Butler has a playoff switch, Budenholzer doesn't

The Miami Heat beat the Milwaukee Bucks 115-104 in the first game of their second-round series Monday night, continuing to impress with their switchy defense and tough shotmaking. Meanwhile, the NBA's top regular-season team continued to look vulnerable and ticked off just about every box in the "reasons to doubt the Bucks" bingo card.

Here's what stood out from Miami's opening salvo:

Jimmy has another gear

On paper, this profiles as a difficult matchup for Jimmy Butler. The Bucks are by far the league's best rim-protecting team, and are better than all but five teams at keeping opponents off the free-throw line; Butler's scoring this year has been predicated almost entirely on free throws and shots at the rim. During the regular season, he hit just 30.5% of his jump shots off the dribble, which are the shots Milwaukee's defense is designed to force opposing ball-handlers to take. It seemed reasonable to assume Butler would struggle to get his own offense.

Instead, in Game 1, he popped off for 40 points on 26 shooting possessions, baiting the typically disciplined Bucks into sending him to the line 13 times and hitting an array of game-icing pullups down the stretch. He got 27 of those points in the second half, shooting 9-of-11 from the field and 7-of-7 from the line. Any time Milwaukee went small with Marvin Williams at center, Butler attacked the basket relentlessly, and when the Bucks' rim-protectors were on the floor, he attacked smaller defenders in inverted pick-and-rolls and fell back on his push shot and rediscovered jumper.

All told, the guy who'd become so dependent on at-rim scoring shot 8-of-11 outside the restricted area - 3-of-4 from floater range, 3-of-5 from mid-range, and 2-of-2 from beyond the arc. It was as if he'd simply been waiting all year for the right moment to prove he can still do that whenever he wants or needs to.

And that's to say nothing of Butler's maniacally disruptive defense, with which, among other things, he forced two huge fourth-quarter turnovers - one in which he stood up Khris Middleton on a drive and stripped him, and another in which he sprung a sneak-attack double-team on Middleton coming off a curl against the sideline and forced him to throw the ball away.

Butler, who was by far the best player in a game that included the presumptive MVP, continues to brandish his big-game bona fides. This marks the second straight year in which he's upped his level considerably in the playoffs, and while he probably won't have another shooting performance quite like this one in the series, it's hard to dispute the fact that he has a 16-game gear. His former Philadelphia 76ers co-star - recently swept out of the playoffs - took a moment to appreciate the performance, and perhaps consider what might have been.

You had to tip your cap. Or, if you're a Sixers fan, scream into a pillow.

Bud keeps coaching as if it's the regular season

Whatever it is about Butler that allows him to tailor his game to suit the moment, Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer seems to have the opposite quality. He continues to frustratingly coach high-stakes playoff contests as if they're mid-January friendlies.

This isn't the first Game 1 this postseason in which his team has gotten blindsided and he's failed to push the right buttons in response. But Milwaukee was never in any real trouble against the Orlando Magic. This is different. The Bucks can absolutely lose this series, and they need Budenholzer to start coaching with more urgency.

His performance in this one was defined by some truly bizarre substitution patterns, and, in what's become a recurring theme, not enough minutes for his best players. Giannis Antetokounmpo ultimately got to 37 minutes, but he had to play the last 16 of the game to get there after getting extended rest in the first half. Brook Lopez, who was fantastic, played only 27 minutes, ostensibly because of foul trouble, though he finished with only four personals.

Pat Connaughton, who was ineffectual at both ends, inexplicably played 25 minutes, which was more burn than Budenholzer gave Wesley Matthews, who did by far the best job of any Bucks defender on Butler. Most egregiously, Matthews sat for the game's final five minutes while Middleton, Connaughton, and George Hill took turns getting cooked. Butler scored 13 points over those five minutes.

Budenholzer had to shuffle things around with starting point guard Eric Bledsoe out of the lineup (more on that), but that doesn't explain the breadth of his head-scratching rotations.

Also, at some point, if things get dire enough, Bud is going to have to swallow hard and just stick Giannis on the opposing team's best scorer. It's a move he's been staunchly reluctant to make, including against Kawhi Leonard in last year's conference finals. There's wisdom in that approach over the long haul - not only for the sake of preserving Giannis' energy for the offensive end but for allowing him to rove and help at the rim rather than get caught up chasing ball-handlers through mazes of screens. In the grand scheme, he's far better utilized on the interior than on the perimeter.

But in the playoffs, when every possession takes on massive importance, the Bucks can't afford to have the literal Defensive Player of the Year standing in the weak-side corner watching Butler inflict cruel and unusual punishment on their coterie of overmatched wing defenders.

Milwaukee's offense hasn't evolved

The Bucks' losses all tend to look pretty similar. In just about all of them, we wind up questioning the team's offensive process, particularly in crunch time.

This one was a little less familiar because Milwaukee actually shot the ball extremely well, hitting 52.5% from 2-point range and 45.7% from three. But it was still recognizably a Bucks loss because of how stuck their offense looked for answers once a good defense figured out how to blunt their primary instrument. After a roaring, 40-point first quarter, they scored just 64 the rest of the way.

To be clear, Miami's defense deserves a ton of credit for that. It did a masterful job barricading the rim, essentially out-Bucksing the Bucks. Milwaukee as a team got just 15 shots in the restricted area, about half of their usual number. Giannis, who averages over 10 such shots on his own, accounted for just four of them. Thanks to great communication and sheer effort, the Heat managed to pull the double-whammy of crashing the offensive glass (generating 12 extra possessions) without getting burned in transition. Bam Adebayo, Andre Iguodala, Jae Crowder, and Butler combined to hold Giannis in check, and essentially turn him into a passer.

But the Bucks also played into Miami's hands by getting roped into isolation play and running stagnant sets, with Giannis initiating and barreling into a wall of defenders at the nail rather than getting involved as an on- or off-ball screener to leverage his gravity, or running inverted pick-and-rolls as a means of attacking weaker Heat defenders like Tyler Herro. Those drives into traffic resulted in six turnovers, contributing to 19 total for the Bucks, which fueled the Heat's transition offense.

The Bucks succeeded using Giannis as a screener for Middleton earlier in the game; the threat of his dive sucked in Miami defenders from the corners, and Middleton did a nice job responding by making the skip pass to the open shooter. But that fell by the wayside late in the game when the Bucks largely ditched the pick-and-roll. The rare times they did run it, they mostly just wound up isolating against switches.

Giannis and Middleton are still good enough to carry even a staid offense through this series, but, absent any adjustments, Miami's defense is going to make things very, very difficult.

The Dragic revival continues apace

One of the stories of the bubble has been a 34-year-old Goran Dragic - who gamely played the role of bench captain for the Heat before the shutdown - jumping into Miami's starting lineup and playing his best basketball in years, nearly reminiscent of his All-NBA season with the Phoenix Suns in 2014. Nobody has been able to keep him out of the lane, and his pull-up shooting and finishing around the basket have been incredible.

After thoroughly dominating the Indiana Pacers, Dragic was masterful in Game 1 against Milwaukee, supplementing Butler with 27 points on 74.7% true shooting. He played with an arrhythmic cadence that tied Bucks defenders in knots all game. In the pick-and-roll, he routinely juked the screen defender into lurching in the direction of the pick to try to meet him on the other side, before jetting away from the screen and into the middle of the floor. And he made a ton of hay in the short mid-range area, which is a vital space to take advantage of when it comes to trying to crack the Bucks' defense.

His finishing was maybe the most impressive part of his night. Watch his highlight package and note how many times he catches backpedaling big men flat-footed by disguising his gather and releasing the ball with unpredictable timing from wacky angles:

Behind Dragic and Butler, the Heat shot a phenomenal 15-of-28 on 2-pointers outside the restricted area, which is a huge reason why they won the game.

The Bucks need Bledsoe back

One of the reasons Dragic was able to go off to the extent he did was that the guy who likely would've defended him was unavailable. Bledsoe sat out with a hamstring injury, and the Bucks really need him back for Game 2 and beyond.

His point-of-attack defense is sorely needed in this matchup, and though the rest of the team's perimeter players did a solid job chasing Heat ball-handlers and shooters overtop screens, none do so with the tenacity or physicality Bledsoe does. Part of the reason Milwaukee's back-line defense was leakier than usual is that the first line of defense offered less resistance. Bledsoe would've been another option to throw at Butler, too.

The Bucks also really could've used him offensively in this one, as dubious as that may sound given his history of playoff struggles at that end of the floor. Without him, they're light on ball-handlers who can create and leverage advantages. There's a reason their offense devolved mostly into isos for Giannis and Middleton down the stretch. At his best, Bledsoe can reliably attack seams and get to the rim, or collapse the defense and spray passes out to shooters. He's also effective attacking in transition, which is something Milwaukee struggled to do.

Giannis' free-throw woes are a huge - and familiar - problem

Giannis has proven in the past that he can be a competent free-throw shooter. He's shot as well as 77% from the stripe in a season and hit 73% of his freebies just last year. But, for whatever reason, that passable rate has never carried over into the postseason. His career playoff free-throw percentage is 62.8%, compared to 72.2% in the regular season. Things reached a nadir last spring when he shot a disastrous 58.3% from the line in the conference finals, with a ton of ugly misses that barely grazed the rim if they touched it at all. He missed 25 free throws in a series during which the Bucks were outscored by a total of six points.

Has he gotten in his own head? Because he hasn't seemed to recover from last spring's brickfest. Even as he had his best 3-point shooting season (when considering both volume and accuracy), he hit a career-worst 63.3% of his free throws this year, and that mark is down to 55.8% in the playoffs. On Monday, he clanked his way to 4-of-12 from the line, turning an otherwise efficient shooting performance (6-of-12 from the field, 2-of-5 from deep) into 18 points on 18 possessions. Many of the misses weren't close. One was an airball.

It was particularly disappointing because most of Giannis' trips to the line were the result of positive work by the Bucks' offense, including a couple of possessions in which he screened and slipped in the pick-and-roll and pinned a smaller defender in the post. That's the kind of stuff Milwaukee needs to do more of, so to see those turn into empty trips because he couldn't convert at the line was frustrating, to say the least.