Patrick Redford is a 3rd Year Geology/Geography Major. Check him out on twitter @patrickredford.

In modern sports-thinking, there is a tendency to conflate football with war or baseball with patriotism in action. Obviously things are more complicated, but this is America and convenience reigns supreme over nuanced thinking. Basketball doesn’t really lend itself to pigeonholing. You can codify it with the blanket tag as “art”, and you’d be correct, but it can be so many different mediums. Many X’s and O’s analysts see it as a ballet, where a team’s offensive and defensive abilities are functions of the dancers and the choreography. The ‘basketball as jazz’ codification is popular, but as Bethlehem Shoals once joked, people who hold this view “have never listened to Rakim.” Your interpretations are yours to make, but the sport contains multitudes like none other.

Of course, something as intricate as the NBA can’t be digested in its entirety by all casual fans, thus fandom becomes more about narratives and characters than basketball. There are a few rotating storylines surrounding the elite teams, all of which serve to help you make sense of the complicated NBA landscape. One of the biggest and laziest is that the San Antonio Spurs are boring. This is like saying dogs are boring or holidays are boring. The evidence for this conclusion is that the Spurs play efficiently and without bombast. They don’t have the volatile spirit of the Clippers or Grizzlies, nor the rabbit-in-a-hat mysticism of the Warriors, but there isn’t anything boring about watching a team make sense out of the chaos. Conversely, the way they move the ball, probing for any weakness is fascinating. This runs counter to many teams’ tendencies to bang their heads against the wall no matter what defenses throw at them.

Coach Greg Popovich is on the far right of the bell curve for his ability to squeeze the maximum contribution from his squads, as well as adapt strategies to his specific personnel. In years past, Tim Duncan was the focal point of the offense, and the game plan was to slow the tempo down, pound it inside and space the floor around Duncan with shooters (Kawhi Leonard, Danny Green). As he has aged, Popovich has refused to cling to any plan for too long, and instead morphed the offense to revolve around the speed of Tony Parker and the abilities of a very strong group of supporting players. This may be the scariest part about the Spurs. Of their teams of the past decade, this current iteration has the most danger men up and down the roster, all with specific ways to dispatch opposition. Tiago Splitter is a bonafide inside stopper, Kawhi Leonard isn’t 22 and is already one of the better wing defenders in the league and even Big Butt Boris Diaw is crafty as ever. In sweeps of the Lakers (HA!) and Grizzlies, San Antonio worked the system to perfection. Had Steph Curry not gone supernova a few times and had their guards shot normal percentages, the Warriors series would have been over quicker.

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Opposite the Spurs, Miami is a completely different team. Whereas each Spur has a role and a niche, making them a very pointy team, Miami is more of a blob. There are role players, as there are on every team, but their utility is more limited, and general responsibility for each task is distributed more collectively. For example, Ray Allen led the team in rebounds in their Game 4 loss to Indiana. The team is centered around Lebron James, who the ‘Spurs are boring!’ crowd would call an unclutch flopper who doesn’t deserve the title of Best Player in the World. James is so interesting because his dominance isn’t of the Bryant/Jordan species. He doesn’t eat the game in big angry bites, he swallows it whole and affects it on all levels, with a certain omnipotence. In the Eastern Conference Finals, he guarded an All Star small forward, an All Star power forward and an All Star center, as well as scoring in the post, from the perimeter and everywhere in between. Also, most Spurs lineups feature at least one really tall center/power forward type and the Heat only have one on their roster, and he isn’t even all that integral.

His sidekick Dwyane Wade has looked alternately hobbled and irrepressible. Chris Bosh, Udonis Haslem and Chris Andersen were outclassed by the Pacer’s big men pretty thoroughly, and the stable of shooters were all slowed by Indiana’s impressive defense right up until Game 7, when they broke through. The Heat primarily marched on through James’ transcendance. Unlike San Antonio, their system isn’t particularly slick or efficient, yet they still run a very good offense. This is the crucial juxtaposition of this matchup: San Antonio runs a stratified system and adheres to traditional notions of positionality whereas the Heat are built radially outward from their leader Lebron James, with more of an amorphous sense of roles. Miami’s team still has certain players perform specific tasks, but most non-Lebron/Wade dudes are all kind of vaguely responsible for hitting shots and grabbing rebounds.

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It’s difficult to prognosticate exactly how each team will approach the game, but it will be fascinating to watch. The Spurs’ size alone presents many interesting questions. They could fill up the paint to prevent Lebron from attacking the rim, but none of their big guys are markedly mobile, which invites open three pointers. On offense, they will have the advantage over the smaller Heat, but once again the lack of speed expands the risk of letting the Heat loose in transition. Miami could stick Lebron James on Tony Parker, restricting his ability to destroy the defense from within by driving and kicking, but the lack of other elite individual defenders (Miami is a fantastic team defense) may expose them to corner threes or a single covered Tim Duncan.

Neither team has faced an opponent in the playoffs quite like their next one. Both teams feature elite offenses and elite defenses, so the texture of the series is fairly unpredictable. This will be a fascinating finals for the stylistic differences inherent, as well as the legacies in play. Lebron’s first trip to the finals featured a methodical sweep by San Antonio. Who knows how much longer the Parker-Ginobili-Duncan centric Spurs will be serious contenders?\ These large differences will produce an entertaining series, and it definitely won’t be over sooner than 6 games.

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Predictions: Mario Chalmers tells Tim Duncan he thinks the Punisher “has weak story structure” and it “sucks”. Duncan unblinkingly blocks Chalmers’s next shot and throws a perfect outlet pass. Manu Ginobili is found sacrificing a bat outside of the American Airlines Arena before Game 2. When asked what he thought of the Heat’s defense after Game 3, Kawhi Leonard says the new Arrested Development and Daft Punk both sucked. It is revealed that Ray Allen was actually asleep for parts of his 2 for 6 Game 4 performance. Patty Mills and Dejuan Blair construct a totally cool towel-fort on the Spurs bench, which official Kevin Crawford forces them to disassemble because they wouldn’t let Aron Baynes in. Udonis Haslem arrives to Game 6 on the back of a real actual alligator. Heat in 7.

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