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Despite blowout loss, Steve Clifford and Hornets leave their mark
- Updated: May 1, 2016
6:52 PM ET
MIAMI — Game recognizes game, and before the biggest inflection point of his best season as an NBA head coach, Steve Clifford was effusive in his praise of Erik Spoelstra for how he remodeled the Miami Heat without Chris Bosh.
“From a pure coaching standpoint,” Clifford said before Game 5, “it’s really incredible what he’s done.”
Clifford beams his passion for the craft of coaching the way Kemba Walker does his confidence in, well, everything. Behind kind eyes and a ready smile is a belief that each, in his own way, is right. So while Clifford’s sermon on the fallacy of big-game adjustments may have seemed like a media scolding, those around him saw it more as the coach, after 16 years on an NBA bench, emphasizing what countless hours of film study had shown him.
What he saw after two wins apiece for both the Heat and Charlotte Hornets was all one could ask for from a postseason series of two teams that finished with the same record.
“If you look at how they’re playing, it’s more like how we’re playing in the regular season,” he said. “And we’re playing more how they played in the regular season. And that’s what playoff series [are about].”
The Hornets, who fired up 3s at a top-five rate in the regular season, won by pounding the ball in the paint, and they did so again to win a third time on that Wednesday night in Miami, where the Heat had lost just twice since the All-Star break. After 12 years — including a decade under the guise of a listless bobcat — without a second-round appearance, the Hornets were heading home with a chance to close.
The work Steve Clifford did to get Charlotte to this point is impressive. Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports
But after Dwyane Wade ripped the cape away from Walker to re-tie the series, the Hornets found themselves out of identities and out of time. Charlotte, in the 106-73 loss, shot a modest 33.3 percent from 3, finished a season-worst 28.9 percent in the paint, got to the line …
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