Tim Duncan

Couper Moorhead

Chris Bosh shouldn’t be going into the Hall of Fame this weekend. He should be in the game, easing into the final stages of a career approaching 20 seasons and 15 All-Star appearances to go with (at least) a pair of rings. He should still be the working paragon of the switchable, floor-spacing, rim-running, spoke-in-the-wheel center archetype he helped create.

Instead, we haven’t seen him on the court in five years, blood clots having robbed him off an exceedingly obvious Hall of Fame case. The game ripped away from him in the middle of his prime at 31 years-old, Bosh’s unplanned exit left us with a clear but in-need-of-explanation enshrinement case that in a backwards, twisted way might suit his journey even more appropriately. No matter how many times Erik Spoelstra offered up a “Most Important Player” label Bosh always required a little elucidation specifically because he chose the less-obvious path.

It may sound anachronistic to say Bosh chose the more difficult path back in 2010, crafting a contender out of free agency when we have since spent a decade watching one great team after another created in the images of the players creating them. Such was the landscape back before Thor and Captain America had ever produced a big-screen dollar. LeBron James and Dwyane Wade had their own monkeys to shake, demons to defeat and expectations to meet, but at the very least their greatness remained casually observable. In transitioning from a 24 points-per-game centerpiece to an 18 per-game third option, the numbers going down as just as his name was growing in household renown, Bosh became someone who needed to be appreciated. And if you have to explain the art you’ve already lost part of the (widely antagonistic, at the time) audience.

No games better illustrated how much Bosh sacrificed than the nights when Wade and/or James wore suits. Starting alongside Mario Chalmers, James Jones, Shane Battier and Joel Anthony at Atlanta in 2012, Bosh scored 33 points on a career-high 27 shots, hitting the game-tying three to force the first of three overtimes. Terrel Harris played 44 minutes. A season later, Bosh drained a three to take the lead in the final seconds at San Antonio, scoring 23 in an 88-point game. With James out at Portland the next Christmas, Bosh nearly touched his career-high with 37 points and another clutch triple, this one off a what-are-you-doi-ok-cool blind pass from Wade. Miami won all those games and so many others because Bosh could so fluidly toggle between roles and requirements. In four years, Miami was 40-18 when Bosh played and one of James or Wade sat out. When both were out, Bosh crews were 3-1. It was never that he wasn’t the same player he was in Toronto. He got better, he just played a different game.

That so many of his big shots were threes was a happy accident, of sorts. After straining his abdominal muscle early in the second round against the Pacers, the HEAT appeared to be high-and-dry after falling behind 2-1 as they searched for optimal lineups. But while Spoelstra tinkered his way into a small-ball lineup that would come to define the immediate future of the team and James and Wade led an incredible charge into the Conference Finals, Bosh applied the why-not-take-a-step-back line of reasoning to his offensive game that would become a common refrain among the league’s big men. When Bosh returned, an overnight center, as Miami fought from a deficit to Boston, it was a pair of corner threes down the stretch of Game 7 which turned the tide.

“The make‑up of this team is a little different,” Bosh said after that game. “And I knew where things were changing where I could help this team out.  I know the stigmas and the criticisms that are out there.  That's not going to help you win basketball games.  Dedication and belief in yourself is going to help you win basketball games.

“I didn't give it much time for people to see it coming. It just kind of happened very quickly.  It's been a good shot for me.  As long as I'm open and whenever it's needed, I know I can go inside.  But LeBron and Dwyane have it going so well, they need somebody to space the floor.  I was put in that situation, and I told myself I was going to do the best job I possibly can to bring that to this team.”

Big men were not supposed to shoot threes. Unless you came into the league as a fully-formed unicorn, few knowing you as anything other than the rare seven-foot shooter, you focused on the paint. Go get a double-double. Post-up. Dunk and block some shots. That’s what the thinking was even ten years ago, during the bronze age of analysis and commentary (sounds a little mean, but a lot has changed in a decade). Bosh was never that, nor was that what the team needed. The criticism was harsh, relentless and often plain cruel. He never wavered, choosing the opposite, modern direction. The bet, however subconsciously made, was that the future would look kindly upon the decisions he made in the present.

The game may have changed with or without Bosh, but every revolution needs its revolutionaries. He was willing to be the change when it wasn’t popular.

It’s perfectly fitting that the player who joined Miami as a leading scorer left his most indelible playoff moments with non-scoring plays to extend a championship swing in Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals. Not every shot at immortality is a shot, ball in your hands with a title on the line and the clock ticking down. For Bosh it was a ball in the air, Danny Green on one side, Manu Ginobili on the other. Grab it, let Ray Allen be the hero, then go and block a pair of pivotal shots while you’re at it.

That’s Bosh. The Great Enabler. Whatever you wanted to do, he could make it possible. Spacing, passing and poise on one end, speed and length on the other. Everything the HEAT became, a Top 10 team on both ends of the court for four years running, they became because they had Bosh.

The game-that-you-think-of-first game, from this slightly warped perspective, for this Hall of Famer looks like one of his worst. Seven rebounds. Two assists. Five fouls. Zero points. Out of 89 career playoff games, Bosh’s -2.1 GameScore (per basketball-reference.com) was his lowest. It all happened in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, days after the legendary rebound.

And the HEAT don’t win that game without Bosh.

"I think that's the proudest moment of my career," Bosh told reporters the following year.

In the first half of Game 6, Tim Duncan could not be stopped. Outside of a few missed team rotations – the HEAT were still flying around Omega Swarm’ing the ball in those days – the defense wasn’t particularly at fault. Bosh, Chris Andersen and Battier all took turns on Duncan in the post, keeping a wide base and getting into the Hall of Famer’s hips. None of it mattered. Duncan finished the half 11-of-13 for 25 points, at one point scoring on four consecutive post-ups. In the latter stages of Duncan’s career, it was as good a stretch as he’s had.

All those makes dried up in the second half. Bosh stayed low, stayed wide and got tall when he needed to, consistently pushing Duncan off his base as he went 2-of-8 in the second half and overtime. The war continued into the final game of the series.

It wasn’t so much that Bosh missed shots that depressed his scoring. Like so much of his HEAT career, the shots weren’t his to take. James and Wade combined for 44 attempts from the field, more than half of Miami’s total. Bosh took five, the most extreme endpoint of his sacrificial role.

"I had a clarifying moment," Bosh said. "I didn't score and everybody kept saying, 'Don't worry about it, you're going to score.' I was like, 'Dude, I'm fine.' I figured that I'm probably not going to get the ball and get a bucket. Dwyane and LeBron, they had it going the whole game."

Duncan still got his, putting a handful of fouls on Bosh that had him on the bench for a first-half stretch. Between the fouls and the lack of touches, everything was set up for Bosh to have a forgettable night. Instead, he was brilliant. Bosh swarmed the ball, protected the rim and edged out a victory over Duncan with one stonewall after another.

Maybe three years spent channeling his obvious talents into the margins helped him get to that point, to be great on a night when nothing was going his way. Few players were as self-aware as Bosh. In joining Miami he had recognized his own limitations, and those of his circumstance, as a lead player. In that Game 7, he found the things he could contribute to winning rather than search out ways to make his look better in retrospect – happy to again be the player to be explained. Always one to take responsibility for a poor effort with the media – he was always just as interesting after a loss than a win, generous with his time even as he met the occasional perplexing question with his own look of perplexion – Bosh was accountable for what he could control.

Is that what makes Chris Bosh a Hall of Famer? No, 11 All-Star appearances and two titles – with an Olympic gold medal – is all you need on that particular job application. He was always a deserving and rightful lock. Bosh’s capacity to be anything to everyone whenever called upon, to be a winner whether scoring 30 or 0, is what made him great.

It was a brand of greatness which required a little spilled ink to derive proper appreciation in the era in which is happened. Becoming a Hall of Famer means never having to explain yourself. A career stolen away by the cruel gods of the game finds the Valhalla it was always meant for, both years too soon and, as a second-ballot vote, a year too late.

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A Man For All Seasons: Chris Bosh Was Everything And Anything He Needed To Be, But He Was Always True To Himself

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Chris Bosh vs. Tim Duncan Game 7

Two games in, and this series has yet to disappoint.

During the time of year when trailers have spoiled most plot points of major motion pictures almost half a year in advance, the sequel to Heat vs. Spurs is living up to the hype despite the hype being little more than, ‘The last one was really, really good’. There are no scripts that have been rewritten umpteen times in order to attract the proper money-spending demographic. There’s no studio meddling, insisting on big, noisy, computer-generated battles to finish things off. No love interest. No ink-colored quest you first read on the page twenty years ago. Just ten men and a ball telling a new, evolving story which trumps anything showing at your local metroplex for thrills, chills and pulse-pounding action.

But this is no popcorn-fare. For the second year in a row, we’re getting treated to a silver-screen epic.

With many Miami HEAT playoff series, you can boil things down to a couple unique factors. Can the Knicks or Bobcats beat the fronting of Carmelo Anthony and Al Jefferson? Can the HEAT navigate the treacherous waters of a Tom Thibodeau defense? Can the Celtics and Pacers consistently counter Miami’s smaller lineups by moving the ball and getting their big men catches in the paint? All crucial aspects to advancing in the playoffs year after year, but there’s often little depth beyond those adjustments. More often than not, the HEAT just have to play their game and play it well.

There is no one thing against the Spurs. There is only everything – with complexities that rarely make it past test-audiences.

Tony Parker hasn’t taken more than 80 threes in a single season since 2005, but he’s the key to keeping the Spurs off the three-point line. Despite averaging just a tad under 30 minutes per game for the first time since his rookie season and missing 14 games, Parker had the fourth-most assists on drives in the league, per SportVU logging (dribble attacks that begin 20 feet out and get within 10 feet of the rim). He can break down just about anyone on the perimeter, keeps his dribble alive so well that he is model for young guards like Norris Cole and with little flair or pizzazz, Parker routinely finds open shooters once the defense collapses into the paint.

He is, for the HEAT and every other defense, a problem – whether he’s finding shooters himself . . .

Or his kickout passes are leading to one of San Antonio’s nine hockey assists, almost double what they averaged during the regular season, in Game 2. . .

Through two games the Spurs are shooting 25-of-51 from beyond the arc, which is the stuff of comic books. But they aren’t just falling into those shots haphazardly. Sure, Danny Green and Manu Ginobili have each hit a well-contested shot or four, but it’s the defense over-committing to the ball and/or the paint that has been hurting the HEAT the most. Open shots are death no matter who you are, and they almost spelled doom for Miami in consecutive games.

There are three things the HEAT can do to limit San Antonio’s jump-shooting efficiency. The same is more of a universal truth for Erik Spoelstra’s defensive system: rotate to the open man, which Chris Bosh does exceptionally well here as Chris Andersen returns to cover Tim Duncan in the paint.

“With their three point spacing, the way they move the ball, you just have to try to make as many plays, as many efforts every single possession,” Spoelstra said. “More efforts than you're normally typically used to making at present.”

The second thing is more matchup-based, which includes matchups that the HEAT can force. In the interest of preserving energy, Spoelstra isn’t going to have LeBron James defend Parker all night. But when he does, and when James can use his size and speed to limit Parker’s penetration, the HEAT can limit the rotations they have to make. Basically, if James, giving Parker a little cushion, can stay in front of the ball, then Miami’s help defenders can trust James’ ball containment and stay home on shooters.

It doesn’t only have to be with the James-on-Parker matchup, either. Similar to how the HEAT went away from highly-aggressive blitzes against pick-and-rolls in the Indiana series because it was giving Indiana exactly the spacing they wanted, staying home on shooters despite a dribble attack – a somewhat Thibodeau-ian principle, with regards to how the Bulls trust Joakim Noah to secure the paints –  forces the Spurs into more one-on-one matchups.

Either try to score yourself, or kick the ball out and reset the offense, the HEAT seem to be saying. We aren’t giving you any predictable open looks.

“It's how we have to score,” Gregg Popovich said. “We can't put it in somebody's hands and have them create everything for us. It's got to be a group effort and we didn't do that.”

Shutting down the drive-and-kick, along with generally better and more precise, helped limit the Spurs to 1-of-6 shooting and just one assist in the final four minutes before an assisted Ginobili three just as the buzzer went off. And the one assist the Spurs did get during that timeframe came when the HEAT did collapse the paint because Chris Andersen had switched – something Miami did more and more of as the game wore on – onto the perimeter and tried to recover into the paint.

As for the third thing the team can do to limit San Antonio threes? Pick up shooters in transition – something the HEAT didn’t do very well during that back-breaking run to end Game 1, but something they, and in particular Dwyane Wade, took responsibility for. After his barrage three days prior, Danny Green only took three shots from downtown in Game 2, and each one of those was well-contested.

“When we lose a ballgame, we have – whether it’s one day or two days – to get better and to learn from our mistakes,” Wade said. “When we get in that same situation – because you’re going to get in that same situation – you try not to make the same mistakes and I thought we did that tonight.”

This is a familiar issue for all Miami observers. A team with a height and size advantage attempts to take advantage with pick-and-rolls designed to get the big man the ball with space to attack. From Tyson Chandler to Kevin Garnett to Roy Hibbert, you’ve seen the HEAT take their lumps as slow help in the paint led to layup after dunk after layup. When nobody chucks the big man off his roll to slow him down and the weakside defender isn’t prepared to meet him in the paint, the HEAT can look fairly helpless against size.

But there always is, and so far there always has been, an internal remedy for those issues. Where the team might struggle in one game they’ll activate the swarm in the next, creating turnovers and forcing opponents into more deliberate post-ups if they want to get their size the ball.

So after Duncan had 12 catches within 12 feet of the rim for 22 team points in Game 1, the HEAT tightened things up and in Game 2 Duncan had only seven close touches for six team points.

“It's one of the first priorities in our defense, but against this team it's extremely tough because they spread you out, and they don't hesitate to shoot when they get opportunities,” Bosh said. “So we had to take the challenge one on one and do a better job with that, contain the pick and rolls two on two to give our backside defense more help and more opportunities to make plays.”

What separates the Spurs from some of Miami’s other opponents, however, is San Antonio doesn’t just run one high pick-and-roll after another. They’ll change up both angles and pace, patiently waiting for the right passing lane to open up. And they have the skilled personnel to take advantage.

Such an offensive approach, with big-to-big passing that would make Marc Gasol proud, is difficult to sustain over the course of a game. But it hurt the HEAT as they fell behind by seven in the first quarter because there wasn’t enough pressure on the ball.

Sometimes perfect passes are going to beat you, but going forward the HEAT will have to be more aware of the layers to San Antonio’s interior approach while maintaining the sound rotations they had elsewhere for most of Game 2.

There’s often been some confusion when it comes to Miami’s smallball lineups, in large part because it takes many forms. There’s the stretch-four lineup, made famous in 2012 when Shane Battier entered the starting lineup and defended power forwards, which the HEAT use to this day with Rashard Lewis. There’s the multi-guard lineups that Spoelstra has experiemented with more often over the past two seasons, with multiple point-and-shooting guards on the floor. Even when both Udonis Haslem and Chris Bosh started, the HEAT were, according to traditional standards, playing small without a true center on the floor. Until the advent of Andersen-Bosh lineups this season, Miami has long lived the smallball life.

Their true Super Saiyan form, however, has always been with LeBron James as the true power forward on the floor. We don’t get to see those lineups very often because of how much they ask of everyone involved, but when Spoelstra dips into his bag of tricks the result is often pure, raw spacing.

Because James has added so many traditional power-forward tools to his skillset it doesn’t always matter who is on the floor with him. James has been used as a screen-setter more than ever this season, and against the Spurs all that practice at being a live player off-the-ball – not just for him but for every player on the floor – helps prevent the HEAT from falling into stretches of predictable and tiresome, for them, 25-foot wing attack from James and Wade.

But even as James is pick-and-popping or rolling to catches in good locations, having a non-shooting big man on the floor can still muck things up in the middle of the floor at times.

When the HEAT go Saiyan-small, however, it’s almost impossible to properly space the floor with a traditional defensive lineup.

And if they can attack the paint, perhaps with a point guard setting the screen and further keeping the defense from playing traditional defensive roles, then the world is James’ oyster.

If you remember Bosh’s go-ahead three in Game 4 against the Brooklyn Nets – one of his 13 threes to go-ahead or tie the score in the last five minutes of the game since Jan. 1 2012 – the HEAT used the same lineup to generate that shot. With Bosh now able to space the floor from the corner, Ray Allen on the wing being Ray Allen and Wade stationed along the baseline ready for a ghost cut, its pick-your-poison time the moment James gets a step on his defender. No surprise, then, that with James playing true-forward, the HEAT were plus-11 in nine minutes.

Should the defense happen to pick wrong the first time, that choice may influence future decisions. While James was fouled on the team’s next possession as he got into the paint, watch as James fakes the pass to Bosh and Duncan isn’t able to fully commit to the help.

None of this is particularly complicated offense, but when your floor spacing is in pristine condition you might only need one or two passes to find the open look. Better yet, the small lineup and resulting spacing got Miami out of a lengthy iso-and-post stretch where they only had two assists from the five-minute mark of the third – when James was going nova – to the three-minute mark of the fourth, after which the team recorded another three helpers.

No, it isn’t San Antonio offense, with the Spurs earning seven assists on possessions with six or more passes, per SportVU, but it’s what the HEAT want. This series may be far more complex than your typical summer blockbuster, but that doesn’t mean Miami can forget about style. Winning will be in the details over the next two weeks, but whether its small or swarming, the HEAT will play with the style that got them here.

Statistical supports for this article provided by NBA.com, STATS LLC and Synergy Sports

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The Summer Classic

Nobody likes an asterisk, but there are rare occasions that call for them.

Not from a results point of view. The San Antonio Spurs played beautiful basketball, including just about as perfect a final five minutes as you’ll see at this level, en route to taking a 1-0 series lead over the Miami HEAT in the NBA Finals. There is nothing you can take away from them and what they earned.

The asterisk is for the validity of anything that happened from an analytical standpoint. Members of each squad had surely played in such temperate conditions before over the course of general existence – imagine playing in a Las Vegas gym for an AAU tournament in mid-July when the cool air is shut off – but it’s not what they play or practice in today. There’s no telling just how much heat-related mental fatigue played into the 41 combined turnovers, much less each slow or late rotation that caused a plethora of open threes and catches in the paint.

Precise execution led to Tim Duncan getting 12 catches within 12 feet of the rim (for 22 team points) and to the HEAT generating 27 uncontested jumpers, but we can’t say for sure whether or not those possessions would have played out the same way in a typical basketball environment.

“I feel part of our downfall in that game was mental and physical fatigue down the stretch,” Dwyane Wade said. “You know, rotations and things that we normally do weren’t done last night. It wasn't from not having the will or the want to do it.”

So let’s put aside the results for a moment and focus on what each team was trying to do. More specifically, how the Spurs were trying to defend.

How Gregg Popovich schemed for LeBron James and Wade a year ago has been well-covered. The Spurs hung a few feet back whenever Miami’s primary playmakers had the ball, going under just about every single screen in the series as they conceded jumpers and built a wall around the paint. It was, in a sense, aggressively conservative, and it took both players a little time to adjust.

“Their commitment to going under on pindowns (screens) was surprising,” Battier said before the series began. “They really committed to it to the point where [we were like], ‘You guys are really going under that down screen?’ [That’s] an area where most teams would have a faint heart to try and do that in a game, but they did it for pretty much the entire series.”

Thursday night was a step in a different, slightly more traditional direction.

To start, James and Wade weren’t given rights to their own personal space. There was little hang-back, little cushion and few if any outright conceded jumpers. Of the 35 shots the pair took in Game 1, 22 of them came when the defender was within four feet of the shot. Considering that that is more shots than they took in the paint, and some of their paint shots were uncontested, there are a good handful of contested mid-range jumpers in there.

But even on the shots SportVU logged as uncontested, Wade and James were only open because they made a move to get themselves open.

“We never really want anybody to take open jump shots,” Kawhi Leonard said. “We want to contest every shot.”

There’s a balance to strike, of course. The Spurs aren’t going to suddenly go chest-to-chest with James and Wade for an entire game. The difference in spacing that we’re talking about here is one, two or three feet.

“We want to approach this series like we approached the last series [against the Oklahoma City Thunder],” Danny Green said. “We feel like our defense is at our best when we’re more aggressive. We want to give them space and play them smart and not let them drive by us, but at the same time we want everybody on their team to feel us defensively. We want to get up in them a little bit. Just be active as a defense.”

And the appropriate spacing, as shown in the above image above, is different from Leonard to Green to Boris Diaw.

“[LeBron is] way faster than me, so I have to give him a little room,” Diaw said.

The second defensive shift on the San Antonio side was less subtle. Rather than going under almost all screens, the Spurs were going over the top and staying close to the ballhandler.

“We just buy into the gameplan,” Leonard said. “Being aggressive out there. Not trying to make it easy for anyone.”

While there’s too much evidence to the contrary, in one-game sample sizes when certain play-types only occur a few times – the James and Wade’s pick-and-roll usage was well below their norm, with James becoming more of a screen-setter than screen-user – you can sometimes talk yourself into certain wrinkles being born more of circumstance than preconceived strategizing.

That is until you see something like Tim Duncan closing hard on James at the three-point lane, something that rarely happened early in last season’s series.

As you see at the end of that animation, the cost of hard closeouts, a reduced cushion and going over the top of picks is that is opens the door for James and Wade to attack the rim. And they were more than willing to, taking 16 shots in the restricted area and, per SportVU, creating 19 team points off 15 dribble drives that started at least 20 feet from the rim.

“We’re going to make some adjustments in Game 2 to where [LeBron] won’t get to the rim as much. D-Wade as well,” Green said.

We use team points there because not everything was altered in San Antonio’s scheme. They still want to shut off the paint, and on a dribble drive they’ll pinch the middle of the floor. This, in turn, creates open looks from three, as the HEAT took their second-highest total of corner threes in a single game this year.

And when the HEAT space the weakside of the floor while James controls the ball, the Spurs will still send that LeBron Spy across the paint for the strong-side zone. Even without a drive, this creates a three with the right ball movement.

This is where we remind ourselves that we’re dealing with Gregg Popovich. Just when you think you have the answers, he changes all the questions. The Spurs may have stuck with similar tactics for most of the Finals a year ago, but that in no way precludes them from showering the HEAT in wrinkles after the tape tells the truth of Miami’s shot profile. Even within the game itself, the Spurs started switching pick-and-rolls against Wade and James more as things wore on – something we may see more of going ahead.

“I thought we made a good number of mistakes,” Popovich said. “I thought they missed some wide, wide open shots that they had, that scare you to death once you watch the film. That's not just blowing smoke or an exaggeration. There were about seven or eight wide open threes they had that just didn't go down.”

The trick for both the teams and the rest of us, then, is separating what is real from what came out of one of the strangest game environments in recent memory. The process seems to have changed on the San Antonio side for at least one game, and the exciting part is seeing what happens next.

Then again, the Spurs see things differently than the rest of us. To borrow a phrase from Erik Spoelstra, our truth, to those of us that watch, might be different from their truth.

“People say we let them shoot last year,” Diaw said. “It’s just not what we tried to do at all. We tried to disrupt them as much as possible.”

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Tales from the Sauna

As Game 4 began, Tiago Splitter was assigned to defend Dwyane Wade.

That’s how bananas the 2013 NBA Finals were, and that was only halfway through the series. Splitter wouldn’t stay in the game for very long, but his brief spell guarding Wade was just another small thread in what eventually became a grand tapestry of crazy. The first game was decided on a lunging, leaning rim-bouncing shot at the end of the shot clock, and from there we saw massive yet exceptionally well-played blowouts, record-setting three-point shooting, a Dwyane Wade Game, a Manu Ginobili Game, a shoeless three-pointer, LeBron James playing without a headband, a Ray Allen Miracle, Shane Battier’s shot emerging from a Lazarus Pit and all sorts of missed layups and uncharacteristic turnovers from both sides.

Battier, Chris Andersen, Norris Cole, Udonis Haslem and Joel Anthony would all fall in and out of the rotation. Mike Miller would become a starting power forward. Tony Parker, Wade and Ginobili would all finish the series with efficiency ratings in the negative, yet all three were vital to their team’s successes.

Each game was its own beast. But one year later, the Splitter incident is still revealing. So dedicated was Gregg Popovich to a particular strategy, he responded to a Miami starting lineup change by electing to have a seven-foot center defend one of the best shooting guards we’ve ever seen.

Why? He wanted to keep Wade and James out of the paint at all costs.

While San Antonio’s strategy wasn’t particularly surprising to anyone who had seen the Spurs dismantle the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2007 Finals sweep, it was nevertheless fascinating to watch a defense treat James and Wade as if they were Rajon Rondo circa 2008 – particularly after James had just completed a regular-season campaign over the 40 percent mark from three for the first time in his career. Whether it was Kawhi Leonard or Boris Diaw or Tim Duncan, the defender would sag off James and Wade, all but conceding a jumper were it not for a token arm raised in contention.

“They gave him the mid-range jumper, conceded that early on,” Battier said of James. “It was a change from the Indiana series last year. It was like, ‘Woah, that shot’s there.’ We didn’t get anything conceded to us against Indiana. So, there was an adjustment period.”

And if the HEAT tried to use screens to create more functional offensive space, the San Antonio defender deliberately drifted underneath the pick, again allowing an in-rhythm jumper should the offensive player desire to take it.

“Their commitment to going under on pindowns (screens) was surprising,” Battier said. “They really committed to it to the point where [we were like], ‘You guys are really going under that down screen?’ [That’s] an area where most teams would have a faint heart to try and do that in a game, but they did it for pretty much the entire series.”

For observers, the natural response to seeing this strategy was to say that James and Wade should keep attacking the basket no matter what. Easier said than done, of course, as even though the Spurs would concede a certain shot – as you know, one of the least efficient shots in the game – they wouldn’t concede straight isolations. As the man with the ball stared into the heart of the defense from the perimeter, he would often see his defender, a help defender and a third man, out of any typical defensive position, ready to strike.

It was a wall, and upon any attempt to penetrate the exterior that wall would come alive and pinch the ballhandler.

The Chicago Bulls can stay home on shooters and let Joakim Noah or Taj Gibson deal with things on the move in the middle of the floor. The Pacers can park Roy Hibbert in the lane and use their athleticism to deter drives while recovering quickly to the perimeter. But the Spurs’ multi-pronged approach was on a different level, and it worked. Miami’s attempts at the rim dropped by two per game in the series, and their mid-range attempts grew by almost a full six shots a night.

By the time the 2014 rematch begins on Thursday, all of this could be ancient history. Popovich could devise an entirely new scheme and leave us all playing catch up once again. But it isn’t likely that he’ll shift the team’s focus on a macro level away from preventing shots at the rim, so until we’re proven wrong this is the tactic both us and the team should expect.

“I expect it,” James said of the defensive scheme. “But I go in with the mindset to try and help our team win.”

How do James and Wade do that, then? How do they help the team win?
While James said late in last year’s series that he had to get into the film room, see how the Spurs were defending him and begin to trust in all the work he’s put into his jumper, that doesn’t mean he only started taking the conceded jumper late in the series. There were plenty of mid-range shots to go around throughout. What may have changed over those seven games may have been something a little less tangible.

As much as we would like it to be true, players cannot calculate efficiency in real time. James doesn’t have a Robocop visor telling him, second-to-second, which shot is slightly above average and which shot is slightly below. The mind can be trained to approximate that sort of data processing, but ultimately players have to feel their way around the court. A confident shot is more likely to go in than one being second guessed, and while it’s tough to go back to the tape and place a confidence index on each shot being taken, some shots do look smoother than others – as James’ did in Game 7.

“When [James and Wade] get out there and they sink that low, they’ve got to take the shot,” Ray Allen said. “That’s just what the basketball game is telling them to do and you keep going back and forth.  We’re almost playing into their hands a little bit because they’re exhausting them on the pick-and-rolls, but they’re capable of shooting the ball and if they can shoot the ball regularly and consistently and knock it down, then it’s going to change the defensive coverage.”

The ball didn’t go in consistently enough early in the series for the coverage to change, but Wade and James did seem to adopt a more balanced approach as they saw more and more of the same coverage.

“Early on, we were kind of off rhythm with it, but I thought we did a good job later on of mixing it up,” Wade said. “‘Ok, they’re giving it to me, I’m going to take it. But ok, they’re giving it to me, I’m going to take more. I’m going to try and get more. I’m going to try and get better shot for my teammates than settling for this.’

“It’s a mind game as well and you got to put on your thinking cap.”

Spoelstra exhausted just about every pick-and-roll combination in existence trying to create space for his two creators, forcing San Antonio point guards to wall off an attacking James in the paint or having James set screens and use the defense’s focus against it.

While these days it’s all part of Miami’s regular offense, the post-up is a highly important option against San Antonio just as it is against Chicago’s half-zone schemes. If the defense is going to trying to wall you off from the paint, earning good post position away from the ball can finish half the battle for you. Put simply, if the wall is the first level of the defense, a proper post-up starts things off in the second level.

We’ve spent all this time discussing San Antonio’s defense because, until Popovich makes a change, it’s the one true constant in the past year of Spurs vs. HEAT. As such, it’s one of the few places where we can, and will be able to, truly evaluate Miami’s process. With all the changes that went into last season’s series, it’s not easy sussing out the relevant information from all the small sample sizes. Did inserting Ginobili into the starting lineup work because he changed something on the floor or did he simply start making more shots? How much of Danny Green’s incredible shooting was due to poor perimeter coverage and how much of it was just incredible shot-making? Was Mike Miller more valuable when he was making shots off the bench or when he was spacing the floor, but making three less frequently, as a starter?

What we do know is that despite an evolving process against a unique defense, James and Wade created just enough results to put their team over the top. In the past, both players have improved and honed their approach with each playoff series against an elite defense.  Since the ball will be in their hands the most, whether they can improve and hone their craft again may be the difference in the series.

Once again, while James and Wade figure out how to score with the ball, Chris Bosh has the unique task of balancing spacing the floor with being an active, aggressive participant in the offense. While he played some of the best defense of his life against San Antonio last year – something he carried into much of this past regular season – Bosh struggled at times to find the right shots within an offense that very much needed him to counter San Antonio’s aggressive paint-protection.

Just as the defense would sag off James and Wade, Bosh could get a mid-range shot any time he wanted just by setting a corner or elbow screen, waiting for the two defenders to build the wall and then stepping out into unoccupied territory.

But Bosh doesn’t have the ball in his hands as often as his other two teammates, and thus he has less time to feel out how the defense is reacting to him. While that’s something he tends to figure out eventually – see the previous series against Indiana – the main difference this year may again be what he does without the ball.

After missing all four of his three-point attempts in Game 1 against San Antonio, Bosh returned to spacing in the mid-range more often than beyond the arc. Now that he’s settled in to being something close to a high-volume three-point shooter, the space Bosh creates by standing a few steps out may impact whether or not Popovich can play Duncan and Splitter together and how well the Spurs can continue to wall off the paint.

Breaking down San Antonio’s dynamic and multi-layered offense is a story for another day, but there may be no team better equipped to handle Miami’s swarm. While the HEAT will again treat pick-and-rolls a little more conservatively with flat coverage, as they did against Indiana this year and against the Spurs last year, the Spurs are masters at manipulating a big man into showing on the ball one half-second too long and then turning that mistake into either a weakside corner three or, as most teams with functional big men try to do, hit their diving center in the middle of the paint.

And when the HEAT front the post, the Spurs consistently get to the same triangle passing that Miami’s uses to set up LeBron James for easy baskets.

The HEAT were still able to force a decent number of turnovers last year, since the more passes you throw the more opportunities there are to make a mistake, but it required an extravagant amount of energy and effort to do so. Fortunately for Miami supporters, that energy and effort showed up on the defensive end in a big way during the Indiana series.

What was most impressive about the Spurs, then, was how they were able to absorb the punches derived from the HEAT’s Omega Swarm only to keep on pushing forward. And that may be the story of this matchup. Pretty much everything you can say in favor of one team, you can also say about the other. What one team does extremely well, the other team can counter and vice versa. These are exceptionally talented teams, and this should be another exceptional series, complete with hundreds of little threads to pick up along the way.

“Who knows what this series is going to be?” Wade said. “Last year was an unbelievable Finals, arguably one of the best that’s been played in a while. Hopefully this year, it’s roughly the same.”

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