Redemption

OUR HEARTS may go out for fellow Filipino Erik Spoelestra, but the absolute best team won the NBA championship this season.

And their win erased the bitterness of last year’s devastating loss—a choke, really—against the very same team whom they flattened to the ground during the five-game NBA finals.

The San Antonio Spurs, although boasting of their own “Big Three”, have shown the world what basketball is really all about—a team game with no one player outshining everyone else. Truly, this may been what James Naismith envisioned when he invented the game: selfless basketball plays where the open man almost always gets the ball.

We have seen it coming as stats do not lie: the Spurs shot 52.8% from the field for the whole series, capped by a NBA finals record 75.8% field goal accuracy for the first half of game 3.

All these came from the Spurs’ effective offense of always moving the ball to find the open man. There was rarely a time when the Spurs went on isolation or one-on-one plays, except when they are on transition—which was often and almost always multiple players against single or two defenders.

The Spurs’ fluid offense, masterminded by coach Gregg Popovich, not only allowed them to score at will but has, more so, shown how weak the Miami Heat team defense was. It proved indeed that passing the ball is much, much faster than having to dribble it all the time. Timely passes often—always, actually—left Heat defenders in the dust and who were only left with a wing and a prayer that the Spurs miss their shots. Which they did not as they went on to put up a shooting clinic in the finals.

The Heat’s dreaded “Big 3” faded save for LeBron; D-Wade missed shot after shot while Chris Bosh only showed up sporadically with the Spurs’ bigs running rings around him. LeBron found out—just as Michael Jordan did before he teamed up with Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson—that one man alone can never win an NBA championship. LeBron was LeBron during the finals—except for the cramps in game 1. He proved to all and sundry that he is the best player in the planet today. He also proved that he cannot and will never do it by his lonesome.

The Spurs have slain the ghost of the 2013 NBA Finals meltdown. And as they claim their fifth title in 15 years, the team’s future is as bright as ever with the emergence of clutch players that shone in the finals. Their “Big 3” may still be there next season but the arrival of Kawhi Leonard—2014 Finals MVP—would be insurance should Tim Duncan decide to hang up his sneakers.

The Heat, meanwhile, need a reload of their line-up. Their bench production for the whole Finals was laughable in the face of the Spurs’ bench explosiveness—never mind if Manu Ginobili had come off the bench for the whole series. They may have the “Big 3” but just as in the case of the older “Big 3” of the Boston Celtics, they would still need able players around them if they hope to regain the NBA championship.

And just like the Spurs, they have the whole of the next season ahead of them to decide whether they would implode, or take the route Spurs took last year—and prepare themselves to regain what was taken from them.

For now though, the Spurs have indeed served the Heat with a dish that is not only cold, but icy and bitterly frozen.