Bulls vs. Heat play-in game 2 preview: winner take all! (all = 8th)

will it be the 'should be better' team, or the one that's actually played better?

This won’t be as big of a preview as it was for the Raptors game, but honestly it’s just as well: this play-in tournament has been goofy as hell. The Bulls won a game they had no business even being in, and the Heat got stomped early by the underdog Hawks. In both cases the losing team was a 5-ish point favorite, at home.

Let the record show that I thought the Bulls would win in Toronto. Mostly because while they seemed evenly matched statistically, nearly all intangibles were favoring the Bulls. And even the home court advantage thought to be held by the Raptors was mitigated by a Bulls-backing scream queen.

In this matchup, it feels like (and this part, to be clear is all feels) the Heat have the edge. They have the experience of deep playoff runs, they have had fantastic clutch performances this season led by one Jimmy Butler, and a championship winning coach widely recognized as one of the best in the league.

But they had all those advantages against the Hawks too…and got their brains beat in!

And unlike the matchup against the Raptors, the Bulls actually aren’t that close to the Heat in terms of performance: Chicago’s been way better.

The Heat are hard to figure because they’re so reliant on Butler, who’s been incredible this season even as his team’s struggles have put it under the radar. This from John Hollinger at The Athletic:

Butler has carried a Miami team that basically had only two other guys performing above replacement level, with a career year at the offensive end at age 32. I don’t think people caught on to the jump in efficiency he had this year, shooting a career-best 53.7 percent from the floor — he’d never even been above 50 percent before — and shattering his career high with a 27.6 PER that ranks sixth in the league. As ever, Butler combines that with top-notch wing defense.

So for this sample, I chose January 1st as Jimmy missed a lot of games in 2022 but only two in 2023, outside of the final two games of the season (which I tossed entirely). It’s over double the amount of games as the PatBev Bulls, so smaller sample size caveats apply less.

But as you can see, despite Butler’s availability and efficiency, his team stinks because nearly everyone else on the team stinks. Their negative net rating in that time is actually the same as it is for the whole season. It’s been a strange step back, because they were so much better last year without much change. They lost PJ Tucker, Duncan Robinson played much less and Victor Oladipo much more, but those are all bad offensive players.

The issue was everyone non-Jimmy in their rotation got worse:

So this just isn’t the same Heat team as last year, let alone like the one that went to the Finals in the bubble. Kyle Lowry has been especially bad, noticeably so in their three losses to the Bulls this regular season. He unexpectedly had one of his best games of the season with 33 points against the Hawks, so hopefully for the Bulls that’s not anything sustainable.

There’s some buttons that Heat coach Erik Spoelstra can press, but it’s like…whether to play Kevin Love or not. They need their top-6 to be not-terrible to have stuff like that even matter.

This should be another rock fight. Both teams play at a very low pace, and aren’t good shooting the ball. That free throw generating rate for Miami would be league-best if over the course of the season. But the Bulls have had the most important advantage, shooting efficiency, at least lately.

The Heat have a reputation for getting walloped by opponents on the offensive glass, and that played out in their loss to the Hawks, who grabbed an insane 40% of available offensive boards in that play-in game. But in 2023 they’ve been pretty solid overall, and more importantly it’s something the Bulls won’t take advantage of, they never offensive rebound.

If looking at these two teams based off of evidence, the Bulls have the smaller body of work, but in that time are playing way better. This Heat group is living off of reputation and the clutch heroics of Butler, someone who transcends the clutch=luck corollary but not enough to make it absolute that he’s going to win this game just because.

UPDATE: I posted all this before listening to the Dunc’d On episode where Dan Feldman looked to get a more accurate picture of Off/Def/Net ratings from the season by adjusting “to include only lineups comprised of five players projected to be in the postseason rotation”.

Under that methodology, the Bulls are in alignment with their PatBev era (makes sense, that’s the playoff rotation). The Heat look a lot better compared to their regular season:

Dunc’d On Podcast

But altogether, these play-in games, even by the standard of a single game, are really a “throw the book out” type of situation. And the Heat have every off-book advantage, including an extra day of rest. But it’s just one game, and maybe the Heat will also miss 18 free throws?