NBA Finals 2014: Spurs close strong after LeBron James cramps up to win Game 1

The good news is that we are watching the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs. These are two beautiful and brilliant and fascinating basketball teams, playing in an NBA Finals as interesting as any in recent memory. The Spurs, radical-pragmatic Dad Jazz collective that they are, have rounded into a perplexing, half-boring and fully dazzling maturity. The Heat are the Heat -- the team that beat a similarly excellent Spurs team in last year’s Finals, and more importantly the team that’s fortunate enough to employ LeBron James, the best basketball player that most humans alive will ever watch.

The bad news, as usual, is everything else. This is the whole stagy superstructure and the manufactured controversies and endless Hot Take trench warfare, down to the queasy winking micro-redefintions of the luxury sedan and weirdly ugly man-on-puppet perversities during the commercial breaks. They render what’s best about it somehow subsidiary to the stupider spectacle that blurts, bullies and implores during the commercial breaks. The smaller, authentic thing on which all that is leveraged groans under the strain.

Two minutes later, LeBron would be forced out of the game with cramps. That’s when all hell broke loose.

That they did it while suffering through the nasty heat that felled the four-time MVP makes it all the more insane.

The air condition broke at the AT&T Center, leading to rising temperatures that overcame the Heat’s superstar. LeBron James couldn’t play in the fourth quarter because of cramps, allowing the Spurs to pull away.

LeBron James has dealt with cramping on a big stage before. It famously happened in Game 4 of the 2012 NBA Finals. It happened in Game 1 of last year’s NBA Finals against the Spurs. And with the Heat holding a small advantage over the Spurs in the fourth quarter of Game 1 on Thursday, cramps struck James again. He asked out of the game with about seven minutes left:

It was the second time in the game James asked out.

Yup, definitely didn’t see 38-year-old Ray Allen still being able to dunk like this.

Sure, he got away with a push-off on Marco Belinelli, but we’ll allow it for the greater good of being able to watch that happen.

BREAKING: It is very, very warm in the arena in San Antonio.

This is not just because it is hot in San Antonio -- OR BECAUSE THE MIAMI HEAT ARE PLAYING, GET IT? -- it is because the A/C is broken:

Although to be fair, he probably didn’t commit the foul.

Tim Duncan has been a cold-blooded killer in the NBA for about, oh, 179,421 years at this point, draining every 17-foot bank shot and hook he takes like he’s taken it in practice several billion times. (He has.) However, before Game 1 of the Finals, he proved that his hook shot ability extends to tossing t-shirts to the towel boy:

I’m pretty confident I don’t have the arm strength to toss a t-shirt 20 feet or so from a hook shot position -- so much air resistance on that bad boy! -- but Timmy can do it. And he hits towel boy right where he’s standing, without looking!

How can you not love this Finals matchup?

Hey, no one said the Finals weren’t going to be intense. Just... not like this.

For Miami, trying to dissect the Spurs once again will prove difficult. Indiana was able to gameplan against the Heat defense well enough in three games of the Eastern Conference Finals. San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich has a decidedly better offensive gameplan, and one of the regular season’s top offenses.

The first entry into this year’s Finals will let us know just how much these two teams have learned from each other after a year apart.

The Heat and Spurs staged a classic seven-game battle in last year’s NBA Finals. What will they do for an encore?