Heat Vs. Pacers: Complete Eastern Semifinals Series Coverage

Seven days ago, the Miami Heat were blown away in Game 3, its offense was a mess and its two superstars had completely disappeared against the Pacers in the second half of a crucial playoff game. Wade hit rock bottom, LeBron couldn’t do enough to change their fortunes, Chris Bosh wasn’t walking through that door and ... yeah, The Heatles were in trouble.

You don’t have to root for the Miami Heat, but you have to respect what they’ve done in the past week.

Indiana tested, but when it came down to it, Miami’s superstar power was more than the Pacers could handle, as the Heat won a contentious series in six games.

At the end of the day, the Heat were just too good for Indiana. They might have been Boshless, but LeBron and D-Wade are two of the five best players in the league in literally everybody’s book, and they played like it the past two games, which was too much for Indiana to recover from. The pair scored the team’s final 17 points to ice the game in the closing minutes.

It’s probably a combination of all three of these things. However, if Bird was specifically talking about his team’s on-court play, this is where that fatal flaw comes into play. To Bird’s credit, he’s built a team that has loads of young talent, plays well together, defends tenaciously, has plenty of cap room and is only one move away from being truly elite. He has plenty of means to improve the roster.

But his roster lacks one very important element: good guard play. Against good teams like the Heat, this just kills the Pacers.

The Heat won the rebounding battle, 49-35, and the shooting game, 61.4 percent to 33.7.

This series continues Thursday in Indiana. ESPN will have the broadcast at 8:00 p.m. ET

With the game decided in the final minutes, Stephenson came down the lane to grab a rebound. Pittman responded by blatantly sticking his elbow out, catching Stephenson right in the throat.

Pittman may receive fewer games simply because the games he’d miss are in the playoffs and not the regular season, but that play was just as bad as Bynum’s, if not worse. I’d expect a major suspension.

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Tuesday’s game will tip off at 8:00 p.m. ET and will be televised on TNT.

For more information on the Miami Heat, check out Peninsula Is Mightier and SB Nation Tampa Bay. For more on the Indiana Pacers, head over to Indy Cornrows and SB Nation Indiana.

But things are cool, y’all. As Game 4 arrives, everything is good, because Spo and Wade are pure. Or something.

From Mike Lopresti’s USA Today column:

“Dwyane Wade came into this game averaging 26 points,” Hubie Brown said late in the second quarter. “Taking 22 shots a game, getting to the line 12 times. Right now, he is 0-5 with two turnovers. It’s magnificent that Miami is still up.” It wouldn’t last much longer.

“The Heat say he’s fine,” Mike Tirico told the audience after halftime. “But we’ve been observing him. ... Dwyane doesn’t look right. I don’t know if he’s not feeling well, whatever it is.”

As with most any endeavor, NBA basketball has a set of rules, and separate and apart from that they have the way in which those rules are interpreted, which is often a very different thing. For instance, the three-second rule states, unsurprisingly, that an offensive player cannot remain in the painted area of the free throw lane without taking a shot for more than three seconds. The reality is that the rule is more often interpreted as four or five seconds, and sometimes as “Whatever, dude.” The rule book states that you have to dribble before moving your pivot foot when receiving a pass, but the reality is that NBA refs allow two or three or four steps between the catch and the dribble, provided no advantage is gained.

But perhaps no rule is more open to interpretation than the flagrant foul rules. The descriptions of flagrant fouls, types (1) and (2), in the NBA Rule Book are as follows:

Thursday’s Game 3 will tip off at 7:00 p.m. ET and be broadcast on ESPN.

For more on the Pacers, head over to Indy Cornrows and SB Nation Indiana. For more on the Heat, check out Peninsula Is Mightier and SB Nation Tampa Bay.

Even if he’s been underwhelming for most of his two years in Miami, Bosh is still enough of a threat to keep defenses from swarming Wade and James every time they drive the lane. He’s the linchpin that allows everything else to click, because he pulls defenders out of the lane and gives the other two stars room to work. The numbers bear this out, as Mike Prada noted Monday:

Meanwhile, with zero help from anyone else on the roster as Indiana swarmed the superstars, the Heat’s crunch-time offense became “LeBron or Wade careen into a lane full of bodies and hope for the best.”

</experiences vertigo reading Eric Adelson’s Game 1 recap at Yahoo!>

If LeBron has a brilliant game until the fourth, he’s a choker. If LeBron is average through three quarters and kills it in the fourth, he’s “a Ferrari stuck in traffic” who should have killed it earlier. He cannot win with these guys. Ever. He might as well concede now, retire to the Bahamas and enjoy life ... because the American sports media is never going to let him off the hook.

For more on the Pacers, head over to Indy Cornrows and SB Nation Indiana. For more on the Heat, check out Peninsula Is Mightier and SB Nation Tampa Bay.

Here are bad things that happened to the Heat in the first half:

• Miami shot 36 percent from the field.

Miami won three out of the four meetings between the two teams in the regular season, including both of the games between the two teams at the AmericanAirlines Arena. Indiana won the most recent meeting between the two teams, in Indianapolis on March 26.

There is an obvious talent discrepancy between the two teams, but Indiana started to play some of their best basketball towards the end of the regular season, and they did push the Heat to overtime in one of their losses in Miami. Even so, anything but a win in Game 1 would be considered a minor disaster for the Heat.

Whether there’s an element of truth to Vogel’s statement is pretty irrelevant. Lots of teams take charges and exaggerate contact, including, probably, Vogel’s Pacers.

My guess: this is really just a way for Vogel to try to deflect media attention off a different element of this series that he doesn’t want to talk about. What that element is, I don’t know. But no matter what, I’m sure it’s not so scary that Vogel has to go scorched earth on his opponent before the series even begins.

Heat vs. Pacers should be an excellent series, if both teams play up to their potential. Indiana finished the regular season No. 7 in offense and No. 9 in defense; Miami sussed out at No. 8 on offense and No. 4 on defense. The Heat took three of four games from the Pacers in the regular season, two of them blow-outs. Indiana’s win was a blow-out in the other direction, and the remaining game was an overtime thriller won by Miami.

For more on the Heat, visit Peninsula Is Mightier. For more on the Pacers, visit Indy Cornrows and SB Nation Indiana.