The Heat have talked openly about how facing three of the league’s top five defenses over the last three rounds has taken the fast-paced style out of their offense. Great defenses, with weeks to scout a single opponent, don’t fall for the whirring decoy actions all over the floor, or scramble themselves out of position, or forget for a second which shooters demand constant attention and which do not. Miami’s high-flying motion bogs down into stasis, both because the shot clock is dying, and because the Heat simply abandon it for simpler things in the face of a defense that renders the complex ineffective. Great defenses, the Heat will tell you, just take you out of your game for long stretches.

This Finals series is reminding us that the same is true on the other end — that a great offense, a relentlessly great offense, can take a defense out of its game. It can get in a defense’s head, forcing painful adjustments, lineup changes, fatal overthinking, and mental fatigue. The Spurs’ offense has imposed its will on this series, and they have the Heat reeling in ways no team has managed since the 2011 Mavericks. “Our defense tonight,” Shane Battier said after the game, “was unacceptable.”

And he’s right, in a way. Miami made mistakes we’d associate with an out-of-sorts team battling fatigue, frustration, and total bewilderment. In the second quarter, Mario Chalmers just stopped paying attention to his man, Danny Green, as Green trotted along the baseline and popped out the other side for a wide-open 3-pointer — at least the third or fourth such triple Green has hit in this series via that simple cut. About a minute later, Chris Bosh, worried about a possible pick-and-roll that hadn’t actually happened yet, just abandoned Tim Duncan to double-team Tony Parker — leaving a shocked Mike Miller to foul Duncan under the basket:

We forgot about it because of the scary things LeBron James did in the second half of Game 2 on Sunday, but Miami’s defense was strangely off for much of that win. They lost track of Danny Green on two 3-pointers, errors of miscommunication that resulted in shrugged shoulders, the kind of stuff championship teams leave behind in April. Kawhi Leonard took advantage of lazy or nonexistent boxouts on two offensive rebounds, and he back-cut a ball-watching LeBron late in the first quarter.

It recalled the listless Heat that allowed an offensively challenged Celtics team to ring up Spurs-level scoring numbers through the first five games of last season’s Eastern Conference finals. That team mostly cleaned things up after getting Chris Bosh back. This Heat team cleaned things up in Game 2 with one of the most devastating 15 minutes of basketball the league has ever seen.

Last night, they were awful defensively for the entire game. They can be bad defensively and get away with it against some teams. But this is the NBA Finals, against a brilliant and unselfish San Antonio team, and the Heat will lose just like this if they continue to make very basic NBA mistakes.

It's been six weeks, but after three rounds and 78 playoff games, we're here. The NBA Finals. We did it. This is our reward for sitting through the Bulls-Nets series.

And if you're a little bit exhausted after the past few rounds of hoops, that's totally understandable. But in a few weeks basketball will be over, and all we'll be left with for the summer is baseball. So savor this. Especially since we're getting one of the best Finals matchups of the past decade. With that in mind, let's get right to it with a breakdown of who's involved.

So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.

Motivational Speaking

(All GIFs by @HeyBelinda)

Chris Ryan: Here's LeBron's "clear eyes, full hearts, pass me the ball or I will eat your dreams" speech that had everyone buzzing last night. What do you think he's saying here? In my mind, it's a mix of Alec Baldwin's "I am God” speech from Malice, a Maori war chant, Samuel L. Jackson's "You think water's fast? You should see ice!" speech from Deep Blue Sea, Drew Brees's pregame barking, profanity, threats to finally collect on loans that he has doled out, utter disbelief that Lance Stephenson wears And1s, and sincere questions about the intestinal fortitude of everyone in front of him. LeBron looks like a linebacker, and now I guess he talks like Ray Lewis.

The Cleveland Show

Andrew Sharp: Just add it to the list.

LeBron's third quarter last night goes right next to his 48 points against the Pistons in 2007, almost everything he did against the Magic in the 2009 Eastern finals, everything he did to the Bulls in 2011, Game 6 in Boston, his Finals masterpiece, and probably 20 or 25 other murderous works of art I'm forgetting. It's been a gift and a curse for Bron ever since that '07 Pistons series. The more he's given us what we wanted, the more often we've demanded it.

But we're getting it. In Game 3, he went into the post and bullied the Pacers from the inside out with the post game we'd always wanted from him. In Game 5, after a lifeless first half that had a lot of us wondering if maybe the Pacers were really going to pull this off, LeBron came out and destroyed EVERYTHING.

LeBron scored or assisted on 24 points in 3Q. Pacers only scored 13 as a team.

— Brian Windhorst (@WindhorstESPN) May 31, 2013

Let’s set aside all the nonsense for a second — the outrageously bad blown 24-second call on the Pacers, the laughable officiating, the obsession with flopping that distracts from a beautiful game, and all the rest of the ancillary crap. In the big picture, the Pacers have split four games with a team that had entered the series 45-3 in its prior 48 games. And they've done it for two reasons:

1. Indiana’s offense, which ranged from bad to mediocre all season, has sliced apart Miami at a rate of 111.3 points per 100 possessions — a mark that would have led the league in the regular season, and more than 10 points better than the Pacers managed in either of their first two series. The Pacers finished the season 19th in points per possession. Miami finished seventh in points allowed per possession.

Bill Simmons calls Zach Lowe and basketball gambler Haralabos Voulgaris to discuss the first two rounds of the NBA playoffs and the league's best coaches.

To listen to this podcast, download it on iTunes here or listen at the ESPN.com Podcenter.

In preparation for the NBA playoffs, this is the first of four entries breaking down one key play or action central to the success of each playoff-bound team. Check back later this week for the remaining 12 breakdowns.

New York Knicks: The Carmelo Anthony Iso

New York was considered a relative afterthought in the Eastern Conference before the season started, but thanks to a shift in its offensive philosophy, the Knicks now represent the biggest threat to Miami. Their explosive offensive scheme leans heavily on their star forward to create mismatches in isolation plays all over the floor.

Knicks coach Mike Woodson gets Anthony into these spots in two ways. The first is by using false action.

By using a loop cut or quick down screen, the Knicks give Anthony just a little separation in order to cleanly get to his spot and use his jab-attack game. But because the team has played a vast majority of the season with one lone big (or sometimes none at all), it's also been able to just let Anthony walk into isos without any help.

The key to Anthony’s success is the newfound space he has to operate. With shooters spread around him, teams are forced to pick between letting Anthony attack an overmatched defender one-on-one or leaving an open shooter on the perimeter.

Even in a game featuring LeBron James and Kobe Bryant, the first 40 minutes of last night's Lakers-Heat game had been filled with typical, mid-January schedule filler play. Within the game’s first few minutes, James had already put down two dunks worth the price of admission, but his performance was all anyone had gotten. Bryant was 3-for-16 from the field. Clanking just about every jump shot it took, Miami looked like a team playing a back-to-back on the 10th day of a 10-day road trip. The Lakers looked like a team that isn’t very good. Then, with the game tied at 78, with 7:22 left in the fourth quarter, James launched his first 3 of the night, and as his only bucket from outside the paint dropped through the net, the game everyone had hoped for began.

We went through this last season with Miami. The Heat allowed the fourth-most 3-point attempts in the league — while playing at a below-average pace — and watched opponents hit a whopping 36.3 percent of those 3s. From 1998-99 through 2010-11, only two of the 48 conference finalists finished the regular season having allowed both an above-average number of 3-point attempts and an above-average opponent shooting percentage on long balls. Those two teams — the 2001 Bucks and 2006 Suns — were essentially right at the league average in one of the two categories once you adjusted for pace; the Heat were awful at both, a terrible historic omen for their title chances in a league that has long since embraced the 3 as a must-have weapon. Then the playoffs happened.

I’ve heard it from a few NBA players over the last couple of years: The plays and rotations a team uses in Game 1 will be long scrapped by playoff time. Tonight is a big night, with one glamour matchup, but it’s also just the first in a long journey of experiments, failures, discovery, and injury luck that will take a million little twists. Still, that glamour matchup provides an interesting window into the current state of a defending champion that made itself over on the fly during the playoffs, and one would-be contender that did so by working the intricacies of the cap in a brilliant offseason. That Boston reloaded with Miami specifically in mind makes the matchup even more intriguing. Five things to watch:

1. Rotations

This is really the only thing that matters, perhaps even more so than the result of the game. Right from the announcement of the starting lineups, we get to see how committed Miami is to a position-less version of small ball with LeBron James at power forward, and how aggressively Boston will adjust its own rotation to account for it. The Heat will likely start the lineup that saved their season in May and June — Mario Chalmers, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, LeBron James, and Shane Battier.

Last August, I watched Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra hoist a giant jug of coconut wine in his uncle's backyard in Los Baños, Philippines, and tell his family that next year, he hoped to bring back an NBA championship trophy. It was the closest Spoelstra, the famously self-effacing and tight-lipped coach, would come to bluster during the week I spent following him through Metro Manila and nearby provinces. Back then, the lockout rules forbid him from even uttering the names LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, but I heard from coaches in the local professional league that Spoelstra spent more time questioning them about their offensive sets and strategies for breaking zone defenses than holding forth on what it was like to coach two of the best five basketball players on the planet. When I got to speak with him, our conversation followed a similar pattern: He asked me about life in the Philippines, how to hail a jeepney in Manila, and how weird it felt to call next in a street corner pickup game when I was a 6-foot-3 white guy. Now, there are hundreds of factors that go into making a championship team and coach — luck being a pretty damn big one — but I think Spoelstra's patience and open mind are important aspects of his success. The man seemed to treat every experience as an opportunity to learn something new and useful, and that seems like as good a recipe for improvement as there is. This year, Spoelstra and the Miami Heat certainly improved on their finish in the 2011 NBA Finals, and though there's really no way to improve on "NBA champions," Spoelstra will keep searching for ways to learn more about his craft and the world, and to make himself and his team even better.

So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.

The Gift

There's a natural inclination to view sports in relation to culture around these parts. And, don't get me wrong, I stand by my never-published Gmail manifesto about Mario Chalmers being Mouth from Goonies. But watching Miami win the NBA championship Thursday night, something that seemed both inevitable and impossible at various times over the course of the season, I kept coming back to the books on my shelf, the songs in my iTunes, and the movies on my screen.

And this isn't because I was looking to compare LeBron James to something. It was because I was looking to compare the experience of LeBron James to something. I've watched — we've watched — pretty much every minute of these playoffs, and every minute LeBron James spent on the floor. But Thursday night, I got the same feeling watching LeBron as I did finishing Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, or the first time I saw the Copacabana scene in Goodfellas.

In case you were out living a life of leisure, here's what you missed in sports on Wednesday.

• Kevin Durant's 34 points and 14 boards led the Oklahoma City Thunder to a 107-99 win over the San Antonio Spurs and an NBA Finals berth. A despondent Tim Duncan began his postgame comments on a melancholic note. "I used to rule the world," he said. "Seas would rise when I gave the word. Now in the morning I sleep alone … sweep the streets that I used to own." He continued in this vein for about two minutes as some reporters began to realize he was quoting a Coldplay song. The rest of them picked up on it when he sprang up for the chorus, ripped off his shirt, and pumped both fists as he sang, "I hear Jerusalem bells a ringing! Roman cavalry choirs are singing!"
• Martin Brodeur made 21 saves as the New Jersey Devils beat the Kings 3-1 to avoid a sweep in the Stanley Cup finals. Kings coach Darryl Sutter kept a brave face, but when he finally got a moment alone, after the game, he broke down weeping and called his wife. "Those decorative brooms I made?" he said. "One for each player? So festive, so vibrant? Burn them. Maybe then I'll stop dreaming like a stupid little boy. A STUPID LITTLE BOY! A STUPID LITTLE BOY! A STUPID LITTLE BOY!"

Miami coach Erik Spoelstra, just hours before tip-off for Heat-Pacers Game 6, This Time It's Personal: "In nine games now there's been over a dozen hard fouls to the face, some of the tomahawk variety, some have drawn blood …"

Tomahawk, huh? Spoelstra jumps right into the Official Heat-Pacers What Did He Just Say? Power Rankings. Glad you asked:

So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.

Wade-ing in the Deep

I would like to think that Dwyane Wade's meltdown is some sort of karmic payback for tossing Mike Bibby's sneaker. You get back what you give into this world, man. Just so happens that Heat coach Erik Spoelstra got back a little of it, as well. In the third quarter of a game that Wade would just as soon go to the Total Recall machine to have wiped from his memory, the Heat guard missed a few shots and seemingly coasted back on defense while the Pacers were on the break. This bothered the Heat coach and that, in turn, enraged Wade.