The 2010s in the NBA will be remembered for the rapid rise and fall of superteams, the proliferation of marketable superstar talent, the 3-point revolution, and, of course, LeBron James' dominance.
Taking those factors into consideration, you'd assume that if any matchup defined the decade in pro basketball, it's Warriors versus Cavaliers. Their rivalry literally accounted for 40% of 2010s Finals.
But the first signs of where the game and the league were headed appeared a couple of years before Golden State's first title of the '10s, in two memorable championship series between the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs.
The Heat had James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, and a dependable cast of high-IQ vets like Ray Allen and Shane Battier. The Spurs had the ageless Tim Duncan, a young Kawhi Leonard, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, and glue guys like Danny Green and Boris Diaw.
Their first Finals meeting in 2013 gave us one of the decade's most iconic plays, when Bosh rebounded a James miss and found a backpedaling Allen in the corner. Allen's shot forced overtime in Game 6 en route to an eventual Game 7 win and second straight championship for the Heat.
The second matchup - a lopsided Spurs victory in 2014 - propelled Leonard to stardom and pushed James back to Cleveland later that summer, shifting the league's balance of power.
The lasting legacy of those Heat-Spurs matchups, though, might be both teams' historic contributions to the evolution of the modern game.
Before spacing had really entered the average fan's lexicon, head coach Erik Spoelstra's Heat were talking about "pace and space," an offensive strategy focused more on the latter than the former. Miami ranked 23rd and 27th in pace in the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons but fifth and sixth in 3-point attempt rate. The "pace" component was more about taking advantage of transition opportunities than it was about playing fast.
Recalling why he moved to the pace-and-space system, Spoelstra said, "We struggled in the (2011) Finals against Dallas."
He continued, "I actually stole that from Chip Kelly when he was at the University of Oregon. It just made a whole lot of sense when I watched it play out with his Oregon (football) teams - how they played with enough pace and spacing that it created incredible opportunities for the talent. That concept of doing those things so that our talent could emerge and be the best versions of themselves is something that really helped us offensively."
The simple yet effective strategy - surrounding James with shooters who could space the floor rather than clogging the lane with traditional big men - became the offensive blueprint for maximizing LeBron-led teams. Defenses that had the misfortune of lining up opposite James' Heat were left to grapple with the terrifying realities of his drives; they either watched helplessly as he went to work on his insanely efficient interior game, or they collapsed and saw him find his sharpshooting teammates.
Look around the league, and it's not hard to see the influence. Mike Budenholzer and the Bucks unlocked the most devastating version of Giannis Antetokounmpo in a similar fashion.
Small ball and spacing weren't exactly born in Miami, but the Heat - who possessed an otherworldly abundance of talent - did it better than any team that came before. They started the 2013 Finals with Udonis Haslem sharing the frontcourt with Bosh, only to replace Haslem with marksman Mike Miller by the end of the seven-game epic. In 2014, Rashard Lewis started beside Bosh.
"I was part of it. I saw it in the making. I was like, 'OK, this is different,'" says Haslem, now the longest-tenured member of the Heat. "Up until then, to my knowledge, no one was playing - or no one was talking about playing - positionless, small-ball basketball.
"It was either you're a center and you're in the paint, you're a guard on the perimeter, or you're a forward, whatever. And then everything became positionless for us, because of the players we had - guys like Bron, CB, D-Wade - and the skill sets they had. You had to learn and be able to play all five positions."
Winning a positionless championship without a traditional big man on the court in 2013 was almost unheard of at the time. It's since become the norm.
The Spurs, meanwhile, were in the middle of reinventing themselves. A team whose two decades of dominance began with a grind-it-out style that won Finals games by scores like 78-77 and 88-77 was now an offensive juggernaut playing some of the most breathtaking team basketball the NBA had ever seen.
"When we played San Antonio, they really took movement and beating you with the pass to a totally different level," Spoelstra said.
"The first Finals we played them, I thought it was the best movement and passing team we would face. I was wrong," he continued. As Spoelstra paused to reflect, he shook his head and smiled. It's almost as if he could see the 2014 Spurs bending the Heat's defense all over again; a dizzying array of black, silver, and white uniforms running, cutting, and shooting through his mind.
"I was wrong," Spoelstra said, "because the following year (2014) was just incredible. It was exquisite ball and player movement that I think really set the table for the NBA's next generation, which took concepts of what both teams did (in those Finals) and put it on steroids."
The 2013-14 Spurs made 330 passes per game, nearly nine more than any other team during the regular season, but that average jumped to a whopping 355.2 during their five-game Finals triumph over Miami - thanks in part to a mid-series lineup change, as Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich replaced center Tiago Splitter with the playmaking brilliance of Diaw.
The offensive onslaught that ensued - a plethora of ball movement, off-ball movement, cuts, screens, and misdirections - influenced the fluid, read-and-react attacks that yielded championships in Golden State and are currently employed by coaches like defending champion Nick Nurse in Toronto.
Sure, those Spurs were stocked with their fair share of future Hall of Famers. But they taught the rest of the league that, despite tired narratives about the style of basketball that champions need to play, you could succeed in April, May, and ultimately June by trusting a team-oriented attack designed to produce open (3-point) jumpers.
The 2013-14 Spurs led the league with 25.2 assists per game. Over the next five seasons, 26 teams matched or bested that number. This year, a team averaging 25.2 assists would rank ninth in the NBA.
During the 2014 Finals, 32.6% of the Spurs' field-goal attempts came from 3-point territory - just shy of the Rockets' league-leading 33% 3-point attempt rate during the regular season. These days, those are the marks of the most 3-point averse teams.
"Everybody in the NBA watched San Antonio and decided they wanted to play that way," former Suns general manager Ryan McDonough told ESPN's Jackie MacMullan in 2015. "It's a copycat league. It was a good strategy: making the extra pass, flying down the floor in transition and shooting threes before the defense could get set."
As he stood on the court in Toronto with only weeks remaining in 2019, Spoelstra said that in the heat of battle, he never considered how his Heat and Popovich's Spurs may have been changing the game.
"It was just desperation," Spoelstra explained. "We were trying to find anything to help us win."
He can reflect on it now, though.
"I just admire the game and how it evolves," he said. "It constantly changes and keeps you on your toes. Where it is now, it almost looks like a different sport.
"I remember the first time we played the Phoenix Suns after Mike D'Antoni got there in 2004, and everybody said he was ruining the game. That Suns team averaged what people were calling an 'astonishing' 24 3-point attempts per game. Right now, that would be last in the league by far. That was the style of play that was supposed to be horrible for the future of the game. That's how closed-minded all of us can be sometimes.
"Even our two teams that did those concepts (of pace, space, and movement) so well, what's happened in the last few Finals already looks so different from where we were, and it's beautiful basketball. It makes you wonder. Who knows where the game will be 10 years from now?"
The story of the game's stylistic evolution in the 2020s is yet to be written. For now, we reflect on the 2010s, and we can't do that without remembering the peek into the future San Antonio and Miami offered us in 2013 and 2014.
Joseph Casciaro is theScore's senior basketball writer.
