Finals Game 1 Thoughts

Could it be that Dallas has never heard of Mario Chalmers before? If they’re gonna keep going back to playing zone defense, they have to do a better job on closing out on shooters. For a team who doesn’t shoot the three that much or well, letting Miami take so many three pointers might be a good idea, but not when they are hitting it consistently, Chalmers hit two big threes to keep them in the game in the second quarter, and LeBron made one that was basically impossible to end the third. Dallas got burned tonight because they didn’t responded well enough to the changes on Miami’s offense. The three pointer basically killed them tonight.

In this series, Dirk Nowitzki can basically get any shots he wants and no one can stop him, it’s just that simple. With him making quicker decisions on whether to penetrate or to just post up, it’s harder for Miami’s defense to defend him and it showed tonight.

Deshawn Stevenson should be playing more minutes in this series, he’s a better defensive fit than the Barea, Kidd tandem. He’s proven that he can defend and rough up LeBron before, and he knows how he plays, remember Soulja Boy in Washington? I’m not knocking on Barea but he is going to be burned on defense like it or not. Stevenson’s ability to knockdown shots and play strong defense would really help, and bringing out Barea for short spurts would aid Dallas better.

Mike Bibby shouldn’t be starting right now, he shouldn’t even be coming off the bench, heck he shouldn’t even have a job. Mario Chalmers should have his job and his minutes, like I said before, the job would be harder if it wasn’t Chalmers making Dallas pay for leaving him wide open.

Jason Terry needs to be more aggressive on offense, it’s not just shooting jumpshot after jumpshot, he needs to take it to the hole once in awhile to keep the defense honest and not play him straight up and tight. The range on where he took his threes got further and further every single time, he has got to play smarter than that if Dallas wants to win game 2.

It’s just so hard to defend a team that has two premier guys that poses such a big scoring threat, you tend to overlook their passing skills, but Dwyane Wade and LeBron James can pass among the very best in the league and it shows during pick and roll situations especially with Haslem and Bosh because both players are excellent in making pick and roll decisions. Dallas needs to do a better job on recognizing pick and roll plays and sometimes go under the screen and dare both of them to take the outside shot, rather than letting the Heat get their pick and roll game underway.

Basically both teams played hard, really hard, the amount of floor burns in this game was just amazing, and Dallas should keep going to Shawn Marion if the Heat are just going to let Mike Miller cover him one on one. Marion turned on the father time switch since the conference Finals and Dallas should ride him as much as possible before the clock ticks over.

Final note, Mario Chalmers won this game for the Heat, and that’s the bottomline.

Anyways, looking forward to game 2, I’m really excited to see Dallas in the Finals and the Heat are playing really well. It’s going to be seven games I think with this one.