Spurs-Heat, Game 3: San Antonio Spits Hot Fire

As I watched, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The numbers were incredible. The Miami Heat shot 56% from the floor in the 1st half, scored 50 points...and trailed by 21 heading into the break!

Actually, it looked like the Heat couldn't believe it either.

The Spurs broke out probably the greatest shooting display I've ever seen in my 29-plus years on planet Earth: 71 1st half points, making 19 of their 1st 21 attempts from the floor, shooting 76% from the field after 2 quarters. After Game 2, I broke out a bullet list of 5 my main thoughts from the game...no such list necessary today.

Any other analysis other than the Spurs shot the lights out is completely unnecessary and absurd. Maybe the 1 other point you could make is that Miami was too careless with the ball. They coughed it up 20 times on the night (LeBron James had 7 and Dwyane Wade had 5), which only served to pile on in San Antonio's offensive fireworks display. Miami also had a couple defensive lapses early on that led to Spurs' layups, but on this night even when they played solid D the Spurs shot-making rendered it irrelevant.

But stop with everything else, please. People trying to make a story out of Kawhi Leonard outplaying James are silly. For the record, LeBron scored 22 points on only 14 shots, grabbed 5 boards, dished out 7 assists, and was the only thing even keeping the Heat within shouting distance of the Spurs early on. How badly Tony Parker and Patty Mills have outplayed Miami's point guards may be consequential in the grand scheme of things of this series, but it's merely a footnote for this particular game.

After 2 mediocre games, Leonard was a stud last night.

All you need to know are the offensive numbers from 2 paragraphs ago. As the saying goes though, in the NBA, everybody makes a run, and Miami predictably scrapped back into the game in the 2nd half. Several times, they trimmed the deficit to single digits, but the Spurs always seemed to push the lead back out to a comfortable 14 points or so. The fact is that unless Miami matched San Antonio's historic 1st half output in half number 2 or the Spurs simply stopped scoring the ball completely, the Heat had no chance. As another NBA cliche goes, it's a make or miss league. And the Spurs didn't miss very often.

Here's the most basic fact of all: if the Spurs shoot anything close to that again, there's nothing the Heat can do about it, and this series will be short and sweet...end of story.