Miami Heat to face Giannis Antetokounmpo-led Milwaukee Bucks in second round of playoffs
It’s official: The Miami Heat will face the Milwaukee Bucks in the second round of the NBA playoffs.
The Bucks defeated the Orlando Magic 118-104 on Saturday to win their first-round series 4-1 and clinch a matchup against the Heat in the second round. Miami finished its 4-0 first-round sweep of the Indiana Pacers on Monday.
There were no playoff games from Wednesday through Friday, with players protesting the recent police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The playoffs resumed Saturday.
Game 1 of the best-of-7 second-round series between the Heat and Bucks is set for Monday at 6:30 p.m. on TNT. The NBA also announced Game 2 will be Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. on ESPN, Game 3 will be Friday, Game 4 will be Sept. 6, and if necessary Game 5 would be Sept. 8, Game 6 would be Sept. 10 and Game 7 would be Sept. 12 with those games times still to be determined.
“I have a ton of respect for them and it will be a great opportunity, a great challenge,” Milwaukee coach Mike Budenholzer said of Miami.
The fifth-seeded Heat will enter the Eastern Conference series as the underdog. The top-seeded Bucks finished the regular season with the NBA’s top record at 56-17 and is led by MVP front-runner Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is a Heat target in 2021 free agency.
But if the regular season is any indication, it should be a very competitive series.
The Heat won the season series 2-1 over the Bucks. Miami won the first two matchups before the NBA shutdown in March, and Milwaukee won the most recent meeting earlier this month during seeding play at Disney.
“It’s going to be a great series,” Bucks center Brook Lopez said of facing the Heat. “They obviously have a lot of talented players. But even beyond that, they just play so hard every single minute they’re on the court, whoever is on the court. So we’re absolutely going to have to go out and match or exceed that. And that’s something that this team has typically always done and been built to do. So it’s going to be a fun series. I’m glad to be a part of it and I can’t wait for it to start.”
In the teams’ first meeting of the season, the Heat played without Jimmy Butler and still earned a 131-126 overtime win over the Bucks on Oct. 26 at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. The Bucks led by 21 with 10:58 remaining in the third quarter, but the Heat ended up winning the second half and overtime 78-56 to complete its largest comeback since overcoming a 21-point deficit against the Houston Rockets on Nov. 1, 2015.
In the team’s second meeting of the season, the Heat defeated the Bucks 105-89 on March 2 at AmericanAirlines Arena. Milwaukee was playing on the second night of a back-to-back set and it marked the Bucks’ second-most lopsided defeat of the season.
The Heat’s only loss to the Bucks this season came in the teams’ third and final meeting of the regular season, when Milwaukee picked up a 130-116 win over Miami on Aug. 6 during seeding play at Disney. The Heat was without Butler and Goran Dragic in the loss because of injuries and actually led by one point with 4:58 to play before the Bucks closed the game on a 20-5 run to earn the victory.
Miami is one of only three teams to defeat Milwaukee at least two times this season, along with the Dallas Mavericks and Denver Nuggets.
Why does the Heat seem to match up well against the Bucks?
Three-point shooting is a big part of it.
The Bucks’ defense gave up the most three-point attempts in the league (39.3 per game) and was also the best at protecting the rim (held opponents to 55.2 percent shooting from inside the restricted area) in the regular season. So to solve Milwaukee’s elite interior defense, a team must be able to make a lot of threes.
The Heat can do that, as it finished the regular season with the NBA’s second-best team three-point percentage (37.9) and also shot 39.1 percent from deep in its first-round playoff sweep. In three games against Milwaukee this season, Miami shot an efficient 55 of 127 (43.3 percent) from three-point range and an inefficient 50 of 112 (44.6 percent) from inside the paint.
To have success against the Bucks, a team also has to devise a scheme to slow Antetokounmpo.
The Heat has one of the league’s most versatile and agile frontcourt defenders on its roster in All-Star big man Bam Adebayo, who finished fifth in the voting for this season’s Defensive Player of the Year honor that went to Antetokounmpo. Adebayo will surely be at the center of Miami’s defensive scheme against the reigning MVP, especially in important moments.
According to NBA Advanced Stats, Antetokounmpo scored 28 points on 12-of-28 shooting (42.9 percent) in the 52 possessions he was defended by Adebayo this season. Adebayo is one of only five NBA players who defended Antetokounmpo for 50 or more possessions in the regular season.
Antetokounmpo averaged an NBA-high 17.5 paint points per game in the regular season. The challenge in defending in Antetokounmpo is finding a way to limit his shots around the rim, as he shot just 32.8 percent from outside of the paint in the regular season.
The Bucks’ other All-Star Khris Middleton is an efficient three-point shooter, as he averaged 20.9 points on 49.7 percent shooting from the field and 41.5 percent shooting on threes in the regular season.
While this is the first time the Heat has faced Antetokounmpo in the playoffs, it isn’t the first time it has faced the Bucks in a postseason series. Miami and Milwaukee have met in the playoffs once before, when the Heat swept the Bucks in the first round of the 2013 playoffs.
This also marks the first time Miami has played in the second round of the postseason since 2016. But the Heat has not advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals since the final season of the Big 3 era in 2014.
The winner of the Heat-Bucks series will take on the winner of the Toronto Raptors-Boston Celtics series in the conference finals. Game 1 of the Raptors-Celtics second-round series is scheduled for Sunday at 1 p.m. on ESPN.
This story was originally published August 29, 2020 at 6:08 PM.
