ALL HAIL THE KING: LeBron James, backing down Kawhi Leonard, showed why he is the best player in basketball, The Post’s Mike Vaccaro writes. James, who scored 37 points and grabbed 12 rebounds, denied Tony Parker and Tim Duncan (inset) another NBA title. (AP (2))
MIAMI — As he spoke, the full blare of celebration bled through the walls of American Airlines Arena, through the curtains, loud music and loud voices, a reminder of all that had been in his fingers two nights earlier, all that had slipped through. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. It didn’t seem Manu Ginobili needed much prompting.
“I still have Game 6 in my head,” he said.
They all did, and that was one problem last night, the last night of these epic NBA Finals, especially toward the end of this splendid 95-88 chess match. The other problem was named LeBron James, and the fact that he was on one side of the court and the Spurs were on the other.
“That’s what happens,” Ginobili said, “when you’re playing the best player in the world.”
But this is also what happens when the best player in the world, and the best basketball team on the planet, are pushed to the very brink and beyond, when they are opposed by a collection of proud old champions like the Spurs. Maybe this wasn’t the most artistic basketball ever played. It was often inelegant.
But damn, it was fun.
“That,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said, “was the toughest series we’ve ever been in.”
“It took everything we had as a team,” Dwyane Wade said. “We did whatever it took.”
James was the difference, of course, because he is what Ginobili said he is, because for all the clatter and the chatter that surrounds him, all the hand-wringing about his “legacy,” he is capable of this: 37 points and 12 rebounds in an all-in game. He is capable of making five 3-pointers on a night when the Spurs all but begged him to shoot them.
“He’s unbelievable,” Tim Duncan said. “He made every shot they needed him to make. That’s who he is.”
This is who Duncan is, and who the Spurs are: even after four championships, even after a career that has yielded one of the great basketball stories ever told, he looked tortured in the postgame. He had missed a driving shot that could have tied the game late — eerily reminiscent of the finger roll Patrick Ewing missed 18 years ago, in fact — and he had watched LeBron take the game away, watched the Heat take the title away. The hurt was all over his face.
“This is tough,” he said. “It’s always tough when you lose. But this …”
He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to. At 37 he’d come so close to giving the Spurs one final push that would’ve nudged the into the firmament of the very best basketball dynasties ever assembled, some 14 years after winning for the first time. He’d struggled some, and been as dominant as he’d ever been at 27 in Game 6, and that hadn’t gone unnoticed.
“Tim is one of the greatest players of all time,” Wade said. “He had a hell of a series. If I can do what he did at 37, I’ll be happy.”
At the end, though, it was James who is the younger man, the more gifted man, blessed with the better supporting cast. While Duncan fumbled away the layup and the follow, James hit the gut-busting, game-breaking shot with 27.9 seconds left, a 19-footer that gave the Heat a four-point lead and sent the arena into the kind of frenzy that 19,900 people can provide when they choose to stay to the very end.
“I’m blessed,” he said. “So what everyone says about me off the court doesn’t matter. I’ve got no worries.”
None of them do. Not after this. All due respect to last year’s Thunder, all due respect to the four tomato cans the Spurs knocked down on the way to their first four titles, this was exactly the kind of match-up the sport craved, the two teams swapping uppercuts and body blows, fighting, as was once said of Ali and Frazier, for the championship of each other, in addition to their league.
“We needed every inch of what everybody gave,” Wade said.
Credit the Heat for that. And credit the Spurs, too. They thought they had the trophy in their hands Tuesday night, and a lesser team with lesser character would’ve been bludgeoned last night. That simply isn’t the Spurs’ way.
“I thought we gave everything,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said.
The Heat just had a little more. The party raged on in the arena, long and loud, a reminder of everything the Heat had just earned, everything the Spurs had lost. And everything they had both achieved. Together.