For most of Boston’s Game 1 loss to Miami, the Heat got any and every shot they wanted.
So as the fourth quarter rolled around and C’s coach Doc Rivers had seemingly exhausted just about every tweak and twist he could to his team’s leaky man-to-man coverage, he played his final card: the zone defense.
It didn’t provide the kind of game-changing impact the Celtics would have liked, but it did at the very least provide enough of a disruption to the Heat’s offensive flow to keep the game relatively close down the stretch.
So much so that Rivers made it clear afterward that the cameo appearance by the Celtics’ zone defense was not going to be a one-night only performance.
“You’ll see it,” Rivers said when asked about its use throughout this series. “We like it. We’ve been working on zone all year even though we’ve played it probably five times, six times all year.”
— Reported by A. Sherrod Blakely of CSNNE
