When Mason Plumlee’s block on LeBron James sealed the Nets’ 88-87 win over the Heat in Miami back on April 8th to clinch Brooklyn’s four-game season sweep of the two-time defending champions, it set the league and the Heat on notice.
The Nets became the first team in Miami’s Big Three era to take all four games in a regular season from the Heat, two at home at the Barclays Center and two on the road at American Airlines Arena in South Beach. Say what you want about the regular season and how the records from that time are totally worthless in the postseason, but Brooklyn’s success against a normally-dominant Heat is nothing something to simply be strewn to the side.
Sure, the Heat–with an incredible core of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh–have won the Eastern Conference in each of the last three seasons, winning the NBA Championship in both 2012 and 2013 after a loss in 2011 to the Dallas Mavericks. They faltered a bit this regular season, finishing second in the East to the Indiana Pacers, but steamrolled through their first-round opponents, the Charlotte Bobcats, to a very easy four-game sweep.
LeBron is arguably the best player in the NBA right now, and he’s right in the middle of his prime at the ripe age of 29 years old. He averaged 27.1 points, 6.9 rebounds, and 6.3 assists on 57% shooting in 37.7 minutes this season in 77 games, numbers which are on their own outstanding, but are just par-for-the-course for James, who is already one of the league’s all-time greats.
Clearly, he is a matchup problem for the Nets, as is Bosh, especially with Brook Lopez out and Kevin Garnett on the last legs of his career. Wade, however, is not too difficult for a mixture of Joe Johnson, Shaun Livingston, Alan Anderson, Paul Pierce and possibly others to guard. The interesting thing, though, is that the Nets’ glaring size troubles against the Heat’s studs have been mitigated by Jason Kidd’s rapid-fire lineup changes and adaptations and his usage of lineups without a true center but with three or four players standing at 6’8″ or taller.
Kidd’s moves were the big reasons as to why Brooklyn was able to stick with the younger and more athletic Heat in the two teams’ prior meetings. They’re also why the Nets are so confident going up against Miami, who they were rumored to be gunning for when they faded towards the end of the regular season to get the No. 6 seed. Also, in the twilight of their careers, Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett want another chance at LeBron and the Heat, who have had the pair’s number in the playoffs when they were on the Celtics.
As we clearly know from this season, The Truth and KG are certainly no players to back down from a fight and they sense a challenge from the team from South Beach, which they will be glad to stand up to. Those guys, along with the rest of the Nets hungry to live up to their team’s lofty preseason expectations, want nothing more than to stun the Heat and their fans in this series and advance on to the Eastern Conference Finals.
That won’t be an easy task, rather far from it, but it’s definitely not an impossible one, especially for a veteran team with loads of experience that has beaten Miami before, even if it was in the regular season. There truly isn’t anything like the postseason, but that doesn’t mean the four games played between these two teams this year–in playoff-like atmospheres–don’t have any significance, as they 100% do.
This series will just depend on how well the Nets are able to contain LeBron (and to a lesser extent, Wade and Bosh) and if Brooklyn will be able to score with the opportunities the Heat will afford them, most notably from the perimeter. If they are able to win this series, the Nets will have turned the entire playoffs upside down and will be that much closer to having their own parade down New York’s Canyon of Heroes, similarly to what the Heat have had the last two seasons.
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