Sheridan: LeBron’s Future Cloudy; No Clue in the Shoes

SAN ANTONIO — Before we get to the elephant in the room, it would be unfair to the San Antonio Spurs to not acknowledge their accomplishment and give you a little snapshot of what it was like in their locker room after they became NBA champions Sunday night.

The champagne being served and sprayed was Dom Perignon, 2003. I’m told it tastes OK, but I don’t do champagne that costs more than my car. There was not a ton of Dom. But the beer supply? Put it this way: There are fraternity houses that don’t have as much suds on hand as the Spurs did, one huge cooler holding about a million bottles of Bud Light, and smaller coolers scattered about filled with Dos Equis and Shiner Bock.

Beer seems to fit with the Spurs and their championship celebrations. I covered their last one in Cleveland when they swept LeBron James and the Cavaliers in 2007, and although the brewskis were not quite as abundant, they were the beverage of choice then as well.

Having been in nearly two dozen championship locker rooms through the years, you learn to appreciate the different ways that different teams celebrate. When the Heat won in Dallas in 2006, the smell of champagne was so prevalent that it stuck in your nostrils for the rest of the night. In Boston, the smell you remembered was from cigars. In Los Angeles, the locker room was such a sea of humanity that the players barely even celebrated in there.

This was a night when you had to feel happy for the Spurs, an organization that is the class of the league on the court and off. As the game ended, the scoreboard camera operator focused his lens on coach Gregg Popovich and didn’t let the camera drift anywhere else even once, giving the crowd a chance to see Pop congratulate different individual members of the Heat who stuck around on the court after the game ended. First Dwyane Wade, then Ray Allen — the player who had more to do with Popovich’s 365 somewhat sleepless nights over the past year — then Chris Bosh.

Pop poked a finger in Allen’s chest as he spoke to him, and Allen could only smile in return.

“Last year’s loss was devastating. I’ve said many times, a day didn’t go by that I didn’t think about Game 6,” Popovich said. “So for the group to have the fortitude they showed to get back to this spot, I think it speaks volumes about how they’re constituted and what kind of fiber they have.”

Here is what Pop said to his team:

James did not stick around to watch the Spurs celebrate, leaving the floor before any of his teammates and retreating to the visitors locker room where he was more or less left alone, a black skull cap pulled over his head, wearing no shirt along with a pair of black slacks and a pair of dark blue shoes.

The hue of blue did not match the color of any NBA team’s uniform, which is noteworthy only because I covered his final game for the Cavaliers back in 2010 and watched him walk out of Quicken Loans arena wearing a pair of Nikes with hot pink trim. At the time, I took that as a clue that James would be heading to the Miami Heat, as that was the only NBA team that had pink among its uniform colors. (It was part of the Heat’s alternate uniforms, patterned after the ABA Floridians.) The Cavs have a dark blue among their many color schemes, but this shade was not as dark as that shade.

He walked to the team bus side by side with Wade after offering very little in the way of clues at his post-game news conference, with the exception of a line that sounded eerily familiar to what he said at the podium on his final night as a Cleveland Cavalier.

“I’ll deal with my summer when I get to that point. Me and my team will sit down and deal with it. I love Miami. My family loves it. But obviously right now that’s not what I’m thinking about,” James said. “You guys are trying to find answers. I’m not going to give you one. When it gets to that point, I’ll deal with it.”

So James didn’t say he’s coming back to Miami, and he didn’t say he’s leaving Miami. He said he loves Miami. He loves Ohio, too. Don’t forget that. Does he love Dan Gilbert? One would expect not. But could that be the deal-breaker that rules out a return to the Cavs? That’s too tough to say right now.

But I’d imagine it is going to be a two-horse race when it comes to The Decision II, and the Cavs think so, too. I know because they told me so the night they won the draft lottery. And I’ll tell you this, too: If Mark Jackson becomes their new coach, it will be a clear signal that they are going after LeBron again.

Listening to James and Wade after the game, it was hard to tell if they were closing a chapter of their careers.

“It’s been a hell of a ride in these four years, and when we decided to play together we didn’t say, okay, let’s try it for four years. We said let’s just play together and see what happens,” Wade said. “We’ve been successful in the sense of what we tried to accomplish, and that is going to the Finals, and we did it. We’d love to be four-for-four, it just wasn’t in the cards for us to be that.”

To a man, the Heat acknowledged the Spurs’ superiority, with Bosh — who emptily vowed his team would not lose Game 5 – saying they were the finest team he had ever competed against.

“They exposed us. They picked us apart. Give credit to those guys. They dominated us, and it was an anti-climactic end to the season for us. They played the best basketball I’ve ever seen,” Bosh said.

Few would argue with Bosh after watching what the Spurs did to the Heat over the final three games, taking a pair in Miami and control of this one by holding the Heat to just 11 second-quarter points when the game turned permanently in the Spurs’ favor.

Kawhi Leonard was the one holding the MVP trophy when it ended, and the flavor of the night this time was Patty Mills, the point guard who dropped 17 of the Spurs’ 47 bench points. (The bench scored 188 points in the five games.)

Mills will be a free agent this summer, and he’ll be in demand — maybe in such high demand that the Spurs won’t be able to afford him anymore. The same could happen with Boris Diaw, whose high basketball IQ was on full display as he passed, rebounded and defended his way to this championship. Manu Ginobili ended up being the most consistent member of the Spurs’ Big Three, and anybody who watched him struggle in last year’s playoffs should be sufficiently astounded that he turned things around so totally.

So as we close the books on the 2013-14 season, we can definitely say that the best team won, and the second-best team was outclassed despite having the game’s best player.

Has James accomplished everything he can in Miami? That is a question that he is going to have to ask himself and discuss with his “team.” The guy never went to college, and he has now had a four-year break from the harsh winters he used to endure in Ohio — the state where he was once loved, then hated, and now longed for.

We’ve got two weeks until the league shuts down, and the future plans of LeBron James will be Topic A, B and C aside from the draft. And speaking of the draft, if the Cavs decide to trade the overall No. 1 pick to Minnesota for Kevin Love, you can be pretty darned sure they are doing it to make the team more enticing for LeBron to come back.

The Decision II awaits us.

And right now, I’d say there is a fairly decent chance that James returns home. Better than a 50-50 chance? I wouldn’t go that far.

But I will say this: If he wants to play on a team that is capable of defeating the Spurs, he’s going to have a hard time doing that by staying in Miami. That is the one thing we walked away from the NBA Finals knowing definitively.

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Chris Sheridan is publisher and editor-in-chief of SheridanHoops.com. Follow him on Twitter.