SAN ANTONIO — Okay, It seems I got the long end of the stick here. Arguing why the Spurs are going to beat the Cavs requires fewer skills of persuasion than the opposite argument, as I’m sure my colleague Martin Johnson can attest.

In fact, merely arguing that the Spurs are better seems to me the journalistic equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel: They won eight more games than Cleveland, had the best scoring margin in the league, and breezed through a loaded Western Conference in 16 games to make it to the Finals.

Everybody knows the Spurs have a great star in Tim Duncan, and that they play incredible defense, and have a slew of veterans who have been here before and succeeded.

So instead, let me tell you some things you probably don’t know about the Spurs and Cavs. These are not just the reasons San Antonio will win, but why they will win easily:

The Spurs have a great offense, too: For a team that’s supposedly boring to watch, the Spurs sure can light up the scoreboard. Using Offensive Efficiency, my measure of a team’s points per 100 possessions, San Antonio ranked fourth in the NBA — the team’s best finish in the Duncan-Popovich era. The Spurs boast three big-time scoring threats in Duncan, speedy guard Tony Parker, and sixth man supreme Manu Ginobili. Stopping any one of them is possible; containing all three simultaneously is a virtual impossibility, as the Nuggets, Suns, and Jazz discovered in succession during the postseason.

Despite LeBron, Cleveland struggles to score: Nets fans know this already, but the Cavs are not a good offensive team. They ranked only 19th in the NBA in Offensive Efficiency, a far cry from the no. 4 Spurs. That performance didn’t improve any in the playoffs: They put up consecutive 76-point clunkers in the first two games against Detroit and cleared 90 just once in six games against New Jersey. They’ve really only clicked in two instances: when LeBron took over the end of Game 5, and when Cavs guard Daniel Gibson got scorching hot to win Game 6.

San Antonio has multiple secondary threats: One of the things that makes San Antonio so tough to guard is that they aren’t just a three-man team. When opponents focus too intently on Duncan and Parker, the Spurs kill opponents with 3-pointers, taking great care to space the floor with outside shooters. Deadly bombers like Michael Finley (36.4%), Brent Barry (44.6%), Bruce Bowen (38.4%), and of course “big shot” Robert Horry (only 33.6% this year, but don’t leave him open in June) punish opponents for paying too much attention to the Spurs’ stars. That’s true in the interior as well, where Fabricio Oberto has quietly made a nice living taking advantage of all the doubleteaming of Duncan.

Of this group, Finley is by far the most dangerous. He’s shooting 46.2% from downtown in the postseason while making nearly three a game. In fact, his 13.1 points per game in the playoffs is more than all but two Cavaliers — not bad for one of the “other” guys.

Cleveland can’t make foul shots: Everyone harps on San Antonio’s woes from the line, because their best player (Duncan, 63.7%) is a notoriously poor foul shooter, and because two other starters (Bruce Bowen, 58.9% and Oberto, 64.7%) are also rather poor from the stripe.

So it may surprise some to learn that, as a team, the Spurs shot 75.1% from the stripe this year. Yes, Duncan has his problems, but the other two Spurs who took the bulk of their attempts were Parker and Ginobili: Parker shot 78.3%, and Ginobili a sizzling 86.0%. Moreover, in any kind of technical foul situation (for illegal defense against Duncan, for instance), the Spurs can turn to Barry (88.0%) and Finely (91.8%).

In fact, Cleveland is the team that has more trouble from the stripe. James, despite his greatness in other areas, is a poor foul shooter. He made 69.8% on the season, and had several key misfires late in close games. The two other Cavs to take the most free throws — Larry Hughes (67.6%) and Anderson Varejao (61.6%) — were just as bad.

Together, those three players took nearly two-thirds of the team’s free-throw tries. That helps explain why the Cavs hit only 69.5%, the second-worst percentage in the league (Miami was the worst at 69.0%).

During the course of a sevengame series, we would expect the disparity in free-throws to cost Cleveland about 10 points — in other words, there’s a good chance that free-throw shooting alone might cost them a game.

San Antonio was much better than their record: The Spurs won 58 games and lost 24 during the regular season, but two factors lead us to conclude they were actually better than that. First was their scoring margin. Usually there’s a predictable relationship between points scored, points allowed, and how many games a team wins. In 82 games, this might deviate by a couple of games from the expected values, but it’s rare to see a larger shift.

The Spurs were a rare exception, however. They had the victory margin of 67-win team, a ninegame difference from their real win-loss record. You might think this is the result of some inability to master late-game situations, but this is almost entirely because of pure bad luck. Victory margin has been shown to be a better predictor of future results than winloss record, and in this case San Antonio’s victory margin shows it to be one of the most powerful teams of the past few decades.

Additionally, San Antonio played significantly better in the second half of the season. The Spurs went 23–3 after the All-Star break before resting their stars in the final three games, which has been a staple of their play under Popovich. They don’t really seem to get rolling until their “Rodeo road trip” each February when a rodeo takes over San Antonio’s home arena.

Taken all together, this series is actually less close than it appears at first glance. I’m not just predicting San Antonio will win — I think they’ll win going away. This thing will be over in five relatively easy games, and the Cavs will be left to ponder just how much better they need to get to beat the elite teams from the West next June.

jhollinger@nysun.com