The San Antonio Spurs dominated the boards 52-36 and rained down an unprecedented three point barrage to blow out the Miami Heat 113-77 and take a 2-1 lead in the NBA Finals. The Spurs shot 16-32 from beyond the arc, setting an NBA Finals single game record for three pointers made. This was the worst playoff loss in Miami Heat history, the worst loss in the LeBron James-Dwyane Wade-Chris Bosh Big Three Era and the third worst loss in NBA Finals history. Danny Green scored a game-high 27 points while shooting 9-15 from the field, including 7-9 from three point range; he has shot 16-23 (.696) from three point range overall and he is the leading scorer in the series (18.7 ppg). Gary Neal scored 24 points while shooting 9-17 from the field, including 6-10 from three point range. Kawhi Leonard contributed 14 points, 12 rebounds and four steals. Tim Duncan had a solid performance: 12 points, 14 rebounds, two blocked shots, 5-11 field goal shooting. It is easy to overlook Duncan when three point bombs are exploding from every direction but his defense in the paint and his post up presence on offense should not be ignored or diminished. Manu Ginobili added seven points and six assists; his deft passing played a role in San Antonio's perimeter shooting prowess. Tony Parker only scored six points but he had a game-high eight assists and just two turnovers before missing most of the fourth quarter due to a hamstring injury; he is scheduled to have an MRI on Wednesday morning and is listed as questionable for game four. If Parker cannot play then that could turn out to be a bigger story than anything else that happened in game three.
Dwyane Wade played very aggressively in the first quarter and then he disappeared for the rest of the game; that has been his pattern recently and it does not seem likely that this will change. He finished with a team-high 16 points (including eight in the first quarter) on 7-15 field goal shooting, five assists, four steals and no rebounds. Whether his leaping ability has been limited by injury or taken away by Father Time, it is evident that Wade has no backup plan when he cannot just elevate over everyone; he has been transformed from an All-Star into a hesitant role player who does not have the footwork or perimeter shot to be a consistent scorer and the Spurs are guarding him like he is a scrub: no double teams are sent his way and he is being dared to shoot any shot outside of six to eight feet.
Chris Bosh is trying to do the right thing, largely abandoning the three point line in favor of the midpost area, but he is an afterthought in Miami's offense; he finished with 12 points, 10 rebounds and four assists. It is fashionable to criticize Bosh when the Heat lose but the reality is that he does not get to touch the ball very often; he is supposed to watch James and Wade dribble around and then be ready to shoot jump shots when they deign to pass him the ball.
LeBron James scored 15 points on 7-21 field goal shooting while grabbing 11 rebounds and passing for five assists but his performance was even worse than those mediocre numbers (by his standards) suggest. James made just two of his first 12 field goal attempts, the second game in a row that he has missed 10 of his first 12 shots, and even after he padded his statistics with a one man 9-0 run late in the third quarter the Heat still trailed 76-63; he did not play aggressively until the game was out of reach and he combined with Wade to shoot 0-8 from the field as the Spurs extended their 50-44 halftime lead to 73-52.
The emergence of Green this season--and especially in this series--is fascinating. Green could barely even get on the court for the 2009-10 Cleveland team that went a league-best 61-21 in the regular season and could very well have won a championship if LeBron James had not quit versus Boston in the playoffs. Just two years later, Green started 38 games for an excellent San Antonio team--and now he has outscored James through the first three games of the 2013 NBA Finals. There is little doubt that Green has matured since his Cleveland days and that he has further developed his skill set, but the larger point is that he did so while starting for one of the league's best teams because they did not have anyone better to put in the game ahead of him--and he did not get the same opportunity in Cleveland precisely because the Cavaliers possessed so much depth, contrary to popular belief. It is true that the Cavaliers never brought in an All-Star in his prime to play alongside James, but that is in no small part because James would not entice such a player to come to Cleveland by definitively saying that he was going to stay in Cleveland. Despite James' refusal to recruit players to come to Cleveland, the Cavaliers' front office built a very deep, defensive-minded team that was good enough to reach the NBA Finals once and to post the NBA's best regular season record in two other campaigns.
Like Danny Green in 2009-10, Shannon Brown could barely get on the court for the 2006-07 Cleveland team that advanced to the NBA Finals; two years later Brown was the first guard off of the bench for the Lakers as they reached the NBA Finals and in the next two seasons Brown was the first guard off of the bench for the Lakers' back to back championship teams. Many pundits claimed that those Lakers were very talented and/or very deep but I made the case that the 2009 Lakers were one of the least talented championship teams of the past two decades. It should be obvious that if a guy who cannot even get off of the bench for one of the 2007 NBA Finalists becomes part of the seven man rotation for a championship team then that championship team is not very talented. Furthermore, look at what happened to those "talented" Lakers since 2009: Lamar Odom, the team's third best player, has looked like garbage since he stopped living off of Kobe Bryant being double-teamed; starting point guard Derek Fisher became a seldom-used reserve in Oklahoma City; Sasha Vujacic and Jordan Farmar--two young players who were endlessly praised by the same media members who still mock LeBron James' Cleveland teammates--are not even in the league anymore! The 2009 Lakers won the championship because Kobe Bryant relentlessly attacked opposing defenses. Here are Bryant's scoring and assist numbers in the 2009 NBA Finals:
Game one: 40 points, eight assists
Game two: 29 points, eight assists
Game three: 31 points, eight assists
Game four: 32 points, eight assists
Game five: 30 points, five assists
Bryant averaged 32.4 ppg and 7.4 apg in that series. He posted the fourth highest scoring average in NBA history for a five game NBA Finals and in the decisive game he led both teams in scoring while also leading the Lakers in assists, steals and blocked shots in addition to grabbing six rebounds and committing just one turnover. Here is part of what I wrote in my series recap:
[LeBron] James certainly had a tremendous postseason but watching Bryant lead the Lakers to the title you could see the significance of some of the skill set advantages Bryant has over James--particularly the ability to consistently make the midrange jump shot: teams simply cannot ever concede that shot to Bryant and thus Bryant is very difficult to single cover in the 15-18 foot area, which opens scoring opportunities for all of his teammates. It is no accident or coincidence that Pau Gasol has played the most efficient ball of his career since joining the Lakers (see below for more on that subject) or that career journeymen like Trevor Ariza and Shannon Brown suddenly become much more productive playing alongside Bryant: Bryant's teammates know that they are going to be wide open and, just as importantly, they know exactly when and where they will be open and they know that Bryant is a willing passer, so all they have to focus on is knocking down wide open shots.
In many ways, Bryant saved his best for last in the 2009 postseason; Jerry West is the only player to match or exceed Bryant's scoring and assists averages in the same NBA Finals. West won the NBA's first Finals MVP in 1969 after averaging 37.9 ppg and 7.4 apg in a seven game loss to the Boston Celtics; West remains the only player to ever win that award despite playing on the losing team.
Bryant lived up to his responsibility and obligation as an elite player; he scored, he passed, he rebounded and he defended: he did not defer to anyone or wait for anyone to do anything but instead he dictated his terms to the opposing team and he instilled confidence in his teammates with his aggressiveness. The notion that James must choose between being Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan is ludicrous. James will never be Magic Johnson because Magic Johnson was a pass-first point guard on a team full of scorers while James is an all-time great scorer on a team that needs for him to score at least 25 ppg. Furthermore, the idea that James has to choose between scoring and passing is nonsense; Jordan scored and passed as his teams won six championships, as did Bryant as his teams won five championships.
James is averaging 16.7 ppg on .389 field goal shooting in the 2013 Finals; his scoring has declined in each game (18-17-15), as has his field goal percentage (7-16, 7-17, 7-21). He did not attempt a free throw in game three and he has only attempted six free throws so far in the series. In 18 career Finals games he has scored less than 20 points seven times. When he won the 2012 Finals MVP while leading the Heat to the championship he averaged 28.6 ppg and he scored between 26 and 32 points in each game; it seemed like James had finally figured out how to excel on the sport's biggest stage but so far in the 2013 Finals he has regressed.
I very much respect Kenny Smith's basketball acumen but I disagree with his defense of James' play in the first two games of this series and I don't see how anyone can defend James after game three. James is naturally going to put up big rebounding numbers as the power forward in Miami's small lineup but in game three the Heat got killed on the boards anyway. James is not Magic Johnson and the Heat cannot win this series unless he plays aggressively on offense; the Heat need for James to resume being a big-time scorer and their players must be very puzzled by James' passivity and apparent lack of confidence. Bryant exuded personal confidence and instilled confidence in his less talented teammates, while James is doing the opposite in the 2013 Finals.
What we are seeing from James in this series is a good example of why I did not include any active players in my pro basketball Pantheon; James is a great player but he has played on several championship caliber teams so far while winning just one title. All of the players in the Pantheon either won multiple titles or else put up outrageous statistics while losing in the Finals to other Pantheon members. James may play in several more Finals, he may win multiple titles and he may push his way to the top of the Pantheon--but if he keeps scoring in the teens in the Finals then he is going to end up with one championship on his resume and he will not deserve to be mentioned ahead of the Pantheon members no matter what the "stat gurus" say about his "advanced basketball statistics."
One major improvement for James over his Cleveland days is that he now takes responsibility for his poor play instead of saying things like he has "spoiled" the fans with his consistent excellence; after game three, James said, "I gotta be better. It's that simple. If I'm better, we're better. I gotta be better. I'm putting everything on my chest and on my shoulders. I gotta be better. It's that simple. My teammates are doing a good job; they're doing a great job and I'm not doing my part."
James is right that he must do better but saying the correct words is one thing and putting those words into action at the highest level of the sport is another thing. After one of the Chicago Bulls' painful playoff losses to the Detroit Pistons, Michael Jordan's father tried to console Jordan by saying that there would be more chances to win a championship but Jordan replied that one never knows how many chances he will get. We do not know if James is only beginning to write his Finals story, if he is in the middle of that story or if this is his last Finals appearance but James' 1-2 Finals record (pending the outcome of the 2013 Finals)--while scoring far below his normal average and shooting far worse than his normal field goal percentage--does not stack up very well against the Finals records posted by the greatest players of the past 40 years; each of these players won at least three titles and none of them had a losing record in the Finals. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won a championship in his first Finals appearance and he finished with a 6-4 Finals record. Julius Erving won championships the first two times he reached the Finals (both in the ABA) and he finished with a 3-3 Finals record (including the NBA). Larry Bird won championships in his first two Finals appearances and he finished with a 3-2 Finals record. Magic Johnson won championships in his first two Finals appearances and he finished with a 5-4 Finals record. Michael Jordan went 6-0 in the Finals. Shaquille O'Neal lost in his first Finals appearance and he finished with a 4-2 Finals record. Kobe Bryant won a championship in each of his first three Finals appearances and he now has a 5-2 Finals record. Tim Duncan has a 4-0 Finals record (pending the outcome of the 2013 Finals). A great player should not be judged solely on how many championships he wins but when the best player in the league annually plays for a top contender he should be expected to be at the top of his game in the Finals and he should be expected to win multiple titles.
"Stat gurus" mocked Jordan for saying that he would take Bryant over James because "five beats one" but every time in the NBA Finals that James settles for a long two point jumper or passes the ball instead of attacking the defense he is proving Jordan right.
Three-mendous: Spurs' Long Range Barrage Buries Heat
