[Cactus Jack]

Picked Boston to win in the predictions thread but felt that this year was extremely balanced in terms of the parity between the higher and lower seeds. Miami has everything that a good team needs and everyone seems to be buying in and aware of their roles. They had a highly unusual year in terms of the game-by-game point differential, lots of narrow wins and losses, to the point that it was at a near-historic level.

Butler has the dawg in him for sure, and Adebayo is playing at a very high level. Lowry has the experience and can still turn in some good performances, but he's at the end of his career. Same for Kevin Love. Martin has really stepped up, as have a number of their supporting cast. Potentially getting Herro back will help, but I don't know if he's the end-all, be-all; I think that he and a lot of shooters owe much of their contracts to the sterile shooting background in the COVID-bubble season. There were plenty of players whose shooting percentages were much higher than average there and a few were able to parlay those into bigger contracts *cough* Duncan Robinson *cough*.