Miami Heat vs Detroit Pistons Game Breakdown #31

Welcome to Simply Ballin’s Miami Heat game breakdown. Here you will find a recap of all the threads and tweets.

There are two main threads: offensive film and defensive film thread. In each of those threads, there is a collection of the main offensive and defensive breakdowns.

And what this article is it’s more of an ICYMI with some added context, plus my quick thoughts on the game — so if you want a more in-depth film breakdown and more clips, check it out @johnjablonka_ on Twitter.

Quick Thoughts:

The Heat lose to the Detroit Pistons who were on a 14 game losing streak. And of course, when I go check my timeline, I see most of Heat Twitter overreacting to this loss.

That is usually how things work on Twitter, but it’s funny these are the takes after missing more than half of the roster.

Almost half of the minutes played were by players that weren’t in the rotation at the beginning of the season.

This is also without mentioning that they lost PJ Tucker during the game.

People were acting as if the Heat should have won this game, but this Pistons team is better than this current team.

Regardless, it’s only a loss in December — the team looked tired, they had an off-shooting night from everywhere. It happens.

Offensive Breakdown:

https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1473066673523539973

As mentioned in that tweet, their offense sucked. A lot.

And that kinda happens when the offense relies on Max Strus.

https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1473015615107522572

Here are the top plays that stood out from Strus — I counted around 21 plays where he was directly involved.

It was a colder night from Gabe Vincent, seeing as he just set another career-record the previous game — finishing with 8 points on 3-11 shooting, but him attacking the rim was still impressive:

https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1473024024217280522

Finally, what annoyed me the most was the fact that Kyle Lowry had played 42 minutes. Why is he playing that many minutes? He’s 35 years old.

If you want to see some of the key plays that stood out to me, click the thread above.

Defensive Breakdown:

https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1473067499524603910

The defense wasn’t as bad for the most part — the Pistons also couldn’t hit anything but did manage to get to the paint a lot and quite easily too.

The main defensive scheme was to stop Cade Cunningham and that worked to perfection when it came to stop him from going off.

In the games prior to the Heat game, Cunningham was averaging 22 points, 6 rebounds, and 5 assists shooting 47% from deep on 7 attempts. Against the Heat, however, he dropped 4 points on 4 attempts.

The problem came in the second half when the Pistons had adjusted:

https://twitter.com/JohnJablonka_/status/1473057307714101254

If you want to see more key defensive plays, be sure to check out the thread.