Was travelling for work since after game 1, just getting caught up around here, and so may be posting some thoughts that others have already said somewhere else
People talk about the 'chess match' between coaches in playoff basketball, but I think that sometimes 'rock, paper, scissors' is the better analogy. Both coaching staffs make decisions before a game, and then you find out what happens when they come together.
In that vein, my read of game 2 & 3 is that a few things happened at once:
- Joe and Boston's coaching staff decided to try a defensive strategy along the lines of 'make sure to not give up dribble penetration, with less of a contest of outside shots if needed' at the same time that Miami's coaching staff told their team something like 'get into our offense fast, look and take the first good three you can, take as many 3s as possible'
- Once the game started the 'soft contests are OK' part of 'deny dribble penetration', in practice, turned into much less ball pressure and lots more open Miami 3s than Boston expected or wanted. On paper, when Boston's coaches drew it up, the game plan wasn't to turn Miami's outside looks into a version of pre-game shoot-around. But once our guys tried to implement the plan things shifted too far in that direction.
- Joe being a numbers guy, he might have watched the first half and thought "Miami can't keep shooting this good forever; we're up at the half; I'll keep telling my guys to tighten things up; law of averages kicks w/r/t Miami's shooting and we'll win this thing comfortably'
- Law of averages did not kick in. And both our offensive safety valve (Porzingis) and our 'things have gone to crap create something off the dribble' guy (Jrue) had their worst shooting nights in a while.
- So then, after game 2, Joe and Boston's coaching staff probably looked at each other and said something like 'Fuck it, that defensive strategy was too cute by half. Let's go back to pressuring them all over the court, running them off the three point line, and then rotating aggressively to deal with dribble penetration when it happens.' Which is more or less that we've done all year. And in game 3 lo and behold that defense worked much better, Porzingis had a nice bounce-back game, and we won comfortably
So-- I'm not sure if this has been said somewhere-- but to me the big irony / story about game 2 was the Joe (who keeps getting hammered for how he's not as good as Spo at things like playoff adjustments) didn't need to make big defensive adjustments. But he did, perhaps thinking he was getting ahead of whatever Spo was going to do. And then it didn't work. And so we switched back and were fine.
Sec-- who hasn't posted over here in lord knows how long-- used to have a great point about the mistakes people can make when they feel public pressure to be seen taking action.
As he used to say: "Don't just do something --> stand there!"
