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.

There have been so many possessions in this series during which I’ve thought to myself, It is shocking that the Kings are in the same professional basketball league as these two teams. You could substitute a half-dozen or so teams in place of Sacramento; the Kings, for whatever reason, have been my go-to symbol of NBA incompetence and incoherence for at least three seasons, even as the Bobcats have trumped everyone with their sheer ability to lose games.

Point being: Miami and Indiana are awesome. Part of my job is to apportion blame and credit — to watch and rewatch possessions for clues on what may have gone wrong three or four steps before a layup, what blip of confusion/laziness resulted in a profitable transition opportunity, or what spacing issues might have sabotaged an otherwise very nice offensive possession.

In the predawn of July 7, 2012, a very wealthy cruise-ship magnate got out of his English bed and sent out a tweet.

“Its 2:30am in London and I was just woken up with great news. Welcome to the family #20!!”

Micky Arison, the owner of the Miami Heat, had just used Twitter to announce that Ray Allen, the most accomplished 3-point shooter in NBA history, had agreed to take his jumper to South Beach. The defending NBA champion had just landed the most prized free agent on the market. It was equal parts shocking and unfair.

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.

Pray 4 Lance

(All GIFs by @HeyBelinda)

netw3rk: Look at this lady in the front row, catching that holy ghost from Born Ready Lance Stephenson. This is what playoff basketball does to people. It causes folks with the means to drop five figures on front-row seats to react to corner 3s like their dog is being rescued from a well. It forces arena staff to have to come out onto the court and haul middle-aged white ladies to their feet as the aforementioned ladies jabber in the gibberish tongues of the ancient saints. Lance caught the ball in the corner with two seconds left and rainbowed it like he was trying to get a kite out of a tree, right in the face of a hard Dwyane Wade closeout. Cue the church organ.

There’s reckless abandon, and then there’s Lance Stephenson pulling down a rebound and fast-breaking like he’s running from an avalanche. Dude is just as likely to throw the ball into the stands after trying a 100 mph spin move on three defenders as he is to make a layup. But the Pacers played the sixth-slowest pace this season and desperately need a guy who can handle the ball while running like his child is about to crawl into an intersection. During last season's playoffs, Lance’s major contribution to the cause was his LeBron-targeted autoasphyxia mimicry. This year, in Pacers playoff wins Lance is averaging 12 points on 51 percent shooting from the floor, and 6.8 points on 25 percent shooting in losses. X factor, agent of chaos, loose cannon, whatever you want to call him; when Lance plays well, the Pacers win. Looks like all that time spent under the tawny wing of Larry Hoosier Legend learning how to be ready is paying off.

Plus he’s flopping now, too, so you know he’s thinking strategically.

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.

Force of Nature

(All GIFs by @HeyBelinda)

Danny Chau: It happened too damn fast.

I kept replaying the video over and over again, but every time I paused, backtracked, and pressed play, LeBron would already be a step away from the hoop, about to win the game for Miami. I wasn’t looking for the result, obviously. I was looking for anything that could help explain how he did it. With the power of DVR and YouTube, I should’ve had the upper hand. But even when I had complete control over his movement, I couldn’t keep up with LeBron.

His game-winning layup was unbelievable. Maybe if he had caught the ball while he darted to the basket after a curl, maybe it would’ve made sense then. That’s not what happened, though. He caught the ball with his body facing away from the hoop. His left leg was planted far out, and he took half a beat, probably less, before making his move. Just as Paul George came up close with a little too much velocity, LeBron turned and bulleted to the hole. The entire play took two seconds. It took LeBron less than two seconds to recognize where George was, where he was going to be, and where his lane would open up once George made the inevitable mistake. Game 1’s fate was sealed (let’s be honest here: with or without Roy Hibbert’s presence) the moment that left leg, planted back behind the 3-point line for leverage, propelled LeBron forward on the drive.

This news cycle will be brimming with criticism over Frank Vogel’s decision to sit Hibbert on the final play, because with LeBron, it’s a lot easier to rationalize what didn’t happen than to rationalize what did. That’s just how we respond to LeBron. It was awfully fun picking at his psyche last season. The convenient narratives helped distract us from the inexplicable wonder of his game. But now those safety blankets are gone. All that’s left is LeBron’s unfettered greatness, which is so omnipresent it's often taken for granted, like nature. Have you ever tried to explain nature?

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

1. Carmelo Anthony

There was something quiet about Carmelo Anthony's 50-point game in Miami last night. Maybe it was the already reserved Heat crowd seeming downright sunburned and hungover, with one eye on their postgame Chilean sea bass. Or maybe it had more to do with the absence of LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. Or the fact that the Knicks game felt like a coming attraction in the shadow of the blockbuster entertainment that would take place in Los Angeles a couple of hours later. Whatever the reason, it didn't feel like a 50-point game.

Early in Denver's game with Phoenix on March 11, as a deflection sent the ball into the hands of Denver's Andre Iguodala, his teammate Wilson Chandler took off toward the opposite rim. As Iguodala moved the ball toward the center of the floor with a series of high, hard dribbles, forcing two retreating Phoenix defenders to shift toward him, an open pathway to the rim began to emerge in front of Chandler, bounding along the right flank. A quick shovel pass from Iguodala was easily secured by the galloping Chandler, who needed only two long, explosive strides to soar past a helpless Luis Scola for a vicious, two-handed dunk.

In the early part of this century, a shift in power caused the lines of ACC hate to blur. Duke and Maryland were responsible for two of the first three national championships, and as North Carolina sputtered through the Matt Doherty era, the enmity between the Blue Devils and Terrapins came to a boil. “[It was worst] at Maryland,” J.J. Redick says. “That’s when there was still a rivalry there, dating back to the Miracle Minute and Maryland winning in 2002. It was pretty heated for my first couple years there.”

There were times when the hate actually was hateful. Shelden Williams carried a 2003 incident in College Park with him for his four years at Duke, and Redick said during one game members of the Maryland crowd invoked the name of his then 12-year-old sister.

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.

It’s never too early in an NBA season to judge a player or team’s performance — just ask Mike Brown. The season has just begun, but important trends are already emerging. Some are familiar; some are brand-new. In terms of scoring, as of Friday, NBA players had made 11,039 out of their 24,940 shots (44.2 percent), which is slightly down from last season’s 44.8 percent, which was slightly down from the 2010-11 season mark of 45.8 percent. Looking at scoring across the league on a team-by-team basis, some interesting things start to emerge. One of them is the disparity between two teams in the NBA’s Southeast division: Miami and Washington. It's been a tale of two cities. In one, we see unmatched offensive firepower. In the other, it’s a tale of woe.

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.

Confession: The screeching debate over flopping, which peaked last week with the NBA announcing new anti-flop penalties, has left me largely unmoved. Some reasons:

1. Flopping, in the broadest sense, is going to be part of every team sport with referees and penalties. Flopping and its subtler cousins are unavoidable even when governing bodies make rules specifically to prohibit them.

2. I remain unconvinced that the NBA has a significant flopping “problem,” and in a way, the NBA’s new anti-flopping regulations confirm that suspicion. Flopping happens, obviously. But there is only one category of flop that is truly problematic, in terms of having an impact on the scoring margin of a game: The totally fabricated contact that fools an official into calling a foul that doesn’t exist in any way.

3. I’ve no scientific evidence for this, because none exists, but I’d bet very good money this flop type constitutes a tiny minority of all floppish behavior. Why?

Part of the reason the tiresome LeBron James/Kobe Bryant debate lingers on is that they’ve never, ever played a meaningful game. All-Star antics and a handful of regular-season meetings aren’t enough to shift either party’s ideological platform. Kobe has five championship rings. LeBron is statistically superior. Kobe has played with an outlandish collection of talent. LeBron is a choker. Stop me if you’ve heard any of these arguments screamed at high, spittle-flecked volume before.