After ‘rough days’ in bubble, Heat’s Kendrick Nunn working to flip the narrative in Finals
Ask Miami Heat rookie guard Kendrick Nunn how his NBA bubble experience has been, and he’ll respond with two different answers.
“The bubble has been great for me,” Nunn said during an interview with the Miami Herald in advance of Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Sunday night. “I’ve grown as a player. Most importantly, we’ve won and now we’re here in the Finals. Can’t ask for nothing better than that.”
That’s one side of Nunn’s answer. The other?
“It has been an experience for me,” Nunn also says. “Obviously I had some pretty rough days. Now it’s getting better. It just comes from sticking with it every day, putting in work, grinding, not making any excuses and just sticking to basically my routine and my style of play.”
Both answers can be true.
The fifth-seeded Heat put together an improbable run to meet the top-seeded Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals. It marks the first time a team seeded fifth or lower has made it to the NBA Finals since 1999.
Individually, though, it has been somewhat of a struggle for Nunn. After a COVID-19 diagnosis forced Nunn to arrive at the Disney bubble two weeks later than the rest of the team in July, personal reasons forced him to exit the bubble for a few days just before the start of the playoffs.
Nunn, 25, admits those circumstances impacted his on-court game. He averaged 10.8 points on 31.3 percent shooting from the field and two assists in five games during seeding play, and he posted a plus/minus of minus-46 during that time.
“Early in the bubble, it was just my rhythm and my timing,” said Nunn, who finished second in the voting for the NBA’s Rookie of the Year honor and was named to the All-Rookie First Team. “All that was off because I’ve been quarantined for weeks at a time, I had a death in the family that caused me to go back to Chicago and miss more time, and having to quarantine even more. So it was just knocking that rust and dust off and getting focused on the game basically. Just trying to clear all the distractions and playing with a free mind. My mind was very clouded at the time.”
Nunn, who started in each of his 67 appearances during the regular season, was moved to the bench at the start of the playoffs and has even found himself out of the rotation at times this postseason.
Through the first three rounds of the playoffs leading up to the Finals, Nunn played in nine of the Heat’s 15 games in his new reserve role. He averaged 3.2 points on 29.3 percent shooting from the field and 15 percent shooting on threes in 11.5 minutes.
“I just wasn’t really in the rotation. That’s what it was,” Nunn said. “Some of the games that I played, it was literally minutes. Four or five minutes, things like that. I wasn’t really in the rotation. I was just trying to get back in that rhythm and get to my style of play and how I play basketball.”
All of this represented a major setback for Nunn, who averaged 15.6 points while shooting 44.8 percent from the field and 36.2 percent on threes before the NBA suspended the season amid the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11.
“I wouldn’t say it was frustrating. It kind of made me laugh a little bit,” Nunn said of the outside criticism he has received for his play since the season resumed at Disney. “I know I was hearing a bunch of stuff like, ‘He forgot how to play’ and this and that. But I am human, for one. You have ups and downs in the game of basketball. You go into the next day, a new day can bring many new things. ... But I didn’t get discouraged or nothing like that. I just knew there was a point where things would change, and then I knew that would change the narrative all around again.”
Injuries to starters Bam Adebayo and Goran Dragic have lifted Nunn back into the Heat’s rotation in the Finals. Nunn has looked more like the pre-shutdown version of himself, averaging 15.5 points while shooting 61.1 percent from the field and 37.5 percent on threes, 4.5 rebounds and 2.5 assists 24.5 minutes during the first two games of the championship series.
Nunn, who went undrafted in 2018, said he feels “a lot better” and “more in the flow of the game” these days.
“We haven’t forgotten what he can do,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “Sometimes you have to separate all this, the competition and coaching and your team and just the human side of it. You’re rooting for the guy. He had a tremendous year. We haven’t forgotten about that. And I’ve had great compassion for everything that he has gone through. But he has got significant perseverance. He has been through a lot and he just continues to grind. I love watching him work.”
LAKERS IN THE ZONE
With the Heat leaning heavily on zone defense in its Game 2 Finals loss on Friday, Lakers coach Frank Vogel explained one of the “holes in the zone.”
“We got a lot of those rebounds, not even with our big lineup. There’s a lot of holes in the zone,” Vogel said following Game 2. “That’s one of them, being able to crash the boards. And we definitely punished that aspect of their zone defense.”
The Lakers scored 21 second-chance points with the help of 16 offensive rebounds Friday.
In half-court sets Friday, the Heat’s man-to-man defense allowed 1.5 points per possession on 28 possessions and its zone defense allowed 1.22 points per possession on 67 possessions, according to Heat.com’s Couper Moorhead.
“We want to put playmakers in the middle,” Vogel said of the Lakers’ approach against the Heat’s zone defense “If we can get the ball there and suck the defenders in, it opens up the perimeter. It opens up the rim. Obviously you want great decision-makers in there. [LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Rajon Rondo], all those guys being in that spot benefits our offense.”
This story was originally published October 4, 2020 at 11:50 AM.
