The beautiful game

A year earlier the Spurs had lost the Finals by five seconds.

Game 6, 2013: San Antonio led by five with twenty-eight seconds left, the championship ropes were already at the edge of the floor, and Ray Allen made the most famous three in Finals history.

Miami won the overtime, then Game 7.

Most teams do not come back from a defeat like that. Popovich brought back exactly the same group, a year older, and replayed the Game 6 footage to his players in the preseason.

The revenge does not look like revenge. It looks like a demonstration.

San Antonio win the last four games of the series, three of them by more than fifteen, playing a basketball the league had not seen at this level: four or five passes a possession, no isolation, the shot taken by whoever is most open rather than whoever is best paid.

Game 5 follows the same plan. Miami hold for a quarter, then the third goes 30-18.

LeBron James scores 31 and loses by seventeen. That is the most exact summary of this Finals: the best player in the world was on the floor, and his team did not exist.

104-87. Kawhi Leonard, who arrived as a third option, leaves with the MVP trophy.

It is Tim Duncan's last title, fifteen years after his first, which has no equivalent.

It is also the end of the Heat. LeBron James returns to Cleveland a fortnight later, and the run of four straight Finals ends on this game.

The basketball of this series had a direct influence. The Warriors who win the following year play an accelerated version of the same principle, and the idea that ball movement beats isolated talent becomes orthodoxy for five years.

And there is the symmetry Popovich was after. These Spurs lost in 2013 because they missed a rebound. They won in 2014 because they had spent a year thinking about nothing else.