There have been other recent Finals games that have reached a special place where you throw off the analyst hat, close the laptop, and just take it all in with a wide-eyed giddiness and a tension so profound it surprises you. A few that stand out: Boston’s Game 4 comeback from 24 down against the Lakers in 2008; the Mavs’ rally in Miami in Game 2 of the 2011 Finals, a Dirktastic comeback that began after the Heat prematurely gloated on the bench; both Game 2 (Courtney Lee’s missed layup at the buzzer) and Game 4 (Derek Fisher and overtime) of the Lakers-Magic Finals in 2009; the Lakers using unattractive but gutty brute force to rally from 13 down to win Game 7 over Boston three years ago; and Game 5 between Detroit and San Antonio in 2005 — the “Robert Horry Game,” and one of the most underrated great games in league history. Heck, even Games 2 and 4 of last year’s Finals — Durant’s game-tying miss and the controversial non-call in Game 2, Russell Westbrook’s furious 43 points and LeBron’s cramping in Game 4 — were pretty damn awesome.

But in terms of the stakes at hand, the palpable urgency, and the overall quality of play, this was the greatest Finals game since … I’m not sure when. There are a couple of Utah-Chicago games from the 1997 and 1998 Finals that have a place in the discussion, especially the Jordan Flu/Food Poisoning Game, but if you prefer last night’s elimination thriller to that legendary non-elimination game, then you have to reach back into the peak Jordan-Bird-Magic years to find something that compares. That’s how great this game was. I can still barely process it.

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.

10 Thoughts Written Less Than a Minute Afterward

Brian Phillips:

1. I don't know. I don't. I do. Not. Know.

2. That was. What do you even. How would you.

3. I want to see Kawhi Leonard's Blood Meridian of a dunk on Mike Miller depicted in the most fevered Cormac McCarthy prose you could possibly imagine. "And then rising from the hard planks like a pheasant startled by shot the cornrowed elongated youth swung down his arm and it was as if fire fell with his swing and truth fell with it and something fell too that was neither fire nor truth but that could perhaps have been called beauty and that was more terrible than fire or truth by far."

(All basketball GIFs by @HeyBelinda)

4. I want to see Mike Miller's shoe given its own display case in the Hall of Fame.

5. I want John Donne to motherfucking come back from the grave and rewrite "Death Be Not Proud" about Tim Duncan, who is older than sand and who played most of that game like he just cold forgot it. Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, and that's only the first half.

6. Tony Parker's penultimate minute of the fourth quarter. There are no verbs. He killed all the verbs. You've just got: Tony Parker. Ball. Trajectory. Ninety-nine nervous breakdowns. Net.

7. I want to see Ray Allen's 3 at the end of regulation given its own display case in the Hall of Fame. And I want the placard text to be about Danny Green. And I want the rest of the Hall of Fame closed forever.

8. There's going to be a Game 7 in the series. Just sit with that for a second.

9. How can you even. I mean. Where do you find the.

10. Basketball is a drug.

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.

Hustle Hard

(All GIFs by @HeyBelinda)

Danny Chau: One hard-fought game that went down to the wire, two remarkable blowouts; two unreal 3-point barrages from Danny Green, three confounding performances from LeBron James, each with a different slant on his ever-changing narrative. The series has been all over the place, and while the Spurs obviously have the advantage at this point, back-to-back blowouts don’t tell us too much about the course this series is about to take. Between these two great teams, the series will likely go to whichever is more consistently aggressive. At this point, that favors San Antonio because there hasn’t been anything more consistent in this series than the hustle and effort from Tim Duncan and Kawhi Leonard.

If there’s a possession that neatly tied together every major story line, real and fabricated, emanating from San Antonio’s stirring Game 1 win in Miami, it was this one with about 6:30 left:

Look at all the interesting stuff going on here, just in this freeze-frame:

1. The Heat are running a boring old high pick-and-roll, the most predictable play in basketball. Gone are all the decoy plays and whirring misdirection that made Miami so hard to defend this season. That stuff dotted the game, but as has been the case since the Milwaukee walkover in the first round, Miami for whatever reason — injuries, fatigue, elite opposing defenses — hasn’t been able to find its happy spot for more than a few minutes at a time.

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 Shot

Danny Chau: It might be a bit early for this, but I wonder whether Tony Parker’s shot clock–beating bank shot will end up in a Finals montage 10 or 20 years down the line. Does the sheer impossibility of the moment trump its sloppiness? It was quite a lengthy scramble. Would time constraints force producers to trim a bit off the beginning of the play? Or would they decide that the folly was key to the glory? I’m getting ahead of myself, but in the moment, it sure looked like something timeless.

At first glance, the Spurs and Heat do not seem to have much in common, but one thing they share is a love affair with the corner 3. Across the league, about 6.7 percent of field goal attempts are corner 3s, but Miami shoots 11.3 percent of its shots from the corners, the NBA's highest rate, and San Antonio is third at 9.5 percent.

The corner 3 has become the most lauded jump shot in the NBA for two reasons: it’s the closest 3-point shot on the floor — about 1 foot shorter than “above the break” 3s — and stashing great shooters in the corners creates annoying headaches for defenses. When a sharpshooter is loitering in the corner — especially on the weak side — he is necessarily about as far away from the action as he can be while still posing a huge scoring threat. As a result, a good corner man “stretches” the defense in ways that other players can’t. Both NBA finalists are really good at exploiting this tactic, and both feature a duo of corner-3 specialists.

We here at Grantland love doing power rankings, and I especially love comic strips. Thus, inspired by this "Dilbert" comic, I present the first-ever Grantland edition of NBA Playoffs Hair Power Rankings (NPHPR for short).

The title is pretty self-explanatory. Opinions may vary; scoring is arbitrary. My friend pulled my arm to get the remote out of my hand earlier so now my head hurts and I'm not thinking clearly. My dog also ate the previous draft of this because he was displeased with my Sager-esque, green paisley blouse. Feel free to yell at me in the comments about any obvious oversights.

Without further ado …

Honorable Mention: Zach Randolph

Z-Bo would've made this list for real except for the fact that I would be giving him 37/20 points based on the headband alone (-5 for the very average hair). There's a reason it's referred to as a headband. It does not relate to hair. Sorry, Z-Bo, maybe next time. After all, it took LeBron only nine years to win something huge, and he has a headband, too. (That is also one of the reasons Z-Bo gets the Honorable Mention nod and not LeBron; sometimes we just have to learn to share the wealth.) Good things are coming your way, though, Mr. Randolph — I can feel it. Just not today. Total: -5/20

Rooting for a perpetually hopeless franchise will drive you insane for a number of reasons. You know this. But you know when it gets really bad? The playoffs, when you have to watch players your team passed up dominate on another team. Actually that's not it, either. It gets REALLY bad when you watch someone like Kawhi Leonard dominating for the Spurs and realize that this never would've happened if he'd landed with your team.

This epiphany is the most crushing truth of them all.

I'm speaking from experience as a Wizards fan, and after a month of watching the NBA playoffs, we need to talk about this for a minute. The Wizards passed on Leonard to draft Jan Veseley in 2010. It seemed crazy at the time and has only gotten worse as the years have passed. But if we're being honest here, watching Leonard blossom into a two-way star for the Spurs isn't even what's frustrating. It's knowing that if Veseley had been the one who was drafted by the Spurs, he'd probably turn into a weapon for years to come, and if Leonard went to the Wizards, he'd probably turn into an über-athletic wing with limited skills who becomes indistinguishable from about 50 other wing players in the NBA.

A survey of the players and teams making moves in last night's NBA action.

1. Stephen Curry, Point Guard?

(All GIFs by @HeyBelinda)

Chris Ryan: With about nine minutes left in the third quarter and the Spurs holding on to a slipping six-point lead over the Warriors, Stephen Curry raced up the court off an Andrew Bogut rebound. Curry is not a normal point guard, so the normal rules of playing the position don't apply to him. This of course, is part of the fun of watching Stephen Curry over the last couple of weeks. He played like ... Stephen Curry, showing off a skill set so unique, on a pair of ankles so brittle, it felt like you were watching some endangered species. Like you sat down in your living room and boom, what in the shit, there was an Iberian lynx.

A survey of the players and teams making moves in last night's NBA action.

1. The Kawhi Leonard–for–George Hill Trade

Danny Chau: It was a good night for the 2011 trade that sent George Hill to the Pacers and the draft rights to Kawhi Leonard to the Spurs. At the time, it was a shrewd attempt from both franchises to patch up their more glaring weaknesses. The Pacers needed a versatile, two-way player to fill in the gaps left in the Pacers’ backcourt, and the Spurs needed an infusion of youth, a lottery-type talent that they hadn’t been able to acquire since Tim Duncan (really fitting that Leonard fell one spot outside the lottery). Now, less than two years later, the trade is one of the reasons why each team is only one win away from their respective conference finals.

Hill and Leonard were incredible last night. Hill was the only bright spot in the Pacers offense, which shot 35.4 percent without him (his 9-for-14 outing single-handedly raised that figure to 40.8 percent), while Leonard, who was nearly perfect from the field, shooting 7-for-8, was the model of efficiency for a Spurs team that couldn’t miss.

Hill has been exactly what the Pacers needed to make this kind of playoff push. Like Mike Conley Jr., who is rightfully getting a lot of buzz right now, Hill will likely never be an All-Star, but his role as a game manager and a sneaky offensive threat sets a standard for the Pacers offense. He’s provided a steadying influence for the once-wild Lance Stephenson and allayed Paul George’s growing pains in his ascent to stardom.

Leonard, like Hill in his days as a Spur, plays a significant role as a fourth option, never hijacking the attention for too long. It was frustrating to watch Hill at times, knowing he was capable of more, but there was always going to be a ceiling to his contributions playing behind Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. There is no such limit for Leonard, but he often plays like there is. His youthful reticence and by-the-book abidance to the system is partly the cause, but we also might be asking too much of him too soon in the first place.

Fortunately, there’s still time, because it seems likely both teams will advance. Last night was a good example of what these players are capable of when let loose. It wasn’t a trade that heavily tipped the scales at the time, but both teams have come away as big winners since.

2. The Basketball Koans of Metta World Peace

Knicks are trying to find themselves on the go. Kinda like take out food or a drive thru. They can't find the ketchup. >>>>>

— Metta World Peace (@MettaWorldPeace) May 15, 2013

netw3rk: In his inimitable, fractured, non sequitur way, Metta World Peace perfectly summed up the Knicks', and Mike Woodson’s, strategic efforts against the Pacers last night in Game 4. And listen, regardless of what lineups Woodson puts on the floor at whatever junction of the game, the Pacers are the best defensive team in the league. They have excellent rim protection, the athleticism to guard Melo, and they are the best in the league at defending the 3-pointer. They are the better team. OK, fine, but in what universe is playing Pablo Prigioni — who you could easily argue is New York's best point guard — 3 minutes and 26 seconds TOTAL, while giving Jason Kidd, who at this point is ambulating around the court sheerly by rigor mortis, almost 16 minutes?

When the Warriors lost David Lee to what the team assumed was a season-ending injury in the team’s first playoff game, I was skeptical that Golden State would be able to reconstruct its offense on the fly against an opponent devoting nearly 100 percent of its scouting resources to the Warriors. It wasn’t that Lee was some kind of indispensable two-way destroyer for the Dubs; he’s a very clear minus on defense, and though he puts up gaudy individual rebounding numbers every season, his teams have generally rebounded better with him on the bench.

It was mostly that Lee was such a central cog in just about every Warriors offensive possession. He was by far Golden State’s most common screener for Stephen Curry, and on those deadly pick-and-rolls, Lee could do just about everything — pop for jumpers, roll to the hoop, catch at the foul line, and break down the defense with his dribbling/passing skills. He also soaked up a lot of Golden State possessions with a solid post-up/isolation game, particularly from the left wing. Only Curry attempted more shots per game or used a larger share of Warriors possessions.

A survey of the players and teams making moves in last night's NBA action.

1. The Thunder's Body Language

If you have Insider, you should check out David Thorpe's piece on the chemistry of the Oklahoma City Thunder. There's a lot of speculation in the article, a lot based on the very shaky science of body language, most of it suggesting that this is a more selfish Thunder team than ones we've seen in the past. The piece serves as a reminder that if it's spring, it must be time to judge every time Kevin Durant shakes his hands in the air to demand the ball, every time Russell Westbrook ignores him, and every time Serge Ibaka stares into space. Last night? They looked fine to me.

Amid the buzzer-beaters, heartbreak, and drama in the NCAA tournament, NBA teams are using college basketball’s biggest stage to fine-tune their evaluations of some of the league’s future stars. For someone like Ben McLemore of Kansas or Marcus Smart of Oklahoma State, a brilliant stretch in March will allow them to stake their claim as the no. 1 overall pick in next year’s draft. Regardless of where they are selected, both McLemore and Smart — should they declare — will move on from successful college programs to teams in the professional ranks that aren’t exactly synonymous with winning. During the past two seasons, no team has represented this perennial lottery dweller quite like the Charlotte Bobcats.

After a historically bad season that was partially obscured by a lockout-shortened schedule, the team has continued its futility again this year. In 11 of its past 13 games, Charlotte has been blown out by 14 or more points, an embarrassing stretch that has helped make the team owners of the league’s worst record. Or, in other words, things are going exactly as planned in Charlotte.

Welcome to life in the NBA, where every spring brings not only the excitement of the playoffs, but the unsavory notion of tanking. In a league that rewards losing and incompetence with valuable high draft picks, it pays to be bad. So with organizations like Charlotte, Orlando, and even Portland actively looking to avoid respectability, it’s time to restart the conversation about what tanking does to the competitive nature of the league.

On February 13, the Spurs and Cavaliers were tied at 93 with about 15 seconds left in the game. Dion Waiters was dribbling near midcourt and about to make one of the biggest shots of his career. With just under 14 seconds left, Tristan Thompson set a screen on Kawhi Leonard near the top of the arc, enabling Waiters to advance the ball a little closer to the basket along the left side. As Waiters approached the left elbow, he lunged toward Tim Duncan, but quickly stepped back to create space for a long, off-balance 2-point shot. The ball left Waiters’s hand from about 20 feet out and went through the net with 9.5 seconds remaining. Despite not passing the ball once, the Cavs scored, the score was now 95-93, and Dion made this face:

Not much has changed for the Spurs in the past year. After steamrolling through last year’s compressed scheduled on the backs of their aging stars, only to fall to Oklahoma City one round short of the Finals, the Spurs' brass opted not to make any significant changes to their roster. In some ways, that decision seems to be paying off.

Much like last season, San Antonio is cruising through the regular season, with a 29-11 record and the league’s third best scoring margin (+8.1). Just like it’s been for more than a decade, the Spurs rarely beat themselves. They’re 14-1 against sub-.500 teams, playing the same mistake-free game that led them to four championships between 1999-2007. The difference is that, back then, not beating themselves was enough. Now, the Chris Pauls and Kevin Durants of the world have changed things. With this roster, in this NBA, the Spurs just aren’t good enough.