great team player and a terrific defensive guy, but that skill set is better suited to a good playoff team rather than a .500 team. The team really should have moved him last year before the draft, but due to his success on team USA as an ultimate ‘glue guy,’ I’m sure there’s still a market for him. And Thad? Somehow the Sixers have had this guy for four years and I still don’t know what we have in him. If he’s ever going to start in this league it’s going to have to be at the SF position. But we never really gave him the opportunity to do that. All we know is that he’s a nice bench guy who has great touch around the rim, but isn’t a great rebounder and has a hard time playing D on bigger guys. Is he worth 10M a year? He shouldn’t be to this team. The only two ‘building blocks’ on this team are Jrue and Turner. The franchise should focus on using the rest of their assets (Iggy…umm…) and try to add another piece to that core before Brand’s mammoth deal comes off the cap. That should be the goal.
The Pacers are a better team than the Sixers. This should show Ed Stefanski/Rod Thorn or whoever’s running this franchise to the ground to wake up and realize this: This franchise can’t be built with spot starters and role players. You acquire those LAST not first and foremost.
Luckily for the Sixers, we have Jrue Holiday/Evan Turner. Holiday didn’t so much suck as he was hesitant. Secondly, Irish: I agree with ALL of your post except, Evan Turner struggled defensively? He did just a good a job as anyone on Wade/James. They’re getting most of their points in fast-break opportunities. Right now, the team’s offensive struggles and the worst front court in the league are hurting them.
Your post is so accurate, so descriptive of the team’s reality that you might get flamed for it. Be warned :). But glad to see there are more who see this.
the pacers are better than the sixers…or the bulls are an easier match up than the heat. A somewhat intelligent person would know the answer to this, which explains why you don’t know.
Most analysts said before the playoffs began that the heat were the worst matchup for the sixers. It’s showing. What makes it even worse was that this team was in shambles before the playoffs began, and it carried over into the off-season.
"I admire his competitiveness. As much as I admire it, I thought that he was trying too hard."- Eddie Jordan
I gotta say though – Turner got aboslutely smoked by Wade a few teams and then they had to run it back and forth a few times…. Barkley was giggling and like " He was P-O-Y at Ohio State but he never saw THAT in the Big 10".
It was almost like they chose to “school” him in the ways of NBA playoff-ness. He’ll learn.
I thought it was interesting that hey kept putting him (a rookie) on LeBron or Wade. In some ways, Im glad. Time to grow up son.
Spencer hawes defies the laws of physics by sucking and blowing at the same time
by Tj Singh on Apr 18, 2011 9:39 PM PDT via mobile reply actions
It’s amazing how bad the guy sucks. He isn’t even a rotation big.
by LeQuan Glover on Apr 18, 2011 9:47 PM PDT up reply actions
Yet he starts for us, at least we have a .000557% chance of signing dwight howard in the near future
by Tj Singh on Apr 18, 2011 9:58 PM PDT via mobile up reply actions
It’s a little higher than that. You’ve got Jrue/ET. And I do believe Young should inherit that SF Spot. His ability to attack the post, hit the mid-ranger, take it to the rim. Offensively, he’s a stud and in reality he’d be mismatched with other bigs most of the time. It’s a gimmick suiting for a management that doesn’t think. Meeks coming off the bench will be a lethal weapon.
In my mind, we’ve got Jrue/ET/Young/Meeks. And the rest are useless.
by LeQuan Glover on Apr 18, 2011 10:02 PM PDT up reply actions
Yea I agree with what you’re saying, but why come to philly when u could go play for the Lakers? I love my city but let’s face it, L.A. has so much more than philly does, all the star power and treatment is too good for someone like howard to pass up
by Tj Singh on Apr 18, 2011 10:10 PM PDT via mobile up reply actions
I love how nobody commented on the story for the game on the Heat blog. But as for the game, it was awful. No way to sugar-coat it.
Brand was awful
Iguodala has been awful on offense in both games
Jrue was off today
Lou didn’t give us anything
Speights needs to stop playing
Hawes is over-matched by everyone
Meeks was semi-invisible
Young is relentless, but he got owned by Anthony today. Not good for our slim chances this series.
But let’s be serious here. The team of super-friends is obviously the better team. Not in playing style, but way too much talent. Their 3rd best player is better than our first. Nobody expected us to win this series, better yet make it a series. Most people knew we’d at least get blown out one time. But as we’ve been doing all year, we will continue to fight and try to give our fans a great show on Thursday.
The sky is not falling, but obviously we aren’t at contender level yet. This was obvious I thought. But we have Jrue, who is only going to get better. Same with Jodie. Evan showed us a little something today. Hopefully we can get Young back at a decent price. Elton will be solid for us for another 2 years hopefully. We need a center badly..again obvious. But please don’t call for a fire sale or act like the world’s coming to an end. The Heat better beat us cuz they have 3 all-stars. They have bigger fish to fry.
With that said tho…*#$& the Heat! With a fiery passion and go Celtics.
My god
all I can say is thank god its over. Whether it was the 6+ missed layups/shots underneath the basket or bad help defense or our inability to get anything going on offense, this was a hard game to watch. I love Thad’s aggressiveness but there were a couple times on defense where i wanted to yell at the TV screen because of the way he would come off his man to help on someone that absolutely did not need help. I agree with you and JRB that the way doug rotates or does now know to rotate his players is something that worries me very much. Turner was the ONLY player getting anything going for us and doug took him out … inexplicable.
formerly jdcvr6
"When I'm dead and buried, and my time here has passed. I want them to bury me upside down, so my critics can kiss my ass." - Bob Knight
I'm sorry, I must have missed it but Doug Collin said he wouldn't play Nocioni?
There can only be one Noce!
Oh never mind, I found it.
I’m guessing Noce won’t play any more this season.
Bad news for me, cause I won’t get to see him play until the FIBA-Americas competitions.
God news for me, cause I can’t take much more Noce abuse. I know Noce deserves a lot of the bad stuff said about him here but there are a lot more really bad, nasty, mean stuff said here that he doesn’t deserve. So at least I get a vacation from that eh? :-)
There can only be one Noce!
Mila Kunis
Hey you leave her out of this!!! What did she ever do? (Besides me in my dreams)
by FooFighter1124 on Apr 19, 2011 12:54 AM PDT reply actions 2 recs
I TELL YOU AGAIN
DOUG COLLINS is an overated coach and we go nowhere with him.
2009 with almost the same team 41 / 41 – first round playoffs we lost 4 – 2
2010 was very bad
2011 41 / 41 – first round playoffs we probably get sweept.
EVAN TURNER is a very good player but COLLINS doesn’t know how to use him.
Hold on, slow down the train, back it up....
I know we, usually me, posts pictures of her after loses but she is not the problem her dude. The pictures of Mila are meant to calm us, to help us get over this basketball frustration, she is what is stopping us from taking the proverbial plunge into the Delaware, or in my case, the Susquehanna.
Mila is to be admired(from a distance, unless you’re Macaulay Culkin, still don’t get that BTW), she is not to be associated with bad things like Speights and BOSS. Never BOSS.
That is all.
"You can commit no mistake and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." - Jean-Luc Picard
Throw it away..
I think the good news is that we couldn’t have performed any worse. After game one there’s a disheartening effect of being so close but not getting it done. We just throw this one away and start from scratch at home. The Sixers have been good at following a real clunker up with a very good outing their next game. I’ll stick to that. I fully expect to win game 3. Game 4 is where the series will lie.. a win and we’re alive, and loss and we’ll be done. But Game 3 is a must-win in a sense that if this team is a good basketball team, they’ll find a way to win. The crowd should be juiced with lebron, etc. in town. I know I will be and I’ll be in section 216A. Pretend this game never happened, and bounce back. We won’t play this bad again.
I’m almost hoping, after that atrocious outing last night, that we get swept in this series; then the management may finally realize that they need to come out of their torpor and actually do their jobs. This is not a team that just needs more time to gel and its youngins to develop. It is a middling, under talented team that is one and done in the playoffs at best.
by The Crooked Man on Apr 19, 2011 7:01 AM PDT reply actions
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