The Miami Heat have the best player in the world in LeBron James and two other top flight players in Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh anchoring what is rightfully considered one of the best starting lineups in the NBA.
And they’re getting their hats handed to them by the Indiana Pacers’ starting lineup.
The group of George Hill, Lance Stephenson, Paul George, David West, and Roy Hibbert has run roughshod over the vaunted Heat and is the main reason this series is tied (and why it should probably be 3-1 in the Pacers’ favor).
In the 4 conference finals games to this point, the Pacers’ starting five has posted an offensive efficiency of 120.0 and a defensive efficiency of 105.1. To put those numbers in perspective, during the regular season the Heat posted a league best offensive efficiency of 110.3 while boasting a stingy defensive efficiency of 100.5.
The Pacers’ starters, then, have turned those numbers on their head by holding the heat to 5 fewer points per 100 possessions while scoring nearly 20 points more per 100 possessions than the Heat allowed during the regular season.
These numbers are meaningful not just because they show the discrepancy in production between the Pacers’ starters and the counterpart lineups they’re facing, but because of how often they’re on the floor. Over the first four games of this series, the Pacers starters have shared the floor for 107 minutes, or an average of a 26.9 minutes per game.
Maximizing the time his starters share the floor is nothing new for Pacers’ coach Frank Vogel. Two seasons ago Vogel deployed his starters for 253 minutes longer than the 2nd most used lineup in the league. This season the Pacers’ starters trailed only the Oklahoma City Thunder’s starters as the lineup with the most minutes shared, boasting an incredible 1218 minutes together as a unit.
Moving forward, there aren’t many ways for the Heat to change this. Save for a possession here or there, Vogel has insisted on not adjusting his lineups to match up with the Heat’s smaller personnel groupings. He’s gone as far as having David West guard Shane Battier or Ray Allen over stretches of games in order to keep his unit intact. So unless one of Indiana’s starters gets into foul trouble, I don’t see Vogel voluntarily surrendering the advantage his starters have proven to have so far this series.
Of all the problems the Heat are having with the Pacers so far – and there are several – solving this one may be the hardest. Vogel seems to understand that his starters, as a unit and over the course of a game, will out produce most any other lineup the Heat can put on the floor and he seems intent on riding this advantage as hard as he can.
Maybe the Heat has an answer with their star studded cast. Maybe this is the game where all five players click and prove they really are the top unit. If they don’t, you shouldn’t be surprised, though.
This is nothing new for the Pacers. They’ve been doing it all year.
*Statistical support provided by NBA.com
