Miami's Point of Weakness
Sean Deveney - SportingNews.com
Nov 10, 2010
The order in which the three best point guards in the league should be ranked can be debated, but there isn't much argument as to the identities of the Top 3 -- Chris Paul, Rajon Rondo and Deron Williams, listed alphabetically here for the sake of diplomacy. That's a problem for the Heat, because the common denominator in each of Miami's three losses thus far has been playing against one of those three point guards. They just haven't been able to keep any of them from penetrating at will.
In Tuesday's loss to Utah, the Heat allowed Williams to rack up 14 assists. In last week's loss to the Hornets, Paul had 19 assists. And in their opening night loss to the Celtics, Rondo dished out 17 assists. What's particularly troubling for the Heat is that those assists, all too often, have led to easy baskets in the paint. Miami has been outscored in the paint in each of its three losses, by a combined total of 144-90.
Entering the season, conventional wisdom held that the way to beat the Heat and their triumvirate of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh would be to expose the center position, where Miami had a conglomeration of the too-young (Joel Anthony), the too-old (Zydrunas Ilgauskas) and the too-short (Udonis Haslem). But Miami's shortcomings at point guard, with Carlos Arroyo as the starter and essentially no backup, have been the real problem. Yes, there have been big games from big men against the Heat in their three losses -- Utah's Paul Millsap had 46 points Tuesday night -- but those have resulted from the defense struggling to contain penetration.
Against Utah, the Heat's defense keyed on Williams down the stretch and still could not stop the Jazz. Arroyo can't handle assignments like Williams alone, and when the Heat try to help, it only seems to scramble the defense even further. Williams had 12 of his assists in the second half, and eight of those were to Millsap. "We put two on the ball on D-Will, to try to get the ball out of D-Will's hands, to our success," James said. "But Paul just kept jacking them up and making them go in."
Clearly, this is the problem the Heat defense most needs to clean up, and Miami is about to get another go-round with a top-flight point guard, as Rondo and the Celtics play a rematch in Miami on Thursday night. Rondo had a huge assist night in the opener and has not let up since. He's had double-digit assists in seven out of eight games, and has posted at least 15 assists five times already. His scoring has dipped from 13.7 points last year to 11.1 this year, but that has actually made him more dangerous -- he is leading the league with 14.8 assists per game.
"It's amazing that you can dominate NBA games without scoring a lot of points," Celtics Hall of Famer Kevin McHale said. "He's good with the ball. He dominates the game. You can talk about the Big 3 (Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen), but it's the Fantastic Four because he is that valuable to that team."
The Heat have seen, all too often now, how valuable guys like Rondo, Paul and Williams are to their teams. Now they've got to figure out a way to deal with them.
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