LeBron James had been a quiet killer of sorts for the Heat through the first three games of the Eastern Conference Finals, putting up extremely efficient statistical lines that were impactful while barely making a sound.
With the chance to put his team one win away from a fourth straight trip to the NBA Finals, however, James made plenty of noise. He had three monstrous highlights and was in attack mode from the start, finishing with a game-high 32 points in helping the Heat to a 102-90 victory that wasn’t nearly that close, which put Miami ahead three games to one in the best-of-seven series.
There were multiple factors that enabled Miami to pull away in this one — Chris Bosh returning to form with a strong start, Lance Stephenson getting into early foul trouble which shook his confidence, and Roy Hibbert being completely ineffective on both ends of the floor for almost all of his 22 minutes on the court.
But no one, on either side, was more impactful than James.
First, LeBron finished an and-1 dunk in traffic near the end of the first half that put his team up by double digits. Next, he hit an insanely well-contested three-pointer near the end of the shot clock on his way to a 14-point third quarter outburst that helped put the game out of reach. Finally, he converted a coast-to-coast fast break slam in transition that exemplified his unwillingness to be stopped in this particular contest.
LeBron finished 13-of-21 from the field, and added 10 rebounds and five assists to his 32-point performance.
Bosh broke out of his postseason funk in a huge way, and got Miami off to the strong start. After totaling just 27 points through the first three games of this series, he came out sharp in this one, scoring 10 points in less than eight first quarter minutes, on the way to 25 points for the game on only 12 shots.
Lance Stephenson seemed to believe he got into LeBron’s head a bit in Game 3, but James had a monster Game 4, while Stephenson’s performance went largely unnoticed. Lance battled foul trouble early on, and ended up with just nine points on seven shots in over 32 minutes of action, and the bulk of that production came once the game had already been decided.
Hibbert, meanwhile, went scoreless for the fourth time in this postseason, and did so against a Heat lineup that was forced to go small once Chris Andersen was ruled out due to injury.
The Pacers are built in a way that should be able to extend this Heat team, but only if they defend as they did during the regular season at a rate that was tops in the league, and do so for 48 minutes. Consistency has been the most elusive of characteristics for Indiana over the last couple of months of the regular season, and we’re seeing that trend continue, even as the Pacers have managed to advance this deep into the postseason.
But when LeBron is in attack mode as he was in this one, we’ve yet to see a team be able to stop him at any time over the past few seasons.
