LeBron James’ Championship Formula: Breathing Lakers Defense, and a Blast from His Hot Past

When LeBron James Played Miami heat, They called them Fights. A few stops, a few dunks in transition and a game changes. It happens as quickly and without warning as an earthquake. James’ team gets excited and the opponent gets depressed.

It usually takes discipline to beat a team led by James. Mistakes at the end of the attack can turn into easy baskets at the other end, with drooping shoulders and sharp fingers. In Game 6 of the 2020 NBA Finals, the heat was on the wrong end of the conflict.

The Los Angeles LakersOnly four points with one minute and a half left in the first quarter. Within a minute, it was 11 and Miami was starting to wear down. Conflicts began with enthusiasm at any time Anthony Davis Rejected a Kendrick Nunn Setting four and a half minutes before half time. The volume led to an absurd and -1 Kentavius ​​Caldwell-Pope, An 18-2 start gave the Lakers a 30-point lead.

All season, Los Angeles feasted on direct-ball breakthroughs. To Won the championship on Sunday, Put it Alex Caruso In the starting line, picked up Dwight Howard Out of circulation and dialed its defensive pressure. Miami’s offense, which was so beautiful, suddenly stagnated, with its own tired legs as a result of the lockers’ disruptive defense. Heat turned the ball over more than a fifth of their first-half possessions, and whenever they missed around the edge, Los Angeles went down on the court to punish them.

Caruso called it “the acronym for Lakers basketball.” Kyle Kuzma He described it as “crazy,” “incredible” and “we could have been locked out so far in the season”.

“We were everywhere,” Los Angeles coach Frank Vogel said. “We executed our contracts perfectly, we did it with energy and enthusiasm and active hands. We restored basketball. And it controlled the whole game because at the break with our ability, we stopped getting dirty and the other teams we had no chance to leave at the break.”

Than a full calendar year ago, Vocal told the Lockers that they wanted to be the most natural team in the NBA. They defended themselves as completely different from any of James’ teams since leaving Miami in 2014 – in the regular season, they were determined to get in touch, get connected and stop, Teams that failed to run fast against them were burned. They ranked third in defensive ratings and third in enemy turnover, and according to Classing the Class, change was the first offense.

Some idiots I thought Los Angeles wouldn’t even make it to the finals. Since the Lakers finished 19th in that category in the regular season, its high heels were considered a half-offense. Not only was their filming questionable, their perimeter playmaking almost entirely fell to James and Rajon Rondo, which is why their offense didn’t sing so beautifully pleasingly. Los Angeles did not run smoothly from one action to another like its ultimate opponent. This did not cause confusion and confusion with the off-ball movement. Lockers can create advantages and disadvantages against set protection, but they do not make it easy.

Los Angeles’ solution to this is simple: make life utterly miserable for the crime you resist, and run like hell.

Unlike their playoff opponents, the Lakers usually do not have a guard who can create 35-foot pull-ups or step-back threes, nor do they have teams that pick a point-center. Their half-offense improved in the playoffs, but even in the finals it sometimes faltered. This is not exactly unpredictable, and it does not reflect the larger trend of where the NBA is going.

However, the defense of Los Angeles. Without benching its traditional bigwigs, it would not have advanced to the second round if Davis had not played exclusively at center, where he would have disrupted a force similar to that he is in the league, the same action that Vogel did in game 6 of the final. Lockers do not have to look like heat because they can block the heat. Every season, they shrink the ground, cover the paths they pass through, and blacken the stars. They know who they are.

“You can have a talented team, you can even have a defensive-capable team, but if everyone doesn’t work together and you see the value of being able to suffocate an opponent and rob them of their strength if not everyone is bought, you are not going to reach that level,” Vogel said. “But our guys saw the value from the very beginning. They bought inside.”

The clash in the second quarter on Sunday was part of a 41-15 run that started late in the first quarter. If this attack is known, it is because the Lakers did something similar in Game 1. The Miami series started with the rhythm and took the lead early on, but everything was flipped within six minutes. Davis switched to center, and the Lakers finished the first quarter 19-3 with a 75-30 sprint.

Later, James said they did it very physically and by paying more attention to detail.

“We started playing to our skills,” he said. “As we started to fly around, we started to get defensive stops.”

The story of the season.