Time off prior to start of the East finals comes at a good time for the Heat’s leading duo
There aren’t many players on the Miami Heat’s roster who could use this time off before the start of the Eastern Conference finals more than starting center Bam Adebayo.
Adebayo has been playing on a strained left hamstring and recently began wearing a compression shirt to help alleviate right shoulder discomfort.
So Adebayo went out and earned some time to rest by turning in one of his best playoff performances with 23 points, nine rebounds, two steals and one block to help close out the Heat’s second-round series against the New York Knicks on Friday at Kaseya Center. The Heat is now in the middle of a four-day break between that series-clinching win and Game 1 of the East finals on Wednesday.
“When you want to win that bad, I feel like you’ll do anything,” Adebayo said, with the Heat set to return to the practice court on Monday after taking Saturday and Sunday off. “You’ll put your body through a lot for wins and a series win.”
Adebayo was aggressive and assertive from the start of Friday’s closeout game, scoring 17 points on 12 field-goal attempts in the first half. It’s tied for the most shots Adebayo has attempted in a single playoff half in his NBA career.
By the end of the night, Adebayo had 23 points on 20 field-goal attempts. The 20 shots tied for the third-most he has taken in a playoff game during his NBA career.
Most of those looks came from around the basket. Adebayo closed Game 6 with 14 paint points on 7-of-18 shooting — inefficient but impressive nonetheless because of the volume of paint shots he was able to generate against a Knicks defense trying to take away that aspect of his game.
“He actually comes with that effort every single night,” Adebayo’s Heat co-star Jimmy Butler said. “It’s just that whenever he plays at a high level like he did [Friday], it seems like all his other games are a wash. He grabbed every single big rebound, he had some huge buckets down the stretch. Like I’ve said all year long, he’s been the anchor for us on the defensive side of the ball. But my goodness, when he’s attacking and making shots and getting to the free-throw line on the offensive side of it, he looks virtually unguardable.”
While Adebayo’s aggressiveness and production on the offensive end can sometimes fluctuate, his defense is consistently great.
That again held true in the second round, when Adebayo spent most of the series as the primary defender on Knicks All-Star forward Julius Randle. After missing Game 1 because of a sprained ankle, Randle was limited to an inefficient 18.8 points per game on 41.1 percent shooting from the field and 28.1 percent shooting from three-point range in the final five games of the series.
Adebayo also helped prevent the Knicks — an elite offensive rebounding team — from dominating the glass. Even when Adebayo wasn’t grabbing rebounds, he was often boxing out New York’s top rebounder Mitchell Robinson to give his Heat teammates a better chance of coming away with the ball.
“Somebody mentioned that Bam only had nine rebounds. It felt like he had 17 rebounds,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said of Adebayo’s effort in Friday’s series-clinching win. “All the physicality, they were letting a lot of stuff go and he played a man’s game on the glass and physicality, everything. He was just all over the place. That’s as hard as you can play.”
Adebayo, 25, is averaging 18.1 points, 9.2 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 1.1 steals per game while shooting 49.7 percent from the field in this year’s playoffs.
This marks Adebayo’s third trip to the conference finals in his six NBA seasons. He now stands just four wins away from advancing to the NBA Finals for the second time in his career as he pursues his first championship.
But first, Adebayo will get some time to rest. He earned it.
“We’ve been battle tested this whole year,” Adebayo said, as the Heat became just the second No. 8 seed in league history to make it to the conference finals. “People saying we’re too little, we need this, we need that and we just find a way to win. Day in, day out, guys half broken and still having to muster up the will to play 40 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it may be.”
BUTLER ALSO TAKING ADVANTAGE
The time off before the start of the East finals will also benefit Butler. Butler missed Game 2 of the second round after spraining his right ankle in the series opener.
Butler averaged 24.5 points per game on 41.7 percent shooting from the field in the final four games of the series after returning from that injury. That’s far off from his incredible production of 37.6 points per game on 59.7 percent shooting from the field in the Heat’s first-round series against the Milwaukee Bucks.
The lingering effects of Butler’s sprained ankle appeared to play a part in his diminished production.
“We’ve said so many platitudes about Jimmy, you can put his mental toughness up there in the top echelon of anybody on this planet as a professional athlete,” Spoelstra said. “I’m not making any excuses for him. He would scream at me and yell at me if I did that. But it’s clear he wasn’t physically the way he was in the Milwaukee series.”
