With injuries damaging the roster as only injuries can, the Miami HEAT beat the Utah Jazz Thursday after playing and winning in Denver the night before. That sentence alone is noteworthy and it's one we'll likely recall fondly in a few months. But today there are more important words.
When Erik Spoelstra was asked after the 111-110 victory about Miami's 64 points in the paint against one of the league's premier defenses, the first thing out of his mouth, with no precursor, was simply…
“Goran Dragic.”
Earlier this week, the Boston Celtics flew into Miami and won what was a fairly inconspicuous game as far as the general landscape of the league went. Boston led by as many as 19 and was in control for most of the evening. Most observers around the league probably didn't blink twice at seeing the final score.
But something happened in the second half of that game that was worth noticing. Playing with a desperate energy as the HEAT tried to claw their way back into the game, Goran Dragic racked up 21 points and a ridiculous 15 assists after the break with an all-out assault on the paint. If at any point you happened to look away from the game, upon returning you would have had a ridiculously high chance of finding Dragic weaving his way between defenders right in front the basket.
It was an incredible performance. Caution was warranted given that Boston was understaffed in the middle that night without Al Horford and teams with sizeable leads tend to loosen up a bit defensively, but Dragic was so forceful in his attacks that it felt like an event beyond the contest itself.
“That is the Goran Dragic we know,” Spoelstra said after that game. “It's my responsibility to actually get him to that level more frequently, but he was down-hill a majority of that second half.”
That hill, it seems, doesn't have a bottom. Including Boston, the HEAT are scoring 109.3 points per 100 possessions with Dragic on the court over the past three games, and he's assisting on about 45 percent of Miami's baskets (with just three turnovers). Those are elite numbers however you frame it and they're significant for a team that has so far struggled to score night-to-night.
Dragic has also taken 53 shots over the three game, and 35 of them have been in the paint.
Apart from the court not actually being slanted, coaches are fairly literal when they talk about getting players downhill. How they go about getting the ball going toward the goal with momentum varies from player to player and team to team, and you'll notice it especially over the course of a playoff series as coaches change up angles. If an opposing team has a slower, lumbering center you might see more side pick-and-rolls. If you want to pull the defense out with a shooter, you can use dribble hand-offs to get into space on the move. There are all sorts of tricks of the trade.
When you're just in the regular season, all those granular, opponent-specific adjustments aren't as important. The team has to be ready to perform to a baseline level against all sorts of challenges, so the goal becomes giving talent a consistent environment in which they can succeed.
Dragic is so good at putting his head down and getting to the rim that he can sometimes be agnostic to the situation around him. He'll just bully his way in and finish as few others his size can. But for him to reach the level he hit against Boston – or in dropping 27 points on Utah – it helps to have space. Not just spacing, which is sometimes assumed gained simply from having shooters on the floor, but the right spacing. Everyone has to be in the correct spot when the ball is on the move, and they have to be ready to relocate when the defense shifts its attention.
Even though these, particularly the first possession, aren't perfect examples, watch how Dragic is able to manipulate the defense with the drive when the correct alignment is on the floor.
This is essentially the same set in two different spots. A shooter, either Wayne Ellington or Tyler Johnson, offers up a quick screen to force the defensive switch which is followed up by Hassan Whiteside approaching for the second pick. With Utah icing the pick-and-roll (the on-ball defender shifts his stance to force the ball to the sideline) and Rudy Gobert not fully committing due to the threat of Whiteside on the roll, Dragic has a lane. And with shooters stationary in the corner and mobile on the perimeter, he also has targets.
“You can say collectively, individually we weren't able to keep people in front of us in pick-and-roll situations,” Quin Snyder said. “They are going to get in the paint sometimes. And Dragic is going to get in the paint if you're not up trapping him.”
That Dragic started playing like this around the same time that Wayne Ellington returned from injury is not entirely coincidental. Miami has been working on getting the right spacing all season, but with Ellington having such a lightning-quick trigger he can create an opportunity even when things aren't perfect – for example, when he and McRoberts almost got tangled up in the above video.
With Ellington and Dragic on the floor in 58 minute so far, Miami has an offensive rating of 113.4. That's top-line stuff, but this is also the portion of today's programming where we have to mention how tricky that can be to sustain. Boston and Utah were both dealing with injuries that likely compromised their usually strong defense, and along with Denver all three teams lacked stout point-guard defenders (George Hill did not play Thursday). There will be tougher, longer, more athletic guards in the future, and teams will eventually get back to pinching in on drives like they were earlier in the season.
Still, progress made against any opponents is useful. Personnel helps. So does shot making. This eventually comes down to Dragic playing like he has future vision and feels absolutely no remorse about taking advantage of it. You can have an endless chicken or the egg argument about whether Dragic plays like this because he's in the right situation or if he's in the right situation because Dragic is playing like this, but the way he's blowing past defenders one-on-one, reading defenses and finishing at the rim is not something you can draw up on a board and say, 'This here, you should go do that' and expect it to automatically work. He's doing more.
“That's a good defense to be able to do that against,” Spoelstra said. “Sometimes you need great players to make bigger plays.”
The HEAT have suffered injuries to many of their ballhandlers and playmakers lately and Dragic has responded by posting a usage rate of 27.3 percent over the past three games – perhaps the most encouraging number of all given that usage rate doesn't account for his passing plays.
With someone as efficient as Dragic usually is, the more possessions he uses the better. Because when he's playing like this, the only place to find him is in the paint.
