Game 4 recap: on the Heat's "extra gear"

Erik Spoelstra said after the fourth game of the NBA Finals on Thursday that he would be “checking under the hood” of this Heat team, to try and see what could be fixed.

Maybe he’ll find that something in the gearbox was missing.

We all hear about the Heat’s “other gear.”  The metaphor is used loosely, but it’s meaning is clear.  The Heat possess something that steps up their game when the time calls for it.  That raises their top speed, that allows them to move faster.  The other gear is what allows the team to coast along the smooth wide roads of the regular season, and then, when they hit the highway of the playoffs, to speed up, shift, and blow by the other traffic. 

In the 107-86 Spurs victory, there was no evidence of any other gear there.  The team seemed merely to be clanking along.

Something of the same thing happened in Game 3, as San Antonio blew out the Heat 111-92.  But because the Spurs played so exceptionally well, and because the Heat were able to mount something of a comeback—nothing like an “extra gear” performance by any means, just a solid, determined effort to grind away at the lead and reduce it—it wasn’t clear whether the Heat’s inability to challenge them was a fluke thing or not.

But after an hour and twenty minutes of looking at film of the Spurs’ miraculous performance, and their own failure to keep up, we would expect the Heat to have come out in Game 4 at least with some better sense of what to do to make the Spurs work for what came to them so easily in that third game.

Instead, they played almost the exact same way: sloppy on defense, tired on offense, not finding open players, making bad decisions.  “I was surprised,” Spoelstra said.

He may well be surprised because what he thought was always there, and what was always there for the Heat, didn’t seem to show up.  It’s a real possibility the “extra gear” the Heat rely upon so thoroughly, and which is supposed to bring higher levels of performance out of them, isn’t there.

Indeed, it becomes dubious as to whether the intense effort that they used to step up their game ever constituted anything like an extra gear in the first place.  The better metaphor might have been something like putting nitrous oxide in the fuel supply.  The Heat’s inner workings may well not be designed around the presence of some special and separate level of performance so much as simply given a boost from outside additives that increase the pressure and make things run faster.

The Heat play an extremely difficult brand of defense (as Grantland's netw3rk pointed out well), as well as an extremely tasking brand of offense.  The fuel needed to speed it up, to make it work better, doesn’t come from it’s inner workings, the way it is schemed, the way it is run.  The Heat’s defense, when it is playing better, simply goes harder: the “blitz” that they use on the pick and roll play, for example, can work efficiently enough through its mere aggressiveness as a ploy.  It becomes better, it goes to another level when it is done with extra focus and added intensity—not when anything crucial or strategic about it is changed.  Offensively, their isolation plays create through constant, focused improvisation, and only becomes better by simply working more intensely: when LeBron, that is, or Wade, begin to simply play harder.

In a way, understanding how they work this way, makes their achievements more impressive.  They almost reached through their effort a level of efficiency that made us suspect the whole vehicle was set up differently than we thought it was, internally, on the inside.  They played so hard that whole vehicle in general almost turned into a differently configured machine than the one we saw during the season.

It makes their achievement last season in particular quite amazing, really: the suggestions floating around which LeBron James is worried about—that the Heat didn’t really win it, but got lucky—are all the more baseless (and not just because luck is part of the game and doesn’t invalidate anything in it when it falls one way or the other).  They played with such effort that things which happened because of the intense pressure they put upon themselves looked like opportunities only the most fortunate could have for themselves.

Even more than that, though, understanding them this way doesn’t give credence to the notion that because the Heat are simply worn out, they don’t “really” want the championship in the same way they did before—because if they did, they would switch it into that extra gear, presumably.  This is something that has been insinuated in all this talk of the “gear” in general, and put in franker and different terms by Mark Jackson and Jeff Van Gundy during the Game 4 broadcast, and their hounding of the Heat to “want it more.”  The Heat may indeed be bringing the extra intensity that won the championship last year.  It is just that, because this doesn’t make them into a different machine, but the same one only moreso, it can be beat by greater intensity.

Against a team that knows the workings of their machine inside and out like the Spurs, that has reverse engineered them over and over again, and that can pick them apart with a tinkerer’s precision, it becomes clear that the difference involved in the “extra gear” is simply one of intensity, not of kind—of quantity, not quality.  Because if the Spurs play with extra levels of intensity and effort—as they indeed are in this series—they can completely counteract everything the Heat can throw at them.   It just involves picking them apart more swiftly, thoroughly, ruthlessly.  And that is exactly what they did to them in Game 4.

So why did we think that the Heat’s “extra gear” existed in the first place?  Perhaps because the inner motivation that makes a player simply, frankly, merely play harder is quite opaque to us.  “Wanting it more” is a strange and almost empty notion: if we have a desire, it motivates us.  It’s that simple.  To want the thing more, doesn’t really alter the nature of the desire—unless this makes it another desire.  Also, to want something means wanting it practically, wanting it in a way that can translate into action—not disappearing into the realm of magical thinking where we think it can be gotten just merely because of the intensity of our want.  And if everything you are doing is indeed translating into action and effort, it is hard to see where further effort can be put in.

With all that being the case, it may just be easier to think that the Heat aren’t trying at the limit of their efforts, but actually just fiddling with the gearstick when they want, and becoming whatever they want to be.  What’s clear is that if any of the Heat themselves share this conception of their efforts, the Spurs surely are disabusing them of it pretty thoroughly.  Through this championship series, in other words, the Heat may finally learn how to appreciate their history of intensity and effort a little more than they already do.  It would be however sad to have to learn it through such thorough, crushing defeat.