This is no ballet, that’s for sure.

If you like your basketball full of grace and speed and things that are otherwise attractive to the senses, this isn’t the playoff series for you. This is something else entirely, the description for which lies somewhere between the second and third acts of Mad Max: Fury Road.

There’s a good reason for the current state of affairs. It’s not for lack of talent, nor are the Miami HEAT and Toronto Raptors unable to execute their chosen strategies. Quite the opposite. You don’t continue to get one ugly game after another when there’s this much talent on the floor unless someone is doing something right.

And boy did the HEAT do some things right in knotting the series at 2-2 with a 94-87 overtime victory – all while limiting the Raptors to 12-of-26 shooting at the rim and an offensive efficiency of just 84.2.

With both Hassan Whiteside and Jonas Valanciunas missing from the active rosters due to knee and ankle injuries, respectively, the HEAT had some decisions to make. For the majority of their postseason journey, and for that matter much of the regular season, Miami’s defense had been constructed around the simple idea of directing traffic toward the length and athleticism of Whiteside. Without the primary gear in the clock to keep it running, questions abound for how Miami could keep one of the best attacking teams in the league out of the paint.

“We didn’t have our rim protector,” Justise Winslow said. “So we didn’t have the luxury of funneling guys to the basket and having Hassan save a lot of possessions.”

The answers involved invoking an old foe.

Any good defense considers the painted area in the middle of the floor their property. And what do you do if you want to keep potential usurpers, be they pestering neighbors or an undead horde wandering in from the frozen wastes, off your property? You build a wall.

It wouldn’t be fair to put the weight of an entire defensive system on the shoulders of Amar’e Stoudemire, Udonis Haslem and Josh McRoberts no matter how well they had held up over the course of the season. They would need some help keeping Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan out of the paint, and the form that help took Monday night was that of a third defender.

No, not the chuck coming over to tag the roll man as we used to see on a daily basis from Miami’s old aggro-style of defense. Fortunately, for Miami, they were able to lay off Bismack Biyombo’s rim rolls. Instead, the help was coming high and it was coming early.

Whenever Lowry or DeRozan came off a screen for one of the dozens of pick-and-rolls they run over the course of an evening, the nearby wing player would stunt off their man and into the driving lane long enough to hold the ball at bay until everyone could recover from the initial screen.

Pick. Wall. Pick. Wall. Pick. Wall. Every time help was available, it was there. Even if it meant committing the cardinal sin of helping off a shooter in the strong-side corner.

“It’s different without Hassan,” Luol Deng said. “He makes big plays, big blocks. When you don’t have a guy like that, we just did a good job of stopping the ball. We’re just really locking in to what they’re doing. In the pick-and-roll we’re trying to stop the ball instead of just meeting them at the rim.”

In motion it looked like this, with both Lowry and DeRozan thwarted in the same possession.

In actuality the HEAT have been using this sort of coverage for the entire series – hence the overall lack of fluidity – it was just prominent and consistently executed in Game 4. When you can’t replace a player, you have to do everything else better.

“We know that those two guys, Lowry and DeRozan, they’re going to take their shots,” Goran Dragic said. “We’re trying to make it tough on them. Last game we felt like we didn’t shrink the floor well, and tonight we did an amazing job.”

Limiting the Raptors to just 26 potential assists and merely 12 real ones, with 9-of-30 shooting on pull-up jumpers, probably fits the criteria just fine.

Miami has been on the receiving end of these walls themselves. In the 2013 NBA Finals, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich may as well have dug a trench and filled it with water he was so determined to keep LeBron James and Dwyane Wade out of the paint. The HEAT eventually overcame, but it took some serious growing pains and being pushed as close to the brink as is gravitationally possible without tumbling over the edge.

The general theme is the same now as it was in the enemy’s hands then. It’s not just about daring the Raptors to shoot over the top of the defense, it’s daring the Raptors to make quick decisions with the ball – and if they’re going to shoot, either off the catch or the bounce, that shot better be spring-loaded.

If they were going to make a shot…

It was going to be a tough shot. If they manage to retrieve the baseball signed by Babe Ruth signed by going over, under or around a high fence, you can probably live with that.

“This series is complex,” Erik Spoelstra said. “It’s changing fast. At times teams are able to get to their game, and a lot of times they’re not because of the competition and because the margin of error is so small, you just have to find a way to make plays.”

Scheme only takes you so far, of course. The continued heroics of Dwyane Wade (30 points on 54 percent shooting in Game 4) in the playoffs may as well be on the pages of a comic book, but even the best defensive tactics known to man require outstanding individual efforts. And on this evening what was required was offered in return as players stayed in front and made plays.

Lose the best shotblocker in the league? There’s Josh McRoberts and Joe Johnson with four blocks between them.

Individual defense helped to unlock Miami’s uber-small lineups which Spoelstra waited to use until late in the game – and wound up a +14 in 9.6 minutes. With Luol Deng and Justise Winslow each acting as a center depending on the possession, Miami’s positionless alignment allowed for constant switching of assignments.

“You can pretty much switch everything,” Johnson said. “It keeps a lot of guys on the court that can make plays offensively.”

When executed with precision, there are few better ways to ensure a man is always between the ball and the basket. Just as long as the man in question holds up one-on-one.

“We just did a good job of switching screens,” Deng said. “We broke up a lot of their plays by switching.”

It’s not all just stunts and shrinks and switching, either. Talented offensive players will eventually figure things out if you only offer a couple flavors.

“We miss Whitey,” Dragic said. “But we already played in the regular season with [Stoudemire as a starter] a lot and of course I feel [Haslem] gives us different looks because of his ability to stay up in pick-and-rolls, or sometimes switch or blitz. It’s a unique situation to have.”

So when things get down to the end of regulation and Lowry or Cory Joseph has the ball in their hands with the chance to win the game – both situations have happened already – and you wonder why the Raptors aren’t running a pick-and-roll, it might be because it introduces an element of the unknown. If you’re playing the clock for the last shot, bringing a second defender can jam things up if you guess the coverage wrong. And if they switch with another good defender, you just wasted valuable seconds.

The ensuring isolation jumper may not look pretty, but there can be a good reason for it just as Miami is doing its part in affecting the overall offensive hardships of the Raptors.

This may not be a series you’ll tell your grandchildren about, but neither team should or will care. It’s their fault, after all. Whoever ends up advancing will be happy to take the blame.