A wise man once said, “he who controls the rebounds controls the game“.
If you’re a fan of the Miami Heat, or just a fan of better basketball in general, you had to be screaming “grab the rebound!” at your television screen down the stretch of Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals. The inability to rebound has been an ongoing issue for the Heat, but things got comically bad on Tuesday when they were outrebounded 49-30. No one hurt them more than Roy Hibbert, who scored seven points in the final few minutes on three consecutive offensive putbacks (with an and-one to boot). It’s tough to win games when you don’t complete a defensive possession by grabbing the rebound, and that was the ultimate difference down the stretch of this one.
The blame can be shared by Erik Spoelstra, who will have to do a better job of making adjustments down the stretch to prevent such chaos. Despite all the devastating putbacks by Hibbert, Spoelstra stayed with a small lineup of Mario Chalmers, Ray Allen and Dwyane Wade without calling any timeouts along the way.
Hibbert finished the game with a dominant 23 points on 10-of-16 shooting and 12 rebounds, while David West chipped in 14 points and 12 rebounds. The combined 24 rebounds from the two were seven more than the entire Heat starting lineup managed to grab. Chris Bosh, in particular, has been unacceptably bad on the glass, grabbing a total of 13 rebounds over his last four games. That’s good for an average of 3.3 rebounds – a number that even former Heat centers Mark Blount and Eddy Curry (notoriously poor rebounders) would be ashamed of. If the Heat want to make it back to the Finals, Bosh will have to come up much, much bigger than this.
Of course, there were other factors that helped the Pacers win the game. They collectively held the Heat to 39 percent shooting, and Lance Stephenson was fantastic with 20 points on nine-of-15 shooting, while playing stellar defense on whoever he was guarding. Still, the story of the game was the difference in rebounding – something the Heat will have to correct in a major way if they want their defensive stops to mean anything.
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