The Heat forward has played more than 28,000 minutes in his 12-year career, and at the beginning of his age 30 season, that wear and tear was starting to show on the court.
Deng, who was never the most nimble of players, looked a step behind on the offensive end. Oftentimes, he was stagnant.
The Heat, who were trying to find their identity in their second year of the team's post-LeBron James era, were stagnant too. They were winning games, sure, and no, there was never a question if they were going to make the playoffs, but few would have considered Miami as NBA Finals contenders.
They should now.
Miami has found its mojo again by going back to the tenets that helped the team win two championships with James -- pace and space. Miami's mid-season schematic shift has been so successful that the Heat, not the Raptors or Boston, look to be the team that could keep LeBron and the Cavs from winning the Eastern Conference this year.
And the piece that's making it all work is Deng.
Erik Spoelstra's best lineups for those title-winning Heat teams featured Chris Bosh at the 5. With Bosh surrounded by three shooters and James, the Heat were consistently able to push the tempo to a place where opponents couldn't match up. The Warriors' dominant small-ball lineup with Draymond Green at center? Yeah, the Heat's version was better.
But when James left Miami, so did that style of play. Bosh would play the 5, sure, but it was never the same. How could it be?
For 18 months, Spoelstra searched for a way to get the most out of his new roster. Before a January road trip, Spoelstra, who rose from team's video coordinator to its head coach, had seen enough tape to know what to do. The Heat were going to run.
With 7-footer Hassan Whiteside in the fray, pushing the pace wasn't as simple as sliding Bosh to the 5. Instead, the Heat pushed Deng to power forward and employed a four-out system around the team's enigmatic young center.
The move paid immediate dividends.
But a few weeks later, Spoelstra had to adapt again, as Bosh was shut down Feb. 19 for what's believed to be a recurrence of the blood clots that almost killed the All-Star last year.
To compensate for losing Bosh, who was averaging 19 points and 7.4 rebounds per game, Spoelstra opted to push the pace even more.
The move suits point guard Goran Dragic. Before Bosh was sidelined, Dragic had a PACE factor (possessions per game, extrapolated) of 94.88 and a net rating of plus-2.8. In the 10 games after Bosh was sidelined and Spoelstra asked his team to push it to yet another gear, Dragic's PACE was 101 and his net rating was a gaudy plus-13.7.
You're not supposed to find six extra possessions per game mid-season, but that's exactly what the Heat have done.
Adding Nets castoff Joe Johnson, who provides the Heat a little bit of everything on both ends of the court, helps space the floor, and keeps Dwyane Wade fresh. His addition was critical to the second-wave success as well --€” Johnson averaged 30 minutes and 14 points per game (on 60 percent shooting with a plus-14 rating) in his first five games with the Heat.
In the new system, the enigmatic Whiteside has blossomed too. He's averaging 18 points and 15 rebounds since Bosh was sidelined.
Even Amar'e Stoudemire, long left for dead, has thrived in the new Heat system -- he's seen his net rating go from minus-4.2 to plus-19.4. It's like he's back on the 7-seconds-or-less Suns.
But the real linchpin and beneficiary of the Heat's mid-season transformation has been Deng. The forward is averaging nearly a double-double at 17 points and 9.8 rebounds since Feb. 19, but the real difference is in his movement. For the first time since his Chicago prime, Deng is aggressive in cutting away from the ball, and that, perhaps more than anything, as helped the Heat's offense find its long-lost dynamism.
James and the Cavaliers attempted to have a mid-season renaissance of their own in Cleveland. The team fired David Blatt in January in an effort to move to a more up-tempo style under Ty Lue. Yet the Cavs look almost identical to the Blatt-coached teams and statistically there's little to point to that can prove the change.
The Heat entered Wednesday's game with the Bucks on a five-game winning streak that coincided with the acquisition of Johnson. The streak won't last forever, but it's hard to see the Heat falling back into their slightly better-than-good form for the remainder of the season. Home-court advantage should be presumed and the No. 3 seed probably theirs as well.
And if the Heat can keep their stellar form rolling in the playoffs, there's no question that they'll be on a collision course with James and the Cavs in the Eastern Conference Finals. Don't be so quick to dismiss the idea that it'll be LeBron's old team, not his new one, that would leave that series with an NBA Finals berth.
Link : http://www.foxsports.com/nba/story/miami-heat-lebron-james-free-agency-luol-deng-cleveland-cavaliers-playoffs-nba-finals-030916
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