On a day when the The World Cup starts you can bet news of the Finals might take a bit of a back seat to breakdowns of all the teams, keys to matches, guides to soccer strategies, updates on the developments in Brazilian politics.
But there has been an amazing amount of NBA writing over the past few days, so there's plenty to gather together.
First, Zach Lowe wrote what was, I think, his best column ever. It was just as enlightening as anything else he's written, and yet it was the best take on Game 3 simply because it was so clear. Instead of laying everything before you as he usually does, he picks a few plays simply and walks you through them, trying to show something basic about what it means to be as efficient as the Spurs were in that game. When the rest of the sports world could only resort to historical stats, Lowe honed in on what they were doing every possession. He makes it plain in one simple sentence. "Make sure," he says,
to credit the Spurs for sensing weakness, taking advantage of it, and even creating some of Miami’s defensive fragility.
What this means is not--what we might at first think--that we have to credit the Spurs for making Miami fragile. Lowe isn't saying that. He is saying that we have to credit the Spurs for creating weakness on top of taking advantage of it. What happened with the Spurs in that game, and what made them so deadly, was in his view that strange thing that statisticians have recently pointed to a lot in popular culture, and which athletes in general worship: luck creating luck. Chance creating chance. And, in working against an opponent, weakness creating more more weakness.
Anyone can walk you through how a play works over a defense. Few people can walk you through offense breaks down a defense in the long term, creating opportunities from opportunities.
The rest of the reporters and writers tried to make some sense of it in their own way.
Dan McCarney went the straightforward way of simply marveling at Kawhi's intentions and their amazing results. He put it this way:
Spurs coach Gregg Popovich challenged Leonard after two poor games to start the Finals, and then Leonard challenged himself. “It’s a new game today,” he said at shootaround earlier in the day. “We’ll see what kind of player I am.” Evidently, a pretty damn good one as Leonard provided the ultimate response with a career-high 29 points while helping contain James.
He also tried to find an interesting and significant stat, and came up with one:
Leonard also had two steals and two blocks while helping limit James to just 22 points — the same amount he scored in the second half of Game 2, and nearly six points below his postseason average coming in.
That Kawhi would effectively reduce James to the cramped, heat-hassled version of himself, while doing what he did offensively--well that puts this in perspective.
Zach Harper decided to go away from the Big Three and look at Kawhi as part of a piece of amazing roleplaying: he has a great breakdown of how Leonard, Diaw, and Green all stepped up in Game 3 to turn an excellent performance into a dominating one. It has perhaps the most succinct and satisfying summary about Kawhi's performance:
There isn't much to break down in terms of how he did it, you really can only marvel at the way he managed to score. Everything was measured, everything was aggressive, and nothing was forced aside from one jumper.
I particularly liked that jumper myself, as it was a signal of just how aggressive he was being in everything else. But the point is a good one.
Lee Jenkins at Sports Illustrated, one of the best pure writers on the NBA, described it with some excellent rhetoric, decided it was better to sum up the Spurs' effort by putting the thing negatively, even pleading on behalf of the Heat:
The notion that a San Antonio player could actually misfire clearly startled the Heat because they failed to corral the rebound. Forgive them. The Spurs appeared to anyone witnessing the first quarter-and-a-half of Game 3 like they would sink every shot they took.
He also reminds us of just what this means for our conception of the Spurs' style:
A national audience, which remembers the Spurs as those boring plodders who dumped the ball into Duncan a decade ago, may be surprised by this onslaught. But it was no fluke. The Spurs have evolved over the past five years into the most artistic and efficient offense in the NBA.
Sometimes this step back to how a less initiated, less familiar audience might look at the thing gives us the right perspective.
But, finally, sometimes words aren't enough. Mariah Medina tries to capture the Spurs' effort in graphic form, so we can be speechless in yet another way.
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