Hibbert and George, like most of the Pacers, are young players on the rise. Unlike veteran-laden teams that are only hoping to stay healthy and gel throughout the year, the Pacers have a number of players on the cusp of their primes. George is at that exciting phase in a young player’s career when he starts to realize just how great he can be. In George, the Pacers may very well have landed that most valuable N.B.A. commodity: a two-way superstar.

But during the season, the Pacers’ offense never eclipsed mediocre even with George and Hibbert firing on all cylinders. That was not the fault of the Pacers’ starters. In fact, if the Pacers’ starting unit could have played 48 minutes a game, it would have had the second best offense in the N.B.A. The problem was that the Pacers have one of the worst bench units in the N.B.A., and in the regular season, Frank Vogel simply could not afford to wear down his best talents by playing them long minutes.

In the playoffs, however, the best players play more, and few teams benefit more from this dynamic than the Pacers. The Pacers’ bench players are so bad that if just one player in the lineup of George Hill, Lance Stephenson, Paul George, David West and Roy Hibbert is unavailable, it immediately and drastically weakens the team.

San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich also tends to play his starters for less time than do many other coaches, but he has the luxury of an effective and offensively explosive bench. In part because his team can thrive without them, Popovich has been praised for his insistence on resting key players. Vogel took a similar, but less heralded, approach, playing Hibbert fewer than 30 minutes a game in the regular season even though Hibbert’s replacement could not approximate his impact.

In the playoffs, Hibbert is up to nearly 40 minutes a game, an enormous, game-changing escalation from his regular-season output.

Against no team could it be more important that Hibbert play 30 percent more than the Heat, because no one deters LeBron James from attacking the rim the way Hibbert does. Just as impressive, he has helped the Pacers unlock the Heat’s defensive scheme by exploiting mismatches when the Heat trap and rotate.

As soon as his man leaves him, whether to help on a pick-and-roll or a driving Pacer, Hibbert rumbles toward the rim looking for the pass or, if his teammate shoots, to collect the offensive rebound. The Heat are disciplined on defense and usually send someone to Hibbert, but the Pacers center is so massive that only one or two Heat players on the court can really bother his shot. What the Heat would usually find an acceptable mismatch between, say, Shane Battier and the other team’s center becomes a disadvantage against Hibbert.