The Warriors-Cavaliers NBA Finals will be a wild, beautiful shootout

This is the NBA Finals of the three-pointer.

The Warriors attempted the most threes of any team in the NBA playoffs, 30.3 per game. The Cavaliers attempted the second-most threes in the NBA playoffs, 29.1 per game. (They beat the teams that ranked third and fourth in three pointers attempted per game in the conference finals.)

As Baxter Holmes pointed out, the Warriors and Cavs aren’t just two of the best teams at shooting threes this year -- they’re two of the best teams at shooting threes of all time. The Warriors made 883 threes in the regular season, third-most of all time, and the Cavs made 826, eighth of all time.

And of course, the Warriors have the Splash Brothers: Steph Curry holds the record for most threes made in a season and has already broken the record for most threes made in a postseason. He takes shots others wouldn’t dream of attempting and drills them with ease. He’s arguably the best shooter in NBA history, and he’s only a few percentage points better than his own teammate, Klay Thompson.

It’s not a coincidence that the two teams left fighting for the NBA title were the the two that took the most threes: These two teams will disprove the basketball wisdom that you can’t win championships while shooting threes -- and they’ll put on a pretty damn good show, too.

Breaking: Threes are fun. It is aesthetically very enjoyable to watch people shoot long-distance, high-value shots, and hit them over and over again. And the NBA Finals will be full of them.

Both teams implement the three into their gameplan. Both tend to play lineups filled with players capable of hitting threes, and space beautifully. The Cavs ask teams to decide whether they want to help on LeBron James or leave somebody open, a choice where both results are bad. The Warriors make the three a part of their transition attack, using fast breaks to take open shots from beyond the arc as often as they go for layups.

But while both teams have tried and true strategies to get threes, both teams also have zero-conscience gunners taking tons of questionable threes from deep. Curry takes 8.1 threes per game, J.R. Smith takes 7.3. These shots are often from obscene distances, they’re often off-the-dribble rather than set shots, they’re often defended. But both players are talented enough that the shots go in routinely enough to make them efficient shots.

We’re not saying Curry and Smith are equal players. Smith avoids passing, whereas Curry is a brilliant assist man. Curry is one of the best shooters in basketball history while Smith is merely a very good shooter. But both take threes that would be horrible decisions for the average player, and make them often enough to justify high-volume roles on very good teams. Both play on teams that make hitting a lot of threes seem ordinary, and both are unscrupulous gunners reminding us that making threes is extraordinary. Both can and will defy logic.

In every sport, including basketball, there is a schism between folks who agree that advanced statistics and analytic methods have a place in sports, and those who refuse to integrate those stats and methods into their understanding of the game.

In the NBA, one of the gaps between the disagreements between these two groups surrounds the three-point shot. The analytics group points out that three-point shots are only slightly more difficult than most shots and are worth 1.5 times as many points, and posit that teams should try to maximize their three-point attempts as much as possible.

The anti-analytics group has a few rebuttals. They say that “you can’t win a championship shooting threes,” that in the rough-and-tough world of the NBA Playoffs, three-heavy teams will crumble against defensive-minded foes with strong, dependable interior games. Or “if you live by the three, you die by the three,” a reminder that a team depending on threes might lose easily if they hit a dry spell. People have said these things, even as squads like the 2013 Heat (No. 6 in 3PA, No. 2 in 3P%) and the 2014 Spurs (No. 1 in 3P%) earned NBA titles.

Two three-heavy teams facing off in the Finals should prove once and for all that banking on the three is not a flash-in-the-pan strategy doomed to fail in the postseason. Teams can shoot a lot of threes and be stout defensively. Teams can shoot a lot of threes and win series after series. Teams can shoot a lot of threes and win NBA championships.

The “watch the games” crowd should actually, you know, watch the games, and realize that the NBA’s best teams are the ones that best use the three-point shot. If they don’t, teams like the Warriors and the Cavs will be happy to breeze by, racking up three points on trips where opponents would settle for two.

SB Nation presents: The factors that will decide the NBA Finals