Coup’s Takeaways: Cavaliers Sweep HEAT in Dominant Fashion

It was this one, or nothing at all. Postseason life, or an immediate dose of the off season doldrums.

Cleveland knew the deal, too. And they weren’t interested in giving Miami anything, anything at all, to build on from the start.

Turnovers had been biting Miami in the heels for much of this series, even when the offense was otherwise finding ways to be efficient. It wasn’t a great sign, then, that Jarrett Allen stole a rather simple pass on the game’s first possession and took it the other way for two, the HEAT struggling to take care of the ball effectively from that moment on. With Donovan Mitchell aggressive, and the threes falling, Cleveland‘s lead quickly grew, from 12-3 to 20-5 and, toward the end of the first quarter, 41-12.

There wasn’t much to say after that, no rays of hope in which you could see a path towards what would have to be one of the greatest comebacks in postseason history. Miami had been shooting as well as it had at any point in franchise history over the past month or so, and regression to the mean hit like a truck, taking a 4-of-25 mark into halftime as the deficit passed the 40-point mark. It was 72-33 at the break, the numbers speaking for themselves.

Erik Spoelstra went with a smaller group, inserting Nikola Jovic (24 points) for Kel’el Ware in the starting group after Jovic had ended the half with back-to-back threes, but just as they have all series the Cavaliers showed little, if any, sign of taking their feet off the gas. Even as Miami finally got a few threes to fall, the score didn’t much matter anymore. Cleveland had put their feet firmly down, both sides essentially playing out the string.

By the end of the third, both teams had downshifted into their bench rotations. And that was that, the season ending as definitively, and quietly, as it could. Cleveland takes the night, 138-83, and the series, 4-0.

Much like Game 3, there’s no sugarcoating a game like this, especially not in the playoffs. But for all the things that weren’t going right on a haywire night for the HEAT, the Cavaliers deserve equal credit for all the things they did well.

This was not a regular season No. 1 seed. Everything under the hood said this Cleveland squad, under Kenny Atkinson, was a legit contender. There were reasons to believe Miami could be competitive, their offense trending up over recent weeks and the defense, behind Spoelstra and Bam Adebayo’s lead, almost always found a way to give the opposition fits.

But for the brief stretch of quarters where Miami’s defense found a little traction, Cleveland took ownership of both ends of the floor. They overloaded the strong side, forcing Miami to work over-the-top and skip passes to the weakside, but they also switched liberally with their two bigs as they have all season, flattening out the HEAT’s actions when they tried to work through the middle of the floor. And on the other side, for all of Cleveland’s offensive talent they didn’t produce one of the better single-series Offensive Ratings you’ll see through sheer force of will, it was their ball movement that kept the HEAT trying to catch up to the pass. Put both parts of the game together and the Cavaliers made this a pure Shot Quality series, better looks for them, worse looks for Miami.

The Cavaliers weren’t here for fun. They weren’t here to mess around. They were here for business, as part of what they clearly expect to be a long postseason journey, and for that approach, they deserve respect.

The less said about this one, a game that unraveled quickly behind all the early turnovers and missed threes, the better.

Now it’s on to the offseason, to exit interviews and the draft and summer league. Nobody enjoys the feeling of a postseason loss like this, particularly after fighting so hard just to earn a spot. There are lessons in moments like these, however, moments that offer you the feelings you never want to feel again. These are hard lessons, lessons nobody asked to learn, but they can harden a group nonetheless, a reminder of what the postseason can be and what it can offer. The lone good that can come from a game like this, then, is what comes from remembrance.

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By ML Staff. Courtesy of NBA.