Deadspin 🔥 (This will be my last post for awhile. Google has locked me out again.)

 

Which Jimmy Butler are the Knicks getting?

 Heat’s chances hinge on his ability to stay in Super Saiyan playoff form

 
Jimmy Butler is the validation I needed that NBA playoff basketball is America’s fifth major professional sports league among the “Big Four.” From the pace to the way games are scheduled as a series to the effort, it’s almost a parallel Association. ...

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During the regular season, Milwaukee was 51-3 when leading after three quarters. 😮...

Coaching comes into play more heavily in the playoffs than it does in the regular season when teams play a new opponent every two days, while bouncing between cities. A seven-game series allows coaches to layer game plans, adjustments to those game plans, and counter-moves to those adjustments until both have played their entire card deck. 

Great point.

Erik Spoelstra is one of the NBA’s craftiest after-timeout artists. Gabe Vincent’s parabolic inbounds pass to Playoff Jimmy...

Mike Budenholzer is a regular season don whose playoff coaching shortcomings were mitigated in the past by Giannis Antetokounmpo being a unicorn version of Iso Joe. However, Budenholzer subbing out Brook Lopez on the final defensive possession of regulation, saving his timeouts on the final play of Milwaukee’s season and wasting Antetokounmpo as an inbounds defender on the lob play to Jimmy were harebrained decisions.

In contrast to Playoff Jimmy going supernova, Antetokoumpo suffered Heat stroke down the stretch, building mansions at the free-throw line, and developed PTSD over his free throw misses that he literally almost hot-potatoed the ball out of bounds at the end of regulation to avoid going back.

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Playoff Jimmy is the first-round MVP... And now he gets to head to Madison Square Garden for a chain-link net showdown with Thibodeau’s Knicks. If his sixth sense for feeling his way around high-pressure moments is as strong as I think, we should be in for a show next week too.

 

I think the "Heat" will win that series.

...If Playoff Jimmy sings against the Knicks, he might earn an EGOT. Playoff performances on the Garden floor get magnified. Against his former coach with the Timberwolves and Bulls, Playoff Jimmy might be motivated to crash the Garden and deliver another pantheon game against a lesser team that the one they just dispatched.

He’s already smuggled Miami into an NBA Finals appearance. Let’s see if Jimmy Butler can keep that Playoff Jimmy energy on the NBA’s biggest Broadway stage. But I’m not betting against him.