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A lot of things had to happen for Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat to come back from a 16-point deficit entering the fourth quarter of Game 5 against the Milwaukee Bucks, force overtime and then pull out a victory, eliminating the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference far earlier than anticipated. If there is one play that sticks with you, though, it will likely be Butler's buzzer-beater at the end of regulation, which came on a designed sideline-out-of-bounds play. 

Butler caught a lob from Gabe Vincent and scored off the glass as he fell to the floor. It was spectacular, from any angle:

The finish may have seemed miraculous, but it was a direct result of Butler and Miami coach Erik Spoelstra anticipating how the Bucks would defend the action that set it up. After the Heat's 128-126 win, Spoelstra said that he'd drawn up a different variation of the play and Butler "looked at me dead in the eye," telling him, "No, let me be that guy." 

According to Spoelstra, he then asked Butler, "What if we can't get that pass?" and Butler responded, "I'll get it, don't worry about it."

Butler wasn't worried because he knew Milwaukee's Jrue Holiday would follow his path around the screen, which meant he'd be able to catch the ball as long as it was timed correctly and thrown in front of him, toward the rim:

"You could just tell -- the entire series, for that matter -- that Jrue wasn't taking a body off of me. He wasn't going to shoot the gap. He wasn't going to do any of that. So I said, 'I guarantee you whenever I turn this corner, he's going to be locking and trailing. He has no choice but to be behind.' [Spoelstra] trusted me in that moment, as he has done multiple times, even whenever I told him I was going to shoot the 3 the time before. He was just like, 'Go ahead, man. Take us home.'"

To be clear: Butler, who had missed an open pull-up 3 against drop coverage with 18 seconds left in the fourth quarter, had to make a difficult play. And Vincent, who had made a pull-up 3 from 28 feet with eight seconds left, had to make a difficult pass.  

"It was a perfect pass from Gabe," Spoelstra said. "Gabe has made a similar pass like that earlier in the season and Jimmy just made an incredible play. I mean, Jrue Holiday is one of the best defenders on the entire planet, so if you're going to throw something like that, it better be pinpoint and you better have a Megatron-type guy that can go up there, take a little bit of contact and then somehow find a way to will it in the basket. But that kind of epitomizes JB."

Bam Adebayo wasn't on the floor on that possession because "we needed the paint open," Spoelstra said. Miami "needed space," and Spoelstra anticipated that Milwaukee would match up by taking rim protector Brook Lopez out of the game. All of it worked perfectly, and all of it was an extension of what the Heat had already been doing in the final minutes of the fourth quarter.

As Brady Hawk of Five Reasons Sports pointed out, the comeback was in part due to Adebayo initiating the offense from the perimeter, which drew Lopez away from the paint long enough for Miami to manufacture some points in the paint. Butler's floater with about three minutes to go was not nearly as dramatic as a buzzer-beating, game-tying lob on an out-of-bounds play, but it was set up essentially the same way. 

"Heat Culture," as you've heard a million times, is about being the hardest-working, best-conditioned, most unselfish, nastiest, most disliked team in the NBA. But framing them as a bunch of tough guys undersells Spoelstra's tactical coaching and the team's collective basketball IQ. There is always a method to their madness.