Welcome to "One Play!" Throughout the 2021-22 NBA season, our NBA.com Staff will break down certain possessions from certain games and peel back the curtains to reveal its bigger meaning.
Today, Miami Heat guard Kyle Lowry takes the spotlight.
Context: Lowry has had a slow start to the season, but it looks like he's starting to find his groove.
In Miami's demolition of the Grizzlies over the weekend, Lowry scored in double figures for the first time this season, finishing with 15 points. He followed it up by scoring a season-high 22 points in the Heat's victory over the Mavericks, doing so on 7-for-10 shooting from the field and 6-for-9 from 3-point range.
In addition to his 22 points, Lowry dished out a game-high nine assists against the Mavericks. There was one assist in particular that shows how he's already transforming the Heat.
You know what that means — to the film room!
NBA League Pass: Sign up to unlock live out-of-market games (7-day free trial)
The play:
Breakdown: Markieff Morris rebounds a missed 3-pointer from Sterling Brown.
As soon as he comes down with the rebound, Morris outlets the ball to Tyler Herro to ignite the fastbreak. Rather than push the ball himself, Herro quickly kicks the ball to Lowry, who is leaking out like a wide receiver on the opposite side of the court.
While that's going on, Caleb Martin and Bam Adebayo make their way up the court.
The Heat don't have a numbers advantage when Lowry catches the ball. Martin is the only member of the Heat ahead of him and the Mavericks have not one, not two, not three, but four players back on defence.
Even so, Lowry wastes no time going into attack mode by driving towards the top of the 3-point line.
Wonky as the Heat's spacing might look, the combination of Lowry driving to the center of the court and Adebayo cutting towards the basket draws the attention of three defenders. (The only remaining defender ahead of Lowry, Brown, is glued to Martin in the corner. This is why it's important to run the floor, folks).
Spotting Herro trailing the play, Lowry delivers him the ball in rhythm for a catch-and-shoot 3.
Tim Hardaway Jr. and Willie Cauley-Stein are able to get a hand up, but Herro had knocked down a 3-pointer on the prior possession. He was starting to heat — pun intended — up. Also, he went a combined 131-for-312 (42.0 percent) on catch-and-shoot 3s in his rookie and sophomore season. He's pretty good at the whole catch-and-shoot thing.
Why it matters: Do I have some stats for you...
Let's start with a simple one: Miami is averaging a total of 21.0 transition possessions per game to start this season, putting them behind only six teams for most in the league. The Heat have been dynamite in those situations — they currently rank in the 90th percentile with 1.19 points per possession, if you were wondering — but the more important part is that they're getting out in the open court a whole lot more than they were last season.
According to NBA.com, a total of 17 teams averaged more transition possessions per game than the Heat in 2020-21. They finished even lower (27th) in 2019-20.
Lowry isn't even scoring much himself in transition, but few players in the league push the pace and generate early offence for others like he does. It's a part of his game that Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra said he was drawn to at media day.
"It's not necessarily that bottom line number of your fastbreak points or your pace, but when those happen and if you can get some key easy ones during key moments of the game, that can be the difference of winning and losing, and that can take your offence from one level to an entirely different tier," Spoelstra said of Lowry. "But his pace is one of the things that I dreaded the most competing against him because it was those unpredictable, unscripted moments that you can't really scheme against, and his level of IQ and skill level in those moments is as good as anyone in the league.
"I think that will help our group, particularly if we can defend the way we want to but also to generate some easy buckets going the other way."
(The Heat, by the way, currently have the best defensive rating in the league, holding opponents to an absurd 97.9 points per 100 possessions. Safe to assume that they're defending the way Spoelstra wants them to).
Duncan Robinson spoke highly of Lowry's pace-pushing ways as well.
"It's controlled chaos. But it's so beautiful because it's like, he plays with such a pace that when you're just watching, sometimes it's like that looks ridiculous, like he just chucked the ball down the court, but it's not just reckless abandon," Robinson said. "It's actually calculated, playing with pace and pushing the tempo.
"He has this unbelievable ability to know when to do that and then know when to, alright, we need to slow it up, we need to get a good one or we have this stretch of game where we need to manipulate the clock and we can't play that way."
Of the nine assists Lowry dished out against the Mavericks, five came within the first eight seconds of the shot clock by my count.
The recipe for most of them was the same as the one above — drive into the teeth of the defence, draw multiple defenders and find the open man.
Sometimes it leads to 3-pointers:
Other times it leads to layups:
Lowry also started the game with a textbook outlet pass to Jimmy Butler.
There's a pretty nifty stat to go along with that as well: Lowry was averaging a league-high 9.8 pass-ahead passes through the Heat's first six games of the season, as highlighted by NBA.com's John Schuhmann in this week's Power Rankings.
If you run, Lowry will almost always reward you.
Of course, none of this will come as a surprise to anyone who watched Lowry spend the last nine seasons cementing himself as the greatest Raptor of all time — Lowry helped turn Toronto into one of the league's most feared teams in transition — but him being a one-man fastbreak adds a dimension to a Heat team that has been known much more for their defence than their offence.
It's helped the Heat get off to a 6-1 start to the season and it could be the key to propelling their offence to the heights needed to get back to their title-contending ways.
The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA or its clubs.