The Boston Celtics out-classed the Miami Heat in Game 1 of their opening-round series. Whatever Miami did defensively, Boston had an answer. When they sent two at someone, Boston took advantage of the opportunity to pull the rotating Heat defense out of position and find the open guy. When they played straight up, the Celtics punished the biggest mismatches on the floor.
And when Miami played zone, the Celtics ripped it apart, rendering a key part of the defensive plan useless. Miami plays more zone than any team in the NBA, but they only played 15 possessions of zone against Boston during the regular season. They tried it a handful of times in Game 1, and it did not go well.
There are two main reasons the Celtics are un-zonable (that’s totally word don’t bother looking it up). They have shooting all over the floor and they have two bigs in Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis who know how to blow it up. As long as the rest of the Celtics, i.e. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, are doing the necessary things to attack the zone, the bigs and the shooting will take care of the rest.
Porzingis isn’t just a zone-buster, he’s a zone-deterrent. The Heat barely played zone at all, but the few times they did was almost entirely with Porzingis off the floor. Because when they play zone with him on the floor, this happens:
Watch Porzingis posting up the guards at the top of the zone. This specific attack is something he was working on at practice this week.
Porzingis practicing shots he will specifically get against the Miami zone pic.twitter.com/PwaobdLHXz
— John Karalis 🇬🇷🇺🇦 (@John_Karalis) April 20, 2024
Porzingis being as effective as he is from this range while being tall enough to get his shot off over almost anyone makes him extraordinarily dangerous. Just look at the reaction he gets from the Heat defense.
The shot Boston gets here is just too easy. Miami will get nowhere trying to use that late in the game to fuel a comeback. The Celtics will bury easy 15-footers and hold off whatever run the Heat try to make.
So instead of running suicide missions by trying to zone a Porzingis lineup, Miami tried to go to it with Horford on the floor. And while Horford can also hit from that range, his age and size level the playing field enough that the reaction to him being in the middle is tempered. Instead, Horford helped bury Miami by freeing up his teammates.
Screens against zones can be a very effective attack. Horford set screens that directly led to Payton Pritchard and Sam Hauser getting clean looks early in the game to open up a comfortable lead.
This screen for Tatum is designed less to free Tatum to get to the rim and more to get the other defender at the top of the zone to commit to stopping the drive. He’ll either be late, which means Tatum draws a bigger reaction in the paint, or he’ll step over and lose sight of a shooter.
He lost sight of a shooter.
Boston’s ability to hit shots from 30 feet is deadly. In this scenario, Pritchard can set up far enough away from the line that the defender almost gets lost for a second. A closeout to the 3-point line is meaningless when someone is a few feet behind it. And it’s asking a lot for a defender to come all the way over to stop Tatum and then get all the way over the hash mark. Because the zone requires someone to cover an area, getting Tatum into that area requires that commitment from the defender. A little screen from Horford and the ability to hit those shots is a killer for Miami. Their only hope is that Boston misses.
Watch Horford on this play. Everything he does is intentional, and the goal the entire play is to get Hauser that corner 3.
Tatum’s job is to draw two defenders. Once he gets into that space where the top defender drops down, the Heat are toast. Miami’s over-committal to Tatum in this situation has Horford in the exact position he needs to be to achieve the ultimate goal because he’s taking away the final rotation … before the rotations even happen.
The kick to Jrue Holiday demands Haywood Highsmith abandon his assigned area. Because of that, the swing to Pritchard draws Jaime Jaquez Jr. Kevin Love should already be heading out to Hauser to prevent the corner 3 and Delon Wright should take his place in the middle of the zone, but with Horford in his way, there's no closeout. Hauser gets a warm-up look at the 3 and buries it.
They run a similar concept the next time down.
Fewer steps, similar result. Holiday’s attack has drawn a lot of attention and Duncan Robinson was left to deal with Horford. The middle of the lane was wide open, and he couldn't let Horford get there. But that's not what Horford wanted. He wanted Robinson to front him like that because it, in effect, let Robinson willingly get screened long enough to let Hauser spring free.
Then they went back to Tatum to dip into that well one more time.
Great read by Tatum to go high-opposite because Herro committed to the pass earlier than Highsmith did earlier. Because Herro anticipated the pass, Tatum basically skipped that step and went right to finding the guy to draw Jaquez out of position. Even though Bam Adebayo was quicker to get out to Hauser, it was too late to have any impact on the shot. Hauser buries his third in a row, timeout Miami, zone goes in the garbage.
Miami relies on its zone defense to change the pace of a game, confuse the defense, and get out into transition to get some easy baskets. Without it in their bag, they are going to have a tough time stopping what Boston is trying to do. But Boston is so well constructed to deal with the zone this season, that it’s impossible to use. Going to the zone again in this series will be like trying to juggle scorpions for Miami. They’ll have ridiculously tough time trying to pull it off, and it’ll be almost impossible to do without getting stung and paying a big price for it.