The Miami Heat swept the Indiana Pacers 4-0 in the first round of the NBA playoffs, leaving the Pacers searching for answers.
Before the playoffs began, all the NBA playoffs matchups were laid out and the Indiana Pacers vs Miami Heat series seemed to be on the top of the list as the evenest matchup along with the Jazz-Nuggets series. It turns out that Pacers vs Heat wasn’t anything like the series between Denver and Utah who went to a crunching Game 7 and ultimately Denver came out on top. In four games, the Miami Heat had swept their competition and it was a shock.
The shock wasn’t so much at Miami’s success as it was at Indiana’s failure. The Heat looked to be serious contenders in the East when they almost beat the Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA bubble seeding games until Milwaukee climbed back from their 20-point deficit. Likewise, we watched the Pacers all season and were impressed with how they played.
They even finished ahead of the Heat in the regular season in the fourth and the Heat being the fifth. The Pacers finished the season at 45-28 and the Heat 44-29. So, they were pretty even – very even – at least during the regular season, but this wasn’t the case in the playoffs.
The entire series was cringe-worthy. As we take a look at each game one-by-one, the Heat managed to come out the winner and the Pacers sat dazed and confused on how to approach their competition. It is not easy to see how this happened, but it is worth taking an analytical look at the series now that it is over. The expectations for the Pacers, to say the least, had dropped drastically by the end of it all.