The Battle In South Beach didn’t prove to be much of a battle. The Miami Heat used a 33-16 run through the second quarter to blitz the Indiana Pacers in anticlimactic 99-76 win to win what was otherwise an excellent series to settle the championship of the Eastern Conference.
We’re headed for Game 7 in the NBA’s Eastern Conference Finals. Over the last three nights, the Miami Heat and Indiana Pacers have traded decisive wins on their home floors to set up the big battle on South Beach on Monday night. Our purpose here is to look back at the lessons of Games 5 & 6, and use those to point ahead to the one-game showdown coming up.
If we’d been told at the start of the conference finals that one of these series would end up in a sweep, while the other was knotted 2-2, my guess is that most people would have assumed that San Antonio-Memphis were in a dogfight, while Miami showed Indiana who was boss. But it’s been the opposite. With both Game 4s in the books, San Antonio is celebrating its spot in the NBA Finals, while Miami heads home to South Beach hoping that homecourt advantage can help them survive the final leg of the Eastern Conference Finals.
The NBA playoffs are renowned as a time for the veterans and when being battle-tested matters more than anything else. That truism held in Game 3 of both conference finals matchups, as the San Antonio Spurs put an ironclad grip on the West, and the Miami Heat prevented the Indiana Pacers from getting any ideas in the East.
After pushing the Heat literally to the last second in a Game 1 overtime loss, Indiana stepped up and won Game 2 last night, evening the series as it heads back to the Midwest. Since this is the more compelling of the two conference finals thus far, an overview of Pacers-Heat will lead up this morning’s NBA commentary.
The conference finals in the NBA playoffs are set, as the Indiana Pacers eliminated the New York Knicks, 106-99 in Game 6 of their second round series. We’ll briefly recap the Pacers-Knicks game, and then dive into previews of the next round—Memphis-San Antonio in the West and Indiana-Miami in the East.