[jthig32]

I looked all over the articles threads and didn't see this. If it's been posted, forgive me.

I thought this was really, really good analysis:

Best of 7: Who guards Dirk? Is Riley vindicated?



By John Hollinger
ESPN Insider


So much for that Spurs-Pistons rematch we'd been conditioned to expect all season. Thanks to mild playoff upsets by the No. 2 teams in each conference, we're now treated to a Mavs-Heat Finals that will give one of those cities its first NBA championship.

Not that it's a bad thing. Watching two star-crossed teams try to get off the title schneid is good theater to start with, and once you add Shaq, Dirk, Wade and Cuban to the mix it raises the entertainment factor several notches. The fans are excited, the TV networks are feeling lucky (another Spurs-Pistons slugfest would have been a tough sell), and the folks at American Airlines must be positively ecstatic. (For the sake of brevity, can we just refer to the two home courts as "Center" and "Arena"?)

At the end of all this, however, only one team can win, so today I want to look at some key questions for this series and then figure out who will be the last team left standing. As I've done in previous rounds, I'm tackling this in question format, and this time we're going to a best-of-seven (Or eight. For those of you catching up on your weekend reading, I've already tackled one Shaq-sized question). Here we go:

How much did we learn about Miami?
If you really think about it, this is the single biggest question heading into the Finals -- how much stock should we really put into the Heat's Eastern Conference championship? In other words, was it Miami playing very well, Detroit playing very badly, or something in between?

Arguments can be made either way, because a best-of-seven series is essentially a black box -- we don't get to see either team against the rest of the NBA in that span. But let me throw a few things out there that give me pause. Detroit's offensive troubles didn't begin in the Miami series, but in Game 3 against Cleveland. In fact, in Games 3 through 7 of the Cleveland series, the Pistons' offense was substantially worse (78.8 ppg) than it was against Miami (84.7 ppg). Considering Cleveland was hardly a defensive juggernaut during the regular season and operated for most of that series without Larry Hughes, it's tough for me to get too worked up over the Heat's shutdown of Detroit.
Remember, just a few weeks earlier we had real questions about the Heat. A Chicago team that will never be confused with the Phoenix Suns scored 106, 108, and 109 in the first three games of the opening round, and dribble penetration was a constant problem for the Miami defense all series. Against a 41-win Bulls team, that wasn't a life-threatening issue, but against a 60-win Dallas club, it seems it might be a different story.

We were prepared to respect Miami as the Eastern Conference champion because they have Shaq and Wade, and because their path to the Finals took them through the mighty Pistons. But in light of Detroit's spring meltdown and the tattered state of the rest of the East, we still have to wonder about Miami's credentials. Obviously, pundits like me will shut up if they beat Dallas. Until then, the nagging doubt will persist that they won a weakened conference largely by default.

Who guards Dirk?
Dirk Nowitzki has been the best player in the playoffs, hands down. His PER ranks second only to Tim Duncan, coming on the heels of Dirk's No. 1 finish in the regular season. Plus, that rating doesn't show how many of Nowitzki's shots have been last-second daggers. He made a 3-pointer to send Game 3 against Memphis into OT, got a foul-and-one to send Game 7 against San Antonio to an extra session, and laid waste to Phoenix when Game 5 seemed to be getting away.

The 7-foot sharpshooter is an impossible matchup -- lofting jumpers over smaller defenders and blowing by bigger ones -- but somebody on Miami has to try defending him. "We'll start with Udonis [Haslem] on him," Pat Riley told the Miami papers yesterday, but expect it to be a group effort. Haslem has the requisite size to challenge Nowitzki's jumpers, but footspeed will be a challenge, and he'll be in terra incognita playing Dirk on the perimeter.

Should Haslem falter or pick up early fouls, a few options come to mind. The first is James Posey, a long-armed 6-foot-7 forward who is likely to see a steady diet of post-ups from Dirk. Riley repeatedly has turned to Posey in crunch time during the playoffs, with Haslem usually being the player that checks out.
Posey is too small to challenge Dirk's shot, however, and since Dallas likes to post up Nowitzki at the foul line it virtually will be impossible to bring double-team help. Much like San Antonio's Bruce Bowen does against Nowitzki, Posey will need to do his work before the shot by forcing Dirk off balance and perhaps getting a piece of the ball on the way up.

The two longshots to play against Nowitzki are Antoine Walker and Shandon Anderson. Walker has been wearing a target throughout the playoffs, with Andres Nocioni, Richard Jefferson and Tayshaun Prince taking turns torching him, but he might match up better against Dirk than any of those other three. At 6-9 and with decent footspeed, he's probably the fallback position if Haslem gets fouls and Posey proves ineffective.

Finally, there's Anderson. He's tough as nails and will make Dirk work for his shots, but at only 6-6 he will be helpless against those free-throw-line post-ups. Additionally, Anderson is a major offensive liability, so he'll likely only see spot duty -- perhaps in end-of-quarter situations.

Is Pat Riley vindicated yet?
I had to throw this in here since nobody seems to be talking about it much. Regardless of how the Finals play out, I think you'd have to say yes. A year ago with a limited Dwyane Wade in Game 7, there was simply no way the Heat were going to score enough points to knock out Detroit. This year, Miami again had a limited Wade in a must-win game on its home court, but had more than enough juice to send the Pistons packing. The three new guys Riley brought in with the Eddie Jones trade -- Antoine Walker, James Posey and Jason Williams -- combined to shoot 14-for-24 and finish with 35 points and 16 rebounds, allowing Miami to win easily despite getting only 14 points from Wade.

Chemistry, schmemistry.
And that's why the trade was a good idea from the get-go -- it radically reduced the risk that a single injury would torpedo Miami's season. With Shaq, Wade and three role players, the Heat were fine if the big two were in perfect health, but up the creek if they weren't. This season's crew was far more resilient to those kinds of setbacks, because players like Walker and Williams could fill the offensive breach. And against a team like Dallas, where winning a 78-73 snoozer simply isn't an option, those players will be needed again.

What do we make of the regular-season results?
The teams met twice in the regular season, and Dallas beat the stuffing out of Miami both times. On Nov. 25, Dallas left Arena with a 103-90 victory. Of course, the Heat were without Shaq, and the Mavs didn't have Jerry Stackhouse or Adrian Griffin, and the game happened nearly seven months ago. So basically, we can throw that one in the trash.

Dallas' 112-76 rout on Feb. 6 is a bit harder to dismiss, however. With the exception of Alonzo Mourning, all of the key protagonists for both sides were in the lineup, and Dallas ran them right out of the building. Dirk scored 27 points on 16 shots, Stackhouse and Keith Van Horn each dropped in 14 off the pine, and the Mavs held Wade to 16.

On the other hand, Miami supporters will look past this game and point to its immediate aftermath. It was arguably the turning point in Miami's season -- they had a players' meeting after the game and immediately embarked on a 10-game winning streak. Miami went 22-7 the rest of the way before mailing in the final three regular-season games to rest its starters, and are 34-15 since then including the playoffs. Dallas' record since is a bit less impressive, at 33-17 including postseason games, so that's a slight edge in Miami's favor.

Additionally, there are two pieces of good news embedded in the box score of that 112-76 rout. The first is that foul trouble wasn't a problem, for Shaq or the rest of the Heat. This is probably Miami's biggest fear against a team as quick as the Mavs, but Shaq only picked up two fouls in this meeting and the Mavs only took 13 free throws as a team. The problem was 3-pointers -- Dallas made 11-of-16. That probably will be a problem in the Finals, too, since the quicker Mavs can drive-and-kick Miami to death if they choose. But no team is going to hit them at a 69 percent clip for an entire series, so nights like Feb. 6 should be few and far between.

What do the Heat do with 'Toine?
I mentioned Antoine Walker as a potential foil for Dirk Nowitzki above, and part of the logic is that there's nobody else for him to guard. He'll probably start out against Dallas' Adrian Griffin (presuming, as I speculated Sunday, that Griffin gets the start ahead of Devin Harris), but once Jerry Stackhouse comes off the bench 'Toine's in deep trouble. Walker has no chance of staying in front of Stackhouse or Josh Howard, which leaves his options as (A) guard Nowitzki, or (B) hit the bench.

I imagine Pat Riley will try to manage Walker's minutes so that as many of them as possible are spent against Griffin, but at some point he's going to have to entrust Walker with defending either Nowitzki or Howard. That's where things might get ugly for Miami, defensively. Walker has been the weak link for the Heat D throughout the postseason, and I imagine the Mavericks probably have noticed this.

Miami needs to keep Walker on the court if at all possible because of his offense, but if he can't provide at least some resistance against Howard or Nowitzki, Dallas' ability to match up might claim yet another victim. If so, he'll join Jake Tsakilidis, Nazr Mohammed, Rasho Nesterovic, Robert Horry, Kurt Thomas and (projecting ahead) Alonzo Mourning in the Mavs' matchup graveyard.

Does one team have an emotional edge?
With a few days to cool off before the Finals, both teams should come in on a relatively even keel. But I still think the Mavs might have a psychological edge in the early part of the series.

Dallas had to overcome an idiotic seeding scheme that saw them earn the conference's second-best record, and as its "reward" have to play the other three best teams in the West. The silver lining is that the big hump for them came in Round 2, when they finally got past the Spurs in a grueling seven-game series. I think that series took a lot out of Dallas, both physically and emotionally, and that's why it was so flat in the first few games against Phoenix. But now they're past that, and can focus on the Finals without that "happy/mildly surprised to be here" veneer that seemed to afflict them against Phoenix.

Miami, on the other hand, still has an enemy called satisfaction to contend with. They geared up all season to get past the Pistons, and succeeded even without home-court advantage. It's human nature to lose a bit of that edge in the first couple of games after such a huge triumph, even with the Heat's best efforts to maintain a "we still have work to do" exterior.

Which supporting player will step up?
I've raved about Dallas' bench already, but in the postseason it's been more a function of quantity than quality. Both Miami and Dallas have similar personnel profiles in the postseason -- two players playing fantastic while the rest of the crew has been rather ordinary.

For Miami, those two are Wade and Shaq, of course. But of the seven Miami players who have played the vast majority of the team's posteason minutes, the next-best playoff PER belongs to Udonis Haslem at 13.64.
It's a similar case for Dallas. Nowitzki has been ri-Dirk-ulous and Howard has been very good, but only one other Mav (Jason Terry) has a playoff PER above the league average of 15.00. The Dallas support players have better PERs than their Miami counterparts, but not glaringly so.

So if the big two on each side cancel each other out, one of the key questions for the Finals becomes which support players will step up to save the day?
The most obvious candidates appear to be the two point guards. Jason Terry was Dallas' second-leading scorer in the regular season and figures to have a field day running pick-and-roll plays that involve Shaquille O'Neal. His talent for coming off the screen and popping open jumpers should allow him to do what Kirk Hinrich did in the opening round, when the Chicago guard averaged 20.5 points and 8.7 assists while repeatedly firing off screens before O'Neal could get in position to help. The Heat have been fortunate not to face a player of that type until now, but Terry seems primed to step up as the third option when Nowitzki and Howard aren't taking advantage of their match-ups.

On the Miami side, Jason Williams will need to step up for Miami. When he's being aggressive offensively, as he was when he abused Chauncey Billups in Game 6 of the conference finals, he gives Miami another offensive dimension and makes opponents pay for sagging on O'Neal and Wade. Since Dallas unquestionably will devote heavy defensive resources to those two, and Walker might be forced off the floor at times by match-up situations, the onus is on Williams to be Miami's third gun. Against Terry, he'll have a relatively weak defender to work against.

BONUS QUESTION: Who gets the ring?
On paper, this shapes up as fairly even. The two teams have virtually identical records over their past 50 games, and both clubs enter June as healthy as a team can reasonably expect to be at this point of the season.

However, a few factors are working against the Heat. First, the match-ups. Dallas' ability to mix and match its combinations on the floor has given it a decided advantage in every round of the playoffs, and there's no reason it will stop here. The Mavs can go small when Shaq checks out and basically take Alonzo Mourning out of the series; they can play Stackhouse and force Walker into a bad defensive match up; they have a swarm of big men to send after Shaq; and they have an opponent with no obvious foil for Nowitzki.

Second, there's the emotional aspect. I expect Miami to come out a bit flat for the first few games, just as Dallas did in the last series, and it's going to be very difficult for the Heat to prevail if it's down 2-0 heading back to South Beach. Finally, there's the question mark in the back of my mind about the East. I'm absolutely convinced of the Mavs' quality after watching them sweep Memphis, dispatch the world champs and outlast Phoenix. I'm less certain of the Heat's, just because the one team that was supposed to provide its big test began fizzling just before the big showdown.

For all those reasons, and with the home-court advantage to boot, Dallas is the obvious choice to me. It should be nip-and-tuck all the way -- a fitting conclusion to perhaps the most dramatic NBA playoffs ever. But after Game 6, before a raucous Center crowd, I expect the Mavs to be hoisting the Larry O'Brien trophy.