There was little pretense at closing time on Tuesday night, when the Milwaukee Bucks set about closing out the Miami Heat.
“We liked matchups,” Bucks coach Doc Rivers said coldly and boldly. “We went matchup hunting a lot tonight, at least down the stretch.”
For the Heat, this of course is nothing new, in recent years having to deal with the reality of minus defenders on the wing at moments of truth, in a defensive tradeoff for scoring.
The problem in Tuesday night’s 128-117 loss to the Bucks at Fiserv Forum was the Heat also couldn’t score at the close, going the final 6:34 without a basket.
As miserable as Tuesday night was, it hardly was of the stakes of when an opponent last mentioned matchup hunting as a preferred pathway to beat the Heat.
That was during the Cleveland Cavaliers’ first-round romp over the Heat last season, the most lopsided playoff series by scoring margin in NBA history.
That was when then-Cavaliers guard Darius Garland said of Cleveland’s approach, “Pick on Tyler Herro. Take care of the ball, don’t play in tight spaces — and pick on their weak defenders. Go at them.”
In that series, the Cavaliers ran Herro through 50 ball screens in the first two games, alone.
Tuesday night, Heat coach Erik Spoelstra briefly attempted to play Herro and Norman Powell together at the close. The result was the Bucks going from a two-point lead to the final 11-point margin. In all, Herro and Powell played eight minutes together in the loss, and while a miniscule sample size, the combination had a -102.9 net rating for the night.
Since Herro’s return three games ago from the rib issue that had him out since Jan. 15, Spoelstra largely has staggered the minutes of Herro and Powell. In the three games they have played together, there have been just 15 minutes together, with a -36.5 net rating in those limited minutes.
Next, the perimeter challenge stands just as daunting, if not more so, as what the Heat faced from Bucks’ guards Kevin Porter Jr. and Ryan Rollins, with Porter closing Tuesday night with 32 points and Rollins with 21. Thursday night, it means going against the Philadelphia 76ers’ Tyrese Maxey and rookie V.J. Edgecombe, with Maxey coming off a 32-point performance in Tuesday night’s victory over the Indiana Pacers, and Edgecombe having scored 21.
So, yes, the offense was atrocious at Tuesday’s close, with Herro enduring a second consecutive shooting struggle, now 10 for 32 in his last two. But it is on the defensive end where the Heat backcourt offers little beyond the guile of Davion Mitchell, particularly with Dru Smith mostly out of the recent rotation mix.
Powell, who led the Heat with 26 points on a night Herro scored 14, was quick to acknowledge the need for more defensively.
‘”There’s too many times where we messed up,” he said. “Sometimes we got it right, sometimes we didn’t.”
Spoelstra put the onus on his team’s collective defense.
“Defensively, it just wasn’t a great game,” he said, with the Heat moving on to Philadelphia and Xfinity Mobile Arena, for the close of the two-game trip. “It would have required a whole lot more.”
While the Heat maintained their No. 4 overall defensive net rating even with Tuesday night’s loss, the effort against the Bucks would have the Heat at No. 26 in the NBA in that metric.
So a one-off?
Or a tell on the defensive risk of the Herro-Powell pairing?
“Your defense has to travel,” Spoelstra said. “We scored 117. Once the game got going, I didn’t think it was gonna be a 140-point game. But I think that would have taken a lot of pressure off of us to get three or four stops in a row, which is what we’ve been doing.”
In outscoring the Heat 39-24 in the fourth quarter, the Bucks shot 15 of 21 from the field, including 5 of 9 on 3-pointers.
“We just weren’t making those extra efforts to make them put the ball on the floor and have to get to something else,” Spoelstra said of those 3-pointers, “and they just started to gain confidence.”
So Porter on Tuesday night, with Maxey up next on Thursday night.
“They get in the paint just as well,” Mitchell said of the 76ers. “They got really good players off the dribble. Obviously, Tyrese Maxey’s playing at superstar level right now. So you got to find ways to swarm him, put two people on him. He can’t get any easy looks because it can get him going.”