ON PRO BASKETBALL After Bad Start, N.B.A. Season Finishes with Inspiring Vision

By HOWARD BECK

As the music blared and the confetti spilled Thursday night in Miami, two transcendent figures met at midcourt, shared an embrace and some parting words — a poetic coda to a season that almost wasn’t, an inspiring vision for the future.

LeBron James hugged Kevin Durant, who hugged back, their arms clasped tight in a touching display of friendship and mutual respect between two of the N.B.A.’s brightest stars.

“I basically told him I was proud of him, everything he achieved this year,” James said later, after his Miami Heat had clinched the championship, defeating Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder. James added, “Hopefully, I don’t continue to have to run into him, because he’s that great.”

Although the series ended in five games, a game or two earlier than most predicted, the N.B.A. could not have asked for a better finals. James, the greatest player in the game, and easily its most scrutinized, finally claimed a championship. Durant, fast becoming the most popular player in the league at 23, dazzled in his finals debut.

It was a well-played, entertaining series, with the two teams separated by a total of 5 points after the first four games. It ended with a montage of moving imagery and sound, from Thunder Coach Scott Brooks’s fourth-quarter speech that instantly went viral to Durant’s teary embrace with his mother.

It was more than the N.B.A. could have possibly hoped for — or perhaps deserved — after a bitter 149-day lockout that consumed the summer and fall and nearly became the “nuclear winter” of Commissioner David Stern’s nightmares.

The league exceeded expectations in every area, from revenue to ratings to attendance. Some 18.5 million people watched James win the title last week, according to ABC, completing a five-game finals that generated its highest average ratings since 2004. ESPN, TNT and NBA TV all reported their highest ratings ever for the regular season. Attendance figures were in the top five in league history.

By the playoffs, no one much cared about the labor debates over “BRI” or “aprons” and “cliffs” or the merits of a “repeater tax.” The fretting over back-to-back-to-backs and four-game weeks had faded. Rather than place asterisks on the season, fans and commentators instead pondered the (intriguing, if unrealistic) idea of a permanently truncated 66-game schedule.

The hectic season may or may not have contributed to the injuries that plagued the Los Angeles Clippers’ Chris Paul and Blake Griffin in the playoffs. We will never know if the lack of practice and recovery time caused the injuries that felled Chicago’s Derrick Rose and Joakim Noah and the Knicks’ Iman Shumpert and Baron Davis.

Indeed, the true legacy of the lockout — a harder salary cap, a more punitive luxury tax and new restrictions on player contracts — has yet to be deeply felt. But that day is coming.

The free-agency period that opens July 1 will be the first meaningful gauge of the new system, which is aimed at reducing payroll disparity and spreading talent more evenly across 30 franchises.

The idea was to rein in the high-spending, high-revenue teams in the league’s largest markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston. Yet it is Oklahoma City, the league’s 28th-largest market, that may be the first to confront the N.B.A.’s harsh new realities.

Durant and Russell Westbrook, the Thunder’s dazzling young stars, will earn a combined $31 million next season. James Harden and Serge Ibaka, their next two most important players, are eligible for lucrative extensions this summer. If the Thunder do not lock them up now, Harden and Ibaka will become restricted free agents in 2013, placing Oklahoma City in a precarious position.

Harden, a gifted scorer and playmaker, was the N.B.A.’s sixth man of the year. Ibaka, one of the league’s top shot blockers, was a top candidate for defensive player of the year. They will be hotly pursued if they reach free agency.

Oklahoma City has a projected payroll of $63 million for 2012-13, just $7 million below the luxury-tax threshold. It seems doubtful that a franchise that has dutifully avoided the luxury tax for five years can afford two more “max” (or even near-max) players.

So the Thunder, who have been lauded as a model of good management — smart drafting, conservative spending — may be the first victims of a system that was aimed at the free spenders in New York and Los Angeles.

Call it the law of unintended consequences.

“We’re not necessarily looking to break up teams,” the deputy commissioner Adam Silver said. “But again, it forces teams to make difficult decisions.”

Yet if Durant, Westbrook, Ibaka and Harden were Lakers, there is little doubt that the franchise would simply pay the tax, even tens of millions of dollars, to keep them. The Thunder will have no such option.

“That’s the precise point we made to the union in collective bargaining,” Silver said. “That’s why we would have preferred a hard cap.”

The hard-cap debate is, of course, where the lockout began, 359 days ago.

The league was fortunate to recover as quickly and successfully as it did, in large part because of James’s compelling quest and the endearing dynamism of Durant and his young teammates. The finals left fans with an enticing vision of a rivalry that could last for years — if the Thunder can only afford it.