The Miami Heat, winners of just 44 games in the abbreviated regular season and the No. 5 seed in the Eastern Conference, have done the improbable. A year after missing the NBA playoffs entirely, the Heat is heading to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2014.
Miami finished off a series victory with the Boston Celtics on Sunday, hanging on for a 125-113 win in the NBA Conference Finals. The Heat won the series 4-2 and rallied from a double-digit deficits in two of its four victories against the Celtics in the East finals.
In one of the strangest seasons in NBA history, Miami is the lowest-seeded team to advance to Finals since 1999 and the Heat did it with only one top-10 pick on the roster. Even so, Miami has lost only three games in the 2020 NBA playoffs with six double-digit comebacks in the last two rounds. On Friday, the Heat rallied from a six-point deficit in the final nine minutes led by first-time All-Star Bam Adebayo.
The star post player became the first Miami player since LeBron James in 2014 to score 30 points and grab 10 rebounds in a playoff game. He finished with 32 points, 15 rebounds and five assists, including 10, eight and four in the fourth quarter. Now he’ll meet James and the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2020 NBA Finals.
The Heat’s final push started with 8:48 left, when All-Star wing Jimmy Butler drew a foul and made 1 of 2 free throws to cut Boston’s lead to 96-91. It started a 26-5 run to bury the Celtics.
Miami will face the Lakers in the Finals beginning Wednesday. James will be playing in his fifth Finals since he left the Heat following the 2014 season. Miami is back in the Finals for the first time since he left and the Big 3, which brought two Larry O’Brien Championship Trophies to South Florida last decade, split up after four seasons.
Butler — the Heat’s leader, who was homeless at 13, started his college basketball career at a junior college, was cast aside by three other NBA teams and finally came to Miami last year as the Heat’s biggest offseason acquisition since James in 2010 — scored 22 points and dished out eight assists. Adebayo, a former No. 14 pick in his first season as a full-time starter, led the way with his 32. Guard Goran Dragic, a bench player for almost the entire season, added 13 points and seven assists. Rookie wing Tyler Herro, the No. 13 pick in the 2019 NBA draft just 15 months ago, scored 19, including 11 in the fourth quarter. Sharpshooting swingman Duncan Robinson, who began his college career at a Division III school and then went undrafted in 2018, scored 15 and went 5 of 7 from three-point range and wing Andre Iguodala, headed to his sixth straight finals, scored 15 and went 4 of 4 from long range.
Miami spent half of Game 5 on Friday on the brink of celebration. The Heat charged out to a 12-point lead in the first quarter and took a seven-point lead into halftime, before melting down in the third quarter and allowing 41 points to the Celtics. A 25-point swing in the second half led to Miami’s most lopsided loss of the NBA playoffs — a 13-point defeat, which wasn’t even as close as the final score indicated.
The Heat, which already had comebacks of 14 and 17 points in the first two games of the East finals, went quietly in the second half. Its defense, Miami’s biggest area of improvement in the postseason, reverted to back to regular-season form and its three-point shooting, the Heat’s most reliable offensive weapon in the regular season, fell off a cliff to 19.4 percent.
The Heat started 0 for 4 from three-point range Sunday, then made its next five to take a 33-27 lead at the end of the first quarter. The Celtics missed their first four three-point attempts, then went 6 for 10 the rest of the way in the quarter, hitting all five attempts from the corners — a soft spot in Miami’s 2-3 zone defense.
Even when the shots weren’t falling, the Heat’s two All-Star forwards led the way. Star wing Jimmy Butler, who has had five games this postseason with 11 shots or fewer, scored 13 in the first half on 6 of 11 shooting with three assists and star post player Bam Adebayo, who said he “played like (expletive)” in Game 5, scored 16 in the first two quarters. Miami went into halftime with a 62-60 lead after Jayson Tatum, Boston’s All-Star forward, started 0 of 7 from the field, but then he heated up to finish the half with 12 points, six rebounds, eight assists and two steals.
The Heat pushed the lead up to 82-74 in the third quarter after back-to-back threes by +Iguodala, but Boston closed the period on a 7-2 run to cut Miami’s lead down to 88-86 heading to fourth quarter when Adebayo erupted and the Heat clinched a return to the Finals.
It was a long time coming and still it happened so suddenly.
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