Coup’s Takeaways: Jaquez Jr. Has His Latest Best Game As Miami Takes Down Philadelphia On Christmas Day

1. This might have been a special Christmas Day game, it certainly wound up as one for a certain rookie, but there was nothing unusual about how the start of this one played out.

You’re telling me one team went up double digits only for the other team to lead by the end of the first quarter? Must be HEAT game. Again without Jimmy Butler Miami had four turnovers in the first four minutes as the 76ers jumped out front thanks to the interior stylings of Tobias Harris, but almost as soon as the HEAT went down 18-8 they soon began what would eventually be a 22-1 run stretched across two quarters, during which the 76ers failed to make a shot from the field for eight straight minutes. With Tyler Herro and Jaime Jaquez Jr. – playing the part of Jimmy Butler again as Miami’s source of rim pressure – handling the volume scoring, Bam Adebayo was electric playing the part of help defender on the other end. When Adebayo sat, Philadelphia couldn’t get into the paint as the HEAT packed it, and there weren’t enough threes from the outside to compensate.

As HEAT eventually took a 63-49 lead into the break, Philadelphia was sitting on an Offensive Rating of 94.2, dropping down to 62.5 in the half-court excluding offensive rebounds. Miami was able to find similar production for their missing star, but the 76ers’ offense, with Tyrese Maxey going scoreless through the first two periods, had no way of finding another inside-out gravitational force.

Less than two minutes into the second half, Miami was up 21 and it was maybe looking like a drama-free holiday. Two minutes after that, back to just 10 again as the 76ers found their shooting. As the HEAT suddenly ran cold with Philadelphia in zone – at times something closer to a 1-3-1 than 2-3, a hybrid style like what Miami uses – the 76ers ran off a 20-4 run to get within five. By the end of the quarter it was all tied, Philadelphia having taken a brief lead.

More zone from Philadelphia to open the fourth, against which Miami random offense’d – cuts, free-throws, offensive boards – their way back into the lead. With Maxey still struggling, 2-of-17 with 6:50 remaining, the question was where Philadelphia was going to find enough offense to put them over the top. Turns out, they wouldn’t, as Miami took this clutch game, 119-113, on the strength of some late Duncan Robinson threes (some missed 76ers free-throws helped, too), with Erik Spoelstra improving to 9-0 on Christmas Day. On the night Philadelphia’s best remaining player in Maxey (12 points on 20 shots) had his worst game of the season, Miami’s rookie had his best (30 points on 15 shots, 10 rebounds, zero turnovers).

2. We won’t know until the numbers are updated later, but Miami may have faced as many zone possessions in this game as they had all season coming in (47). Sometimes it was a fairly standard 2-3 zone, sometimes it was far more dynamic than that, with defenders shrinking into the middle of the floor and interchanging with defenders at other positions when it came to close out on the ball. It’s the same tactic Erik Spoelstra often takes when Adebayo isn’t available, and Nick Nurse clearly thought it was his team’s best shot without Embiid protecting the paint.

It was working, too, at least for much of the third quarter when Miami’s threes stopped falling and they were slow to adjust to the new coverage. But as Philadelphia stayed in the scheme in the fourth the HEAT started to see the seams. It wasn’t always perfect, beautiful offense, as sometimes you just need to get fouled going for an offensive rebound or a methodical Lowry drive around the edges that leads into a tough floater. The main reason Nurse scrapped the zone down the stretch, though, may have been Jaquez Jr., whose willingness to move off the ball and wits to do it at the right time and place caught one too many 76ers sleeping.

3. It would have been a wild take just a few months ago but at this point it’s almost normal to say that with rookie Jaime Jaquez Jr. on board Miami has never been better equipped to handle games without Jimmy Butler. In the past, missing Butler meant dialing up the three-point volume to compensate for the loss of interior pressure and mismatch-hunting ability. This season, even though it obviously helps to be shooting better than any team in the league, the volume is relatively unchanged as Jaquez Jr. continues to be able to work his way into the restricted area either via post-ups, cuts or hard drives. There was a stretch between the first and second quarters where Jaquez Jr. was just putting his head down and driving hard in transition, charging hard until anyone on the 76ers realized they needed to stop the ball. Questions remain about how Miami can scale their volume up, but when they’re shooting this well on the shots they’re taking and Jaquez Jr. is so consistently providing a percentage of Butler’s downhill pressure, there isn’t a ton that needs fixing. We’ve said it many times already, but as normal as it is starting to feel there’s nothing normal about what Jaquez Jr. is doing, and it has the potential to be franchise altering down the road.

On the other side, Philadelphia’s offense is built around the combination of Maxey and Embiid and when one of them was not available tonight, the 76ers simply didn’t have anyone else who could anchor and operate within the tendrils of the HEAT’s interior help. That’s to be expected as Embiid is such a unique player no team would ever be reasonably expected to be able to play the same way without them, but when the jumpers ran dry in the first half the force outside-in approach was clearly keeping Philadelphia playing catch-up. In the second half, as Philadelphia was playing off Miami’s misses against the zone, the shots fell and the approach worked as they scored 37 in the third, accentuated by a few blow-by rim attacks which have been a thorn in Miami’s side at times especially when Adebayo isn’t on the court. Once the shooting normalized a bit more, Philadelphia was again taking a one direction approach, and with Adebayo on the floor the defense was once again what it should be.