Miami Heat: Pressure Will Cripple Heat Against Confident Pacers Squad

In the first round of the playoffs against the New York Knicks, the Miami Heat faced very little adversity. The Knicks were a downtrodden team, rendered ineffective by a slew of injuries that they'd never be able to recover from, and the Heat knew it.

Even after Miami dropped Game 4, it wasn't worried. Why should it have been? The Knicks were no sleeping giant. They were just a team desperate to salvage a little bit of pride before its inevitable trip home for the summer.

The Pacers, however, are a different story.

Indiana may be a young team, but it is also one of the most aggressive and defensively tough teams in the NBA. They are not scared of the Heat. They weren't scared of the Heat even before Chris Bosh went down, when they coughed up Game 1.

They were confident back then. Now that the Heat is without a player who has proven to be critical to their defensive strategy, the Pacers are more confident than ever that they can get the job done.

As it stands, the Heat are the definition of a vulnerable team. They've lost Bosh—the team's second-leading rebounder and third-leading scorer—for an indefinite amount of time due to an abdominal strain. Since his exit in Game 1, the Heat's defense has fallen apart. They're getting slaughtered on the boards by Roy Hibbert and David West. Their star is fighting with his coach on the bench in the middle of the game. Their MVP is complaining that he can't adeptly fill in at the 4.

Indiana barely has to do anything to cripple the Heat. They're already doing enough damage all by themselves.

Now that the Pacers have erased Miami's home-court advantage with a win in Game 3 of this series, the pressure is completely on the Heat to avoid a collapse. Can they handle it?

Without Bosh to pick up some of the slack, James and Wade need to be playing better than ever. Instead, James seemed scared to take the potentially game-winning shot in the dwindling seconds of Game 2. Meanwhile, Wade submitted an abominable performance in Game 3 with five points on 2-for-13 shooting. Overall, he's 18-for-58 in the series (about 31 percent), which is well below his career field-goal percentage of .486.

It's going to take a turnaround of drastic proportions for the Heat to be able to recover from this. Wade is going to have to find his shot. James is going to have to find a way to compete with a very deep Pacers frontcourt that ranks fourth in the league in rebounds. Both of them are going to need to find a way to stave off the frustration that comes with the possibility of a collapse and figure out how to withstand the pressure.

Indiana isn't going to make it easy for them. The Pacers smell blood.

Do the Heat have the talent to recover? Yes. But that doesn't mean they have everything it takes to get the job done.