SAN ANTONIO — Ball movement.
Two words. It’s that simple. When the ball moves, good things happen. When the ball stops moving, bad things happen.
“You move it or you die,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said.
If you want to break down Game 2 into the one big thing that separated the two teams, you don’t have to bring up LeBron James’ 35 points. They were needed, of course, but the three biggest plays that James made came in the final 1:43 — once on defense, and then twice on offense when he made the correct basketball play — a pass — and his teammates made those passes count.
First, after defending Tony Parker brilliantly and forcing the Spurs to try to score off an inbounds pass with 0.8 seconds left on the shot clock, James found Chris Bosh open in the corner for a 3-point shot that put Miami ahead 95-93 with 1:18 remaining. It’s the same pass we’ve seen from him many times before — the correct basketball play, not the selfish superstar play.
It was the same pass he threw to Bosh during the Indiana series, drawing criticism because Bosh missed, and it was the same pass he threw to Donyell Marshall back in 2006 when he was playing for the Cavs and trying to get past the Pistons. That one missed, too, and James has been criticized ever since whenever he passed rather than shot. I once had an editor at ESPN.com who ordered the staff to criticize James for passing to Marshall because “that’s what SportsNation is saying loud and clear.” I’ll spare him the public ridicule of naming him, but there’s a little insight for you into how things word at the Worldwide Leader.
“It’s the theater of the absurd when you’re dealing with what plays he makes at the end of the game, “Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “Make it or miss it, it opens up for noise from outside.”
The last big play was another pass, plus a pass James did not throw.
With Miami ahead 96-93, the Heat got possession of the ball with 28.4 seconds remaining. The Spurs decided not to intentionally foul.
The smart thing to do was to run the clock down as much as possible, because a 4.8 second differential between the shot clock and the game clock is about as tight of a squeeze as it gets when you are trying to do what the Spurs were trying to do: Force a stop and then go for a game-tying 3 after a rebound and a timeout. James had the ball near the top of the 3-point line when Dwyane Wade broke free on a backdoor cut and was wide open cutting to the basket.
James saw him, but he also saw there was a defender in between him and Wade. He could have jumped and rifled a pass to Wade, but the margin for error was tricky. What if the pass was deflected? All it would have taken was one quick thrust of Boris Diaw’s hand to force what could have been a turnover and an epic change of possession.
Instead, James kept dribbling and ran down the clock. He passed to Bosh, who quickly found Wade wide open again.
Bang. Layup. Ballgame.
The place started to empty out with 9.4 seconds left.
“LeBron with the ball did a great job at his end and we had to be really pretty perfect at the other end, and we didn’t,” Popovich said. “The ball stuck to us. We didn’t do it as a group. We tried to do it individually, and we’re not good enough to do that.”
Brilliant ball movement. Exquisite execution. A perfect play to end what was pretty much a perfect enough fourth quarter as the Heat played unselfishly and confidently and the Spurs did just the opposite.
“There are moments when we forget what got us to where we are now,” Manu Ginoboli said. “They’ve been here many times, so we’ve got to be close to perfect to win, and today we were far from it.”
Tony Parker’s 3-pointer with 2:26 remaining was San Antonio’s last bucket until Ginobili made a meaningless 3 at the buzzer.
Ginobili missed a 3, threw a pass too hard to Duncan, then missed a 19 footer with 29.9 seconds left off the hurried-up inbounds play. The blame was shared, though, as both Parker and Duncan missed a pair of free throws midway through the quarter that would have put the Spurs up by four (or six).
In a series with two teams this good, the margin for error is too slim for mistakes like those. Combined with the lack of ball movement, the Spurs knew exactly why they are headed to Miami tied at one game apiece. This series is just getting started, as Spoelstra said, but it also can get away from the Spurs rather quickly if Miami takes both Game 3 and Game 4 at home.
“We don’t want to come back here 3-1 down. It’s very hard to overcome that. We have to go to Miami and get one,” Ginobili said.
This could be a series for the ages, or it could be over a week from now if one team wins three in a row.
Only one of the teams has a player capable of scoring 40, and both teams now know that ball movement and staying true to your foundation will be paramount.
This one didn’t get way from the Spurs. It was more like Miami stepped in and took it.
San Antonio did not play horribly. But when mistakes become compounded, that’s giving the Heat all they need.
The Spurs learned that lesson Sunday night, and the outcome of the series will hinge on which team stays in character the longest. The Heat were the team that stayed true to themselves most in Game 2, and mostly it came from James by again making the correct basketball play instead of trying to be a hero all by himself.
It’s a team game, and the Heat were the better team Sunday night. Simple as that. It manifested itself in James’ unselfishness, and that should be a lesson to us all: The Chosen One can choose to pass the ball on the biggest possessions down the stretch. His 35 points were great. His two late passes, along with the pass he didn’t throw, were greater.
Chris Sheridan is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Sheridan Hoops.com. Follow him on Twitter.