By Grantland Staff at
Jesse D. Garrabant/NBAE via Getty Images
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.
Pagan Rituals
netw3rk: In the Heat’s pregame hype-huddle, Dwyane Wade, ringed by his teammates, screamed “How will we respond?!” To which I tweeted:
“HOW WE GONNA RESPOND?” - The guy whose fault it is.
For most of these playoffs, various pundits, tastemakers, and members of the roundball intelligentsia have been vigorously shoveling dirt onto Wade’s head, face, neck, and chest area and tamping it down with some hard stomps of the loafer. And for good reason. He’s averaging 15.1 points per game this playoffs, down nearly eight points from last year’s 22.8; before Game 4, his PER for these playoffs was down to 17 from last year’s 22; and he’s shooting the second-lowest eFG of his playoff career, behind his injury-hit 2006-07 playoff campaign. The fall-down-seven-times-stand-up-eight Flash of the past was reduced to nothing more than the faint throb of a raver's day-old glow stick. People who get paid to be smart about basketball, and who are much smarter than I about basketball, have wondered aloud if it was time to bring Wade off the bench, à la one-shining-bald-spot Manu Ginobili. My contribution to this discussion was to make a Dwyane Wade Oregon Trail dysentery meme.
So, where the hell did this come from? Wade erupted last night in Krakatoa-ian fashion, scoring 32 points on 14-of-25 shooting. It’s his first time ALL PLAYOFFS scoring more than 30 points and only the third time he’s scored more than 20 (he scored 20 points or more 17 times last playoffs). And it’s not just that he got hot from long range, as players will sometimes do, and just started randomly splashing jumpers like a gambler catching hot cards. He was driving HARD, like the Wade of a million YouTube mixes with his Euro-step set to “Ibiza,” taking 12 shots in the paint, converting 10. It’s even more startling considering Wade tweaked some portion of his lower extremities in the first quarter, causing him to need a trainer to stretch him in a manner usually befitting a safe word. Somewhere, Tim Grover is chanting ancient Aramaic demon spells while sacrificing a rare eagle and burning a human foot in a bonfire.
Game 4 of a series in any 2-1 state has always been my favorite playoff game. If the trailing team wins and ties things at 2-2, each of the following games obviously takes on its own sort of hyper-drama. But for this moment, at 2-1, a single game determines the entire feel of a series, with a giant perception gap between outcomes. If the Spurs win tonight, the series begins to feel like a blowout. The city will have a full 48 hours of downtime to drink, eat, reflect, and prepare for a potential championship celebration on Sunday. And if that win comes with another subpar LeBron James effort, the hysteria level around Miami will reach 2011 Finals volume levels again.
And if Miami wins, it’s 2-2 — dead even, guaranteed to return to DOS MINUTOS territory, with the Heat likely having “found themselves again.” This is what we get to ponder for the next 12 hours or so. What fun.
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.
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.
By Zach Lowe at
Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE/Getty Images
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.
Since the late 1990s, the San Antonio Spurs have built an army of obnoxious, elitist fans whose heads are filled with so much paranoia that most of the team’s misfortunes can only be explained by conspiracy theories. It is probably the most complex fan identity in all of sports, without the strength in numbers to perpetually remind everyone else how obnoxious we are. Very few fans of any team get to experience such a sustained period with their team in serious contention for a championship. The process has resulted in a hyper-educated fan base that looks down upon the rest of the NBA. "Enjoying the Spurs" still remains a local experience that usually feels disconnected from the media context in which "the NBA as a series of topical narratives" is presented. Spurs fans are so crazy that they actually hate everything that most people like about the NBA: Kevin Durant, LeBron James, the rise of new teams, "interesting story lines" that the media pounds into the ground during the regular season, and any alleged "changing of the guard" are empty and fake.
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.
Wrath of the Titan
Andrew Sharp: Thoughts during the first three quarters last night:
• LeBron's gotta come out killing everyone. This is going to be awesome.
• Wait, why isn't LeBron killing everyone?
• Wow, maybe the Spurs defense is just that good.
• Put him in the post, put him in the post.
• Is Danny Green really outplaying LeBron right now?
• [LeBron barely hits rim on fast-break layup.]
• What the hell is happening? Is this 2011?
• He's got a wrap on his knee now. Is he hurt?
• He looks sluggish. Is he tired?
• Is he just psyched out by the Spurs? Were the COLUMNISTS right?
• Oh god. Everyone's going to spend the next 48 hours arguing about what's wrong with LeBron, half the sports world calling him a coward who can't measure up to the Spurs, the other half defending him and wondering why everyone's making such a big deal about the best player in the world suddenly crashing back to earth. Both sides will be equally insufferable and this is so awful. I want to move to Antarctica.
Then the fourth quarter started, and LeBron happened. It started with a jumper falling, then he found Mike Miller for 3 with an outrageous pass, got himself a layup, hit Birdman with another outrageous no-look, nearly destroyed the earth with that Splitter block, and turned the two possessions after that into a Ray Allen 3 and a middle-finger fast-break dunk for himself. All part of a 33-5 run, and then the game was over. LeBron happened.
It's probably unfair to watch basketball like this, obsessing over one player on both sides of the court. But when he explodes like that, you see why we do it.
A look at the two most important shots from last night's Game 1.
It Was the Best of Shots
In their biggest possession of the year, the Spurs were surely going to come up empty. A sequence that began with a pair of screens designed to free Tony Parker from LeBron James had badly broken down. Parker was 16 feet away from the rim, down on his left knee doing some desperate circus dribble. He was harmless, and LeBron James, the world’s best perimeter defender, loomed above him. The game clock read 9.2, the shot clock read 2.0, and this critical possession was on life support.
Parker got up, but his back was to the basket and James was in optimal defensive position, vertically spooning Parker deep in the midrange. Parker picked up his dribble, then pivoted on his left foot as means to at least face the basket and maybe create some separation from James. There was no way this was going to end well.
By Zach Lowe at
Issac Baldizon/NBAE via Getty Images
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.
Miami is a great scoring team that is especially dominant in the two key areas: near the basket and beyond the 3-point line. Their three main scorers, James, Wade, and Bosh, each excel close to the basket, and each has a decent 2-point jump shot.
Game 1 of any series, and especially of the NBA Finals, can be a little funky. LeBron James began last season’s Finals guarding Kendrick Perkins, and Game 1 featured so much switching and so many weird matchups it became difficult to track at times. There was a real feeling-out process.
By Andrew Sharp at
David Santiago/El Nuevo Herald/MCT via Getty Images
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.
By Brett Koremenos at
Jesse D. Garrabant/NBAE via Getty Images
If you’ve tuned in to watch the San Antonio Spurs play at any point this season, you’ve no doubt heard an announcer gush over the team’s elegant offensive system. After years of his teams employing an extraordinarily successful, but unsightly, post-centric system designed around Tim Duncan, over the past few seasons head coach Gregg Popovich has created an exhibition of basketball beauty centered on his point guard, Tony Parker.
The Spurs offensive system can be made to seem almost mystical at times, as if Pop were some basketball wizard waving a magic wand to bring about a cascade of 3-pointers from the ether. In reality, nothing San Antonio does is revolutionary. The team is simply committed to a series of principles that play up the talents of the crafty Parker. Here’s a look at the five tenets of the Spurs offense.
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.
Chris Ryan: With about six minutes left in Game 4, Tony Parker caught a Marc Gasol bear paw in the eye. It happened when the Grizzlies center tried to block the Spurs point guard's 17-foot jumper. Gasol is not an opthamologist, but he did stay in a Holiday Inn Express once, so the big man opted to let his teammates run the break while he tended to Parker. Mike Breen treated Gasol's sportsmanship like he just saw an angel lighting the Olympic torch while singing "Danny Boy." One-eyed Tony, on the other hand, was not having it; he was pissed.
Parker's reaction wasn't too surprising when you recall that a little more than a year ago, he was caught in some Veuve Clicquot cross fire, during a nightclub brawl between the entourages of Drake and Chris Brown. He's a little sensitive when it comes to his peepers.
Parker left the game for two minutes, checked back in with about 4:45 left, and promptly buried an 18-footer to put the Spurs up eight. And then he said "FUCK" on television.
It was the delivery that got me. I knew Parker was one of the best players in the NBA; I didn't need 37 points (25 of which came in the second half) to tell me that. What I didn't know is he was the type of dude to go up the river and kill Colonel Kurtz. This was not the affable French guy telling funny stories about the time "Pop" made him run suicides for missing the third read on a delayed elevator pick-and-roll or whatever. This was a very pissed-off, very dialed-in, very turnt-up, dagger-throwing closer. And he did not want to give the Grizzlies, the city of Memphis, or any member of Three 6 Mafia one little bit of hope. I've always thought Tony Parker was a beautiful basketball player …
