Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Lack of practice makes perfect
MIAMI — Of all the Miami Heat’s well-drilled, highly detailed, constantly reinforced approaches ... this wasn’t one of them.
“We practiced it for like 36 seconds,” center Kelly Olynyk said.
And yet there it was, in the third quarter of the Heat’s Wednesday night victory over the Boston Celtics at TD Garden, a game-shifting move to a 2-3 zone.
Not once in his 15 seasons with the team could Heat captain Udonis Haslem recall the approach.
“I still haven’t played it,” he said. “I wasn’t in when we were playing zone.”
The development even resonated with guard Dion Waiters, who had been schooled at Syracuse in Jim Boeheim’s zone precepts.
“I ain’t played zone in like six years,” Waiters said. “It was cool, man. I think that really surprised them, though. I think once we went zone, we caught them off guard.”
The Celtics acknowledged as much.
“It’s one of those things that I think sometimes, when you miss one, two, three, like wide-open threes, which we had, it kind of compounds itself,” Boston coach Brad Stevens said, “and then you think it’s a bigger deal than it is.
“Sometimes when you’re playing against it and you have a tendency to get a little bit tighter instead of a little bit freer, and I thought we got tighter.”
Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said it hardly was a shift from the team’s defensive philosophy, just a necessity while playing with a shorthanded roster.
“We were running out of bodies,” he said. “Guys were starting to get tired. I knew guys were going to have to play probably 20 minutes in the second half. Sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures in this league.”
Spoelstra sprung it on his players at Wednesday’s shootaround.
“Yeah,” forward Josh Richardson said, “[Wednesday] morning literally was like, ‘Alright, we might run a little 2-3. You’re here, you’re here, you’re here, you’re there, you’re there and you’re there . . . . Good luck. We’ll figure it out as we go.’
“So we were just kind of winging it a lot of the time.”
Dead leg
As if the Heat didn’t already have enough injury concerns, they finished Wednesday’s victory with a one-legged center, with Olynyk on an uneven gait after landing awkwardly following a dunk.
“My leg kind of got caught under me and I hyperextended it a little bit,” he said. “It straightened out and my leg just went dead, kind of like if your arm goes dead if you hit your funny bone. I couldn’t feel my leg, my left leg. So I was trying to run up the floor, but I literally couldn’t feel my leg hitting the ground. It was kind of a weird feeling.
“It subsided. It was kind of normal about 10 minutes later. But it was the weirdest feeling. I didn’t know what was going on.”
Let it fly
For weeks teammates had been pushing Olynyk to stop hesitating with his shot. That hesitation finally stopped in Olynyk’s 12-of-15 performance in Boston, when he closed with a career-high 32 points.
“Look what happens when you shoot the ball,” Waiters said. “I wish I had the luxury of Coach telling me to shoot. That’s what happens. We’ve been telling him all year, ‘Shoot the ball, shoot the ball.’
“I yell at him all the time, because me and him are mostly in the pick-and-roll and I tell him it opens up the game for me. If you shoot, you make two, you miss two, you keep shooting no matter what, especially if they’re going to give it to you.”