2011 NBA Champion Details Mavericks' Perfect Game Plan Against Heat, LeBron James

The Dallas Mavericks have one of the most impressive championships in NBA history, as they took down an impressive list of All-Stars and future Hall-of-Famers in 2011. While Dirk Nowitzki carried the torch for most of the playoff run, their defensive effort in the NBA Finals against the Miami Heat is what made the biggest difference.

NBA pundits and analysts label the 2011 NBA Finals as the biggest blemish on the resume of LeBron James, and for good reason. That was arguably the worst 6-game stretch of his NBA career, and it came with a championship on the line.

A member of that championship team, Brendan Haywood, detailed the team's strategy against LeBron James and why he believed it worked on the TFU Podcast.

"At that point, LeBron had certain holes in his game," Haywood started. "We had an All-Star coaching staff. We had Rick Carlisle, we had Dwane Casey... We had Terry Stotts... They came together with this incredible game plan, they were like, 'Listen, guys, this is what LeBron James shoots from the field in the playoffs.' It was like 57%. They said, 'This is what he shoots outside of 15 feet... Outside of that, he shoots like 20%. Everything is about packing the paint. We don't care about what no one else do, we gotta be boxes, elbows, we're going under screens, we got to be tight.'

"Everything was about keeping him out of the lane. We respect [Dwyane] Wade, [LeBron] is the head of the snake. If we gotta leave someone wide open, we gotta make that lane look cluttered because we have to stop that guy. Everything we had was about not letting LeBron dominate from 15 feet on in. We also knew we could guard him with smaller players because, at that point in his career, he didn't like to post up...

"One of the key components in that series is we pulled Shawn Marion off of LeBron James and put him on D-Wade, because D-Wade was posting up [Jason] Kidd. D-Wade had a helluva series. We had to put Shawn on him to slow him down, and that's how we started getting the mismatches where we had the smaller guys on LeBron... On the flip side, he was being forced to chase Jason Terry around screens, and that's the best way to attack LeBron."

One of the better conversations around the 2011 finals that ive heard pic.twitter.com/sn14Qe6fCr
— MarzTalksSports (@MarzTalksSports) May 16, 2026

Dallas Mavericks Played Mind Games With LeBron James

Brendan Haywood admits that the pressure of going to Miami and the spotlight probably got to LeBron James, as well as the wild plan the Mavs' coaches concocted. He came back the next season more willing to go to the post and take advantage of the mismatches.

James averaged just 17.8 PPG in that series. It's his only playoff series out of 57 in which he averaged below 22 PPG. That's how great the plan was for the Mavs.

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