The Beautiful Game: A Love Letter to the 2014 San Antonio Spurs
“Rebound Bosh, out to Allen, his three-pointer, BANG!!! Tie game with five seconds remaining!”
Any NBA fan knows exactly the moment I’m talking about: the 2013 NBA Finals. Heat vs. Spurs. Game 6. The Spurs are on the verge of winning their first title since 2007, as the Big Three of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker begin to take a back seat to the emerging stardom of young defensive wizard Kawhi Leonard. The Spurs have a 3–2 series lead and lead by two with under 30 seconds remaining. My beloved Kawhi is fouled and splits a pair of free throws as the American Airlines Arena staff begin to prepare for a Spurs championship celebration.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the following moments set the stage for the highest form of basketball some of us will ever see.
We all know what happened next: Ray Allen made, arguably, the greatest shot in NBA history, staving off elimination and leading to overtime where the Heat tied the series. Despite a 19 and 16 from Kawhi, and a throwback 24 and 12 from Timmy, the Spurs fell to the Heat in Game 7, giving LeBron his first back-to-back titles. It was the closest a team has ever come to winning the title while not actually winning it: up 5 in the last minute, then with 20 seconds left, up 2, going to the line.
How often does the opposing team actually win the game in that scenario, let alone with a championship within reach?
But the Spurs came up short, and with Duncan showing his age, it seemed like it could be the end of the line for the Spurs’ 21st-century dominance. Four titles are nothing to sneeze at, and would make a fine legacy.
The Spurs didn’t just come back in 2014. They wanted revenge.
The Spurs made no secret of the heartbreak they felt after 2013, but instead of letting it break them, they used it to get stronger. Kawhi was another year improved, but beyond individual performance, the Spurs embraced a wide-open, pass-first form of basketball that was practically unrecognizable compared to the iso-heavy NBA of the ’90s and early 2000s. The team had always embraced a team-first mentality under Duncan and Coach Pop, but took it to another level in 2014.
They functioned as a single unit, and the results spoke for themselves.
Though they grabbed the number one seed in the West, they weren’t perfect during the season or in the playoffs; 8 seed Dallas took them to seven games in round 1, and it took six games to get past the Thunder. In the Finals, Game 1 was a strange start; the air conditioning in the AT&T Center malfunctioned, and the conditions made playing difficult.
LeBron was on the bench with cramps for a chunk of the fourth quarter, and though the Spurs were extremely efficient in the quarter and won easily, it felt odd, like they somehow got lucky. Particularly as the Heat won Game 2 behind 35 and 10 from James, it seemed like Miami’s star power would be enough to power them to a three-peat, and perhaps allow them to fulfill the lofty promises made when James first got to Miami in 2010.
As Game 3 began, though, there was a palpable change. The Spurs replaced Tiago Splitter with Boris Diaw in the starting lineup, intending to counter Miami’s small-ball but in the process allowing for a more flowing offense. Kawhi broke out, hitting his first six shots, and the Spurs combined to hit a Finals record 75.8% of their shots in the first half. The Spurs won easily and took a lead in the Series that they would never give up en route to winning the 2014 title.
It may seem strange to dedicate an entire article to what was, essentially, a three-game stretch of basketball, even if it was in the Finals. But to watch those games live, it was obvious that something special was happening. At the time, the Heat seemed inevitable, but the Spurs not only won, but they also made it look easy. They won games 3, 4, and 5 by 19, 21, and 17 points, and frankly, it shouldn’t have even been that close. They demolished the Heat. Carved them up. I watched those games and just laughed, not at the Heat’s misfortune, but simply because I could not believe what I was watching. People say this all the time in sports, but it really did look like a clinic, like the Spurs were a group of grown men teaching a bunch of college kids about the fundamentals of basketball by taking them to school. I mean, just watch:
The 2014 Spurs were not the greatest NBA team of all time. But I genuinely believe that this team, in those Finals, played basketball at as high a level as any team has ever played. I was elated to see Timmy win his fifth title and to see LeBron come up short. And in retrospect, it was momentous as Giannis’ rookie season, which is why Top Shot chose that year for its first Run It Back series. But for me, as a fan of the game, I just felt lucky to watch it played at that level.
Thank you ’14 Spurs. We all got to see what’s possible on a basketball court, and hopefully one day we can see it again.
