For those just tuning in, it might not seem like much has changed since last June. The Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs are both back in the title hunt, featuring a lot of familiar faces.
But if you look closely, the Heat are bigger than they may appear.
Rewind to June 14, 2012, when the Heat topped the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 2 of the NBA Finals. With Chris Bosh medically cleared to play regular minutes, Erik Spoelstra famously went unconventional and replaced Udonis Haslem, not Shane Battier, with Bosh. While the Thunder stayed big with Kevin Durant, Serge Ibaka and Kendrick Perkins in the frontcourt, Spoelstra decided to go in the other direction: spread the floor and keep Battier in rather than stick with a traditional two-big lineup.
The rest is history. With Bosh at the 5, the Heat won the next four games for title No. 1 and then again last season against the Spurs for title No. 2. Really, until Game 2 in the 2012 Finals, Spoelstra had largely run out another traditional big to complement the team's star trio. Remember the Erick Dampier era? That approach was quickly trashed.
Going "unconventional" became Spoelstra's battle cry. But this season, big is the new small in Miami. With a chance at title No. 3, the Heat have quietly reverted back to the two-big strategy for large segments of the game.
And it has worked.
The Bosh-Andersen dynamic
Battier still starts, but the "conventional" Bosh and Chris Andersen pairing has hammered opponents this season. In the 238 minutes the Bosh-Andersen duo have played together in 2013-14, the Heat are up 17 points per 100 possessions.
Spoelstra didn't bust out this lineup for the first month or so of the season. He kept the Bosh-Andersen pairing in his back pocket until Dec. 8 when he deployed the lineup for 15 minutes against Detroit's monster front line. Now he's used it about 10 minutes per game since the calendar flipped to 2014. In fact, he's given that lineup more minutes in the month of February than he did all of last season (including the playoffs).
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Chris Bosh's ability to drift out to the perimeter has made Miami's lineups even more fearsome.
This development may seem odd given Spoelstra's "pace-and-space" mantra, but Spoelstra has been pragmatic. And the lineup works because Bosh is far from traditional these days.
Three seasons ago, the Heat's offense looked cramped with Bosh and another center occupying the paint, but Bosh has migrated to the perimeter to become a true stretch 4. Just six bigs have taken more 3-pointers than Bosh this season and he's making them at a higher clip (36.6 percent) than the Heat's resident 3-point marksmen, Battier (34.5), Ray Allen (35.
and Rashard Lewis (34.3). With his sharpened long-range game, Bosh's true shooting percentage -- a shooting metric that incorporates 3-pointers and free throws -- has risen to a career-high 60.8 percent.
Bosh is thriving more at the 4 and this time around, the spacing hasn't been compromised. Even though Andersen doesn't stretch the floor (third quarter of Monday's game notwithstanding), the Heat aren't sacrificing anything on the offensive end, registering a 109.3 offensive rating that would rank best in the league. While Bosh has spaced the floor out to the perimeter, Andersen has extended the Heat's offense in the vertical dimension, flying in for weak-side dunks and soaring putbacks.
But the defensive side of the ball is where the Bosh-Andersen lineups make hay. The Heat hold opponents to just 92.3 points per 100 possessions with that duo on the floor, which is two points stingier than the Indiana Pacers' historically great defense.
Greg Oden's impact
And then there's Greg Oden. During the big man's return to basketball, more than half of his minutes this season have been shared with Bosh. And even though Oden's getting whistled more than a cab driver (9.5 fouls per 36 minutes), the Heat have outscored opponents by 20 points in the 69 minutes that the two have taken the floor together. In the short time together, Bosh takes about three times as many 3-pointers as he normally does, underlining the fact that Bosh has adapted to his ever-changing surroundings.
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Having to navigate through Greg Oden and Chris Bosh is quite the tall task for any NBA offense.
Oden has shown flashes of dominance but his performances have been predictably uneven this season. This is what happens when you take a four-year hiatus from a professional sport. He's currently averaging 14.6 points, 9.8 rebounds and 1.8 blocks every 36 minutes along with 59 percent shooting from the floor. And despite the barrage of foul calls, Oden's player efficiency rating of 15.6 ranks above average and sixth among the Heat's rotation players.
As you might expect, Oden has been a beast under the rim as a paint protector. Getting an easy bucket against the Oden-Bosh duo has been just about impossible. Data from NBA StatsCube tells us that Heat opponents are shooting just 46.9 percent in the restricted area with that tandem on the floor. The league average is 60.4 percent. For a team that has struggled defensively this season, the big lineups have given Spoelstra intriguing returns.
Think of the Heat's regular season as a testing ground for the postseason. If Bosh can thrive as a stretch 4 like he has at center, it gives Spoelstra a new weapon against Roy Hibbert and the Pacers in the playoffs. That doesn't mean Spoelstra will abandon his smaller lineups against "big" teams, but it does mean the coach has powerful alternatives at his disposal. If the playoffs are all about matchups, the Heat are showing they can match up with just about anybody, big or small.