SAN Antonio won Game 1 at 110-95, Game 3 at 111-92, and Game 4 at 107-86.
What do the scores tell us?
They tell us they produced three runaway victories.
They tell us San Antonio did not win all three on mere breaks of the game.
And, the most important of all, they tell us the Spurs are just one game away from winning the 2014 NBA crown.
The terrific triple tear was in stark contrast to Miami’s mere two-point, 98-96 victory in Game 2, which was largely the offshoot of LeBron James’s 35-point output plus the 18 of Chris Bosh and 14 from Dwyane Wade for the Heat.
While Miami could barely eke out a victory and had to struggle to snatch a win, San Antonio had repeatedly reaped resounding victories with ridiculous ease for an imposing 3-1 lead.
San Antonio’s successive burst of virtuoso performances does not only validate the Spurs’s billing as the odds-on favorites, it also proves once again that teamwork more than individual talent almost always wins games.
Yesterday’s victory by San Antonio was more than the result of a flawless execution of team patterns that if this were a concert celebrating a Bach, a Rachmaninoff or a Beethoven, it can only be greeted, automatically and instantaneously, by a standing ovation that should last like, say, in eternity.
Bravo, indeed!
LeBron James scored 19 of Miami’s total of 21 third-quarter points but even that was reduced to smithereens by San Antonio’s relentless near-infallible team play from the opening whistle on.
From San Antonio’s 81-57 third-quarter margin, the Spurs erected their biggest bulge at 84-59 with barely a minute gone in the fourth quarter, completely killing all hopes for a Miami rally that simply couldn’t take off amid James’s one-man army stance.
So pathetic were the games of both Bosh and Wade, with Wade missing 9 of his first 10 shots and having only 4 points with the game gone already to the dogs.
In the end, what Spurs coach Gregg Popovich meant to say with his magnificent win again yesterday was, even if Heat coach Erik Spoelstra has the planet’s best player today in James, that does mean the Filipino-American also owns the NBA.
In basketball and, in any team game for that matter, teamwork is tops. Almost always.
(alsol47@yahoo.com)