Twenty-eight NBA teams lay crumpled and destroyed at the foot of the mountain, defeated for all time, never to rise again from their shame. The Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers snarl at each other across the bald summit, beneath the darkening sky. One shall feast upon the other! The NBA Finals are here, and absolutely none of this is metaphorical.
For the Thunder, this is their first appearance in the Finals since 2012, when the hotshot young core of Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden fell in five games to the hotter-shot medium core of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh. At the time that series, though crappy and disappointing as an actual basketball contest, seemed like it was going to be the beginning of a long rivalry between two great teams, but, well ... for the favored Thunder, this is their first appearance in the Finals since 2012. The franchise kept that core going for a while before briefly dipping into the toilet, which allowed them to accumulate the hotshot young core—MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams, Chet Holmgren—that carried the team to a league-best 68 regular-season wins this season, and which has stormed all but unimpeded through the Western playoffs. They're the huge favorites in this series. Probably in betting terms or whatever, but more importantly in our estimation of how this thing is likely to go.
The Pacers make their first trip to the Finals since 2000, when the Shaquille O'Neal–Kobe Bryant Lakers dynasty dismissed them in six not particularly tight games. Indiana entered these playoffs as the East's fourth seed, but went through the playoffs like an extremely fast lawnmower through so much grass, dropping four total games to the Milwaukee Bucks, Cleveland Cavaliers, and New York Knicks along the way. Point guard Tyrese Haliburton has been, at times, the postseason's most electrifying performer, and Indiana's games have been carnival fun: Four different times, they've erased a 15-point deficit and won, and have only grown more brash and self-assured with each.
To preview the Finals—which tip off tonight at 8:30 p.m. Eastern, on ABC—we're doing what we did last year, more or less: Below, some Defector writers have singled out some stuff they'll be paying attention to when each team has the ball, plus stuff they'll have their eyes on more generally. Between all of that stuff, frankly, you are getting way the hell more than you have any right to expect, after how you have conducted yourself here today.
Enjoy the games! That is an order.
When Oklahoma City Has The Ball
- Oklahoma City's regular-season offensive rating: 119.2 (third); postseason ORtg: 115.9 (third)
- Indiana's regular-season defensive rating: 113.3 (14th); postseason DRtg: 113.6 (ninth)
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's Dark Arts Vs. Indiana's Pestering Guards
While the blockbuster action in the Finals likely will be when Indiana is in possession against Oklahoma City's stifling defense, the matchups I'm most interested to see are on the other side. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is an unsolvable problem, thanks to his well-rounded offensive game and his tendency to draw fouls, whether by exerting pressure on defenses or by, uh, less scrupulous means. The Pacers face a conundrum in how best to defend the MVP, and whether Indiana coach Rick Carlisle figures out the right mixture will go a long way toward determining the outcome of this series.
Carlisle has two main options at his disposal: Aaron Nesmith and Andrew Nembhard. As Jalen Brunson experienced firsthand in the Eastern Conference finals, the pair are rugged and annoying defenders. Nesmith drew the main assignment on the Knicks guard, and performed admirably before tweaking his ankle in Game 3. Nembhard took over in Game 6 as the primary defender on Brunson and held him to 40 percent shooting.
Maybe most importantly and certainly most saliently for the upcoming series, Nembhard was able to hold Brunson to zero free-throw attempts when matched up with him in the close-out game. Whoever Carlisle puts on Gilgeous-Alexander, whether it's Nembhard himself or somebody else, will have to replicate Nembhard's foul-free defense. Gilgeous-Alexander is a master at exploiting space and contact to draw fouls, and if a defender plays more conservatively, he can simply pour in buckets.
Nembhard drew most of the assignment in these teams' two regular-season games, but that was by circumstance more than strategy: Nesmith missed the first game, in December, and only played 22 minutes when the teams met again in March. Nembhard did not do so well as Gilgeous-Alexander's primary defender, allowing 11-of-18 shooting across both games, while Nesmith held him to 0-of-3 shooting and only two free-throw attempts in the second game. The December game, especially, serves as a worst-case scenario for Indiana, as Gilgeous-Alexander exploded for 45 points, 16 of those against Nembhard specifically.
Nembhard is a tough defender but he also gives up two inches to Gilgeous-Alexander, while Nesmith matches up almost perfectly in physical terms. If Nesmith's ankle is healed, I'd wager Carlisle will be tempted to move away from what didn't work in the regular season. That entails risk: Nesmith has been the most foul-prone player in these playoffs, leading all players who've logged 150-plus minutes of court time with an average of 4.9 personal fouls per 36 minutes, per NBA.com. If that trend continues, Gilgeous-Alexander will add plentifully to his playoff-leading 147 free-throw attempts. Still, Nembhard has two games of tape suggesting he might not be the answer.
Of course, putting Nesmith on Gilgeous-Alexander then opens up Jalen Williams's game: Nembhard faces essentially the same size disadvantage in that match-up. There's no easy answer here. Against the Knicks, both primary defenders had multiple inches on Brunson, and harassed him with their long and active arms. Against the Thunder's taller wings, and with Tyrese Haliburton likely shunted off to guard Lu Dort, either Nembhard or Nesmith or both will have to be perfect against one of the toughest match-ups in the NBA.
There's also the option of double-teaming Gilgeous-Alexander, but he's too good a passer and the rest of the Oklahoma City supporting cast is too good to double him constantly without giving up easy baskets elsewhere. This will be Carlisle's toughest puzzle in the Finals. Anything resembling Gilgeous-Alexander's usual output might be too much to handle, even for an Indiana team that loves to disrupt offenses with swarming defense. — Luis Paez-Pumar
Chet Holmgren
Oklahoma City's halfcourt offense is really simple. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will dribble around and either score or not score, and if the defense doesn't try to make his life difficult with some form of help from somewhere, he'll dump 40 points on your best perimeter defender and foul him out. When the defense sends a second guy, or helps in off the corners or the wings, the Thunder briefly become a cool version of the Pacers and start drive-and-kicking until someone either pops an open three-pointer or gets to the basket.
The best defenses can make the second, third, and even sometimes fourth options really hustle for theirs. This is what makes Chet Holmgren important in this series. He's a critical release valve for the Thunder offense; if he is able to get his, I don't see Oklahoma City losing.
In the second round against the Denver Nuggets—in my mind the de facto Finals—Holmgren was super marginal, and Oklahoma City struggled. Denver's zone defense was effective not because it hamstrung Gilgeous-Alexander, but because it made the secondary stuff way more difficult. Jalen Williams didn't get to attack anyone on the move, which is the engine of Oklahoma City's second-side stuff, and Holmgren was only allowed to take catch-and-shoot threes. He made six of 27.
Minnesota, by contrast, played man defense, and everyone went comparably crazy, with Gilgeous-Alexander and Williams generally doing their things. At its best, though, the Wolves' defense could sort of make life difficult for those two—but the compromise was giving Holmgren space to work as the third option, and he was very good.
Holmgren's shooting is good enough to at least cause headaches, before you even get into the problems the small-ish Pacers will face in dealing with Oklahoma City's double-big lineup. Isaiah Hartenstein will bash and mash down low, occupying Myles Turner and making space for Holmgren to work either on the short roll or as a lob threat. The two bigs also make it pretty impossible for Rick Carlisle to get away with playing either of his team's true backup centers, as neither Thomas Bryant nor Tony Bradley can really match Holmgren strength for strength, and he's good enough to capitalize on their weaknesses. Indiana is also not a good rebounding team, and if Holmgren really starts dominating on the glass, they will struggle. He's a big reason why I think the Thunder win a quick series. — Patrick Redford
When Indiana Has The Ball
- Indiana's regular-season offensive rating: 115.4 (ninth); postseason ORtg: 117.7 (second)
- Oklahoma City's regular-season defensive rating: 106.6 (first); postseason DRtg: 104.7 (first)
What Will Happen When Oklahoma City's Defense And Indiana's Offense Go Crazy-Style On Each Other?
If you are looking for reasons to believe that the Indiana Pacers have any shot at winning the NBA Finals, you should start here: This is a team that does not turn the ball over. That is a good quality for a team to have in any context, but it becomes doubly important in a matchup against the Thunder, whose success neatly correlates with the number of turnovers they are able to create. Pick any box score from Oklahoma City's season and look at no number other than the one in the opponent's turnover column: If the number is in the neighborhood of 20—as it was very often; the Thunder forced a league-leading 18 turnovers per game, per NBA.com—there's a very good chance Oklahoma City won that game by 15 points or more.
That makes "don't turn the ball over" Step 1 in Not Getting The Absolute Shit Kicked Out Of You By The Oklahoma City Thunder. This is not a novel observation, and it is not like other teams haven't tried. In fact, if there was any reason to doubt the Thunder's title chances before the playoffs began, it could be located in the idea that all NBA offenses tighten up in the playoffs, becoming more methodical and precise in ways that would choke the Thunder's supply of turnovers.
That has not turned out to be the case. The Timberwolves were a high-turnover team in the regular season and remained one in their series against OKC. The Nuggets, armed with the turnover-suppressing power of an offense that can be run through Nikola Jokic, were unable to dampen the Thunder's frenzy for too long. Even a strategy as theoretically sound as "make the safe pass to Jokic and let him deliberate from the nail" could not stop Oklahoma City's ball hawks from ripping and running.
If the Pacers are going to succeed where the Nuggets and Timberwolves (and the entire rest of the league) have failed, it will not be because they adopt an especially deliberate or careful approach. It will be because their own frenetic style overwhelms the Thunder's. The Pacers do not give the impression of a low-turnover team when you watch them: They play at an absurdly fast pace, make all sorts of audacious passes, and never slow down long enough to think too hard about where the ball is going next. That they are able to play this way while also being abnormally secure with the ball makes them a truly unique NBA outfit. Nobody else plays like this.
This stylistic clash has the potential to make this series a fascinating and, hopefully, competitive affair. The Thunder have torn through piles of opponents who saw that ferocious defense bearing down on them and attempted to shield themselves by slowing things down, only to discover that Oklahoma City's defenders can speed up even the most considered tactical approaches, igniting panic and chaos where there should be calm.
But can you speed up and destabilize an offense that is already redlined? This is the question the Pacers will force the Thunder to answer. Indiana will come into this series ready to push the ball past half-court in two seconds on every possession, make full-court passes, and set a million screens. For once, it might be the Thunder who end up trying to slow things down. — Tom Ley
Pascal Siakam
I was explaining the other day to a friend what the Pacers did that was interesting and I gave what turned out to be a pretty unsatisfactory, pretty correct answer: They run really fast on offense. The guy who makes it all work is Pascal Siakam.
Siakam was incredible in the conference final against the Knicks, posting impressive numbers, yes, but more importantly locating and punishing the Knicks' weaknesses more effectively and more ruthlessly than anyone else on his team. The Knicks' defense bent itself to keep Tyrese Haliburton from going too crazy, but the special thing about Indiana, and Haliburton specifically, is that they are capable of continually shifting their offense, via his superb passing, vision, and intelligence, to locate the point where the defense has made the most damaging compromises to keep its structure, and then pressing on that point until the defense breaks. Siakam is such a fantastic player in transition that the fatal compromise might be something as innocent and totally unintentional as, say, the smaller Deuce McBride being the furthest player back as Siakam charges at him one-on-one, or a play at the other end finishing with Siakam switched onto the navigationally challenged Karl-Anthony Towns. The Pacers are such a smart collective that they seem to generate like 10 essentially free points per game from such scenarios.
In the halfcourt, Siakam is Indiana's only reliable foul-drawer, other than perhaps Bennedict Mathurin, who can do nothing else. So Siakam's ability to put consistent pressure on wing defenders, draw fouls, and test Oklahoma City's rim protection will be mission-critical if the Pacers are to win. That standard of importance applies to almost everything Siakam is good at. Oklahoma City's defense is going to make the half-court a slog, so Siakam will have to get those free points. The Thunder will wind up having to put a smaller guy on him late in shot clocks after rotating around like wasps for 15 seconds, so Siakam will have to cram Cason Wallace or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander under the basket. Siakam hit a clean 50 percent of his threes in the previous series, and he'll have to nail his open shots this time around.
Oklahoma City can win even if Siakam has a great series. The Pacers can't win if he doesn't. — Patrick Redford
More Generally
Rooting For A Game 7
Your intrepid stenographer is the guy at every party who complains that there aren't enough colors of wine in the drinks trough, so it should come as no surprise that he suggests that Thunder–Pacers will be a failure of a final unless it lasts seven games. Most folks see this is as a gentleman's sweep, or just as likely an ungentlemanly one. Pacers–Thunder needs to go seven games. Needs, we tell you.
It isn't because every unplayed playoff game is a loogie in Red Auerbach's eye, even though it is. This decade alone has robbed us of 125 playoff games, and only 18 of the 89 series in the 2020s have gone the distance. That's 6,000 lost minutes of basketball, not counting overtimes, and at least some of those would have been worth it.
More to the point, though, this is an almost ideal alpha–omega series between a team with absolute offensive brass against a team with utter defensive obstinacy, a battle not of players or faces or organizations but of the endlessly yin-yang of immovable objects and irresistible forces. It is a battle not for a parade in an otherwise quiescent town square but for the direction of the entire NBA going forward.
Indiana broke the Eastern Conference by being bolder, more intrepid, and faster than the Bucks, Cavaliers, and Knicks. They are the underdogs because Oklahoma City has a epochally soul-crushing defense. The winner is the new template for all the imitative cowards who have to figure out the stylistic restrictions of the rest of this decade and usually do so by trying to reinvent the wheels in front of them. Put another way, the Golden State Warriors changed the nature of NBA basketball by winning in 2015, owning everything about 2016 but the final five minutes of the final game, and then winning again in 2017 and 2018. The game has largely moved on from their M.O., not because it doesn't work any more but because nobody could replicate the Stephen Curry part of it.
Here we are again, this time with a stark contrast between the two fundamental poles of basketball: scoring at will vs. breaking scorers' wills.
Most folks are leaning hard into the defense side of the equation, for the basic reason that the team with 80 wins is probably better than the one with 62. While Oklahoma City looks like a dynasty in the making, so did Boston, and Denver, and Golden State 2.0, and Milwaukee and Los Angeles and Toronto, just to name the last six one-and-dones.
However this plays out, it should be a magnificent war of the worlds between the sport's two opposing forces. The cities are equally small-market, but only television lizards and free-range Bloomnerds care about that. This is a battle for the soul of the game going forward, and it deserves to be titanic and lengthy. The Pacers and Thunder have been the best teams in the league for directly conflicting reasons since the calendars got switched out. Your rooting interest here is not geographical (Indianapolis and Oklahoma City are the same town separated by 500 feet of elevation and the odd Stuckey's) but philosophical, and philosophical debates should never be rushed. — Ray Ratto
Rick Carlisle
Let me clarify up front that, no matter which team has the ball, I will not actually be watching Rick Carlisle. That would be deranged. The fact of him looking like Jim Carrey's brother who works in a supermarket—you can practically see the apron, it's amazing—lost its meager novelty more than 20 years ago. What I will be keeping an eye out for, no matter who has the ball, is how one of the sport's craftiest and most adaptable tacticians approaches a series his team, on paper at least, ought to lose by a huge margin.
The (hopeful, if you're a Pacers fan) precedent is the 2011 Finals, when Carlisle's Dallas Mavericks beat the hugely favored Big Three–era Miami Heat in six games, a series made famous both by the scale of the upset and by the fact that Dallas's J.J. Barea and Jason Terry—hardly stars, then or ever!—spent it utterly befuddling LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Miami coach Eric Spoelstra. That Mavericks team bore only the faintest stylistic resemblance to today's Indiana Pacers—both teams shot a lot of threes, and that's it—but more interestingly, the Mavericks team that beat the Heat in the Finals didn't even bear all that much of a stylistic resemblance to the Mavericks team that won 57 games that same regular season.
That's a testament to Carlisle, the rare NBA coach defined less by stylistic or tactical hallmarks than by stylistic and tactical flexibility. (And by a certain amount of Being A Weenie.) Give him some basketball players, and he will figure out how to arrange and deploy and rotate them so that their strengths augment each other and their weaknesses are mitigated. What identifies a Rick Carlisle team is that it is good at winning basketball games.
In his first stint in Indiana, from 2003 to '07, Carlisle's teams were led by maulers (Ron Artest, Stephen Jackson, Jermaine O'Neal) and lead-footed ruminants (Danny Granger, Jamaal Tinsley, Jermaine O'Neal). They played hideous, unwatchable, nigh-motionless basketball, hunching over the ball like hateful goblins—and made the playoffs three times in four years. For a decade his Mavericks teams assumed various forms organized around the unique talents of Dirk Nowitzki, sometimes running and gunning, sometimes plodding and grinding; they made eight trips to the postseason, and won a ring. Over the first three years of Luka Doncic's career—with Carlisle whipping up a whole new tactical framework for a uniquely ball-dominant teenaged star who had virtually nothing but a European childhood and a sweet jump-shot in common with Nowitzki—the Mavericks rose from 14th in the West to fifth, and gave the vastly superior Los Angeles Clippers hell in two brutally hard-fought first-round playoff losses. Now his Pacers feature the fastest, most free-flowing, most aggressive offense in the sport.
None of that amounts to a prediction that the Pacers will win the Finals, or even that they'll make a particularly filling meal for the Thunder. But to the extent they can, it's in large part because their coach is the perhaps the single person in the sport likeliest to unearth the weird, counterintuitive strategic twist, like matching friggin' Jason Terry up against literally LeBron James, that unravels Oklahoma City's whole deal; the one guy who knows best, from experience, that what determines the outcome of the 2025 Finals won't be some absolute measure of the two teams' ultimate qualities, nor even any fixed set of advantages over the next couple of weeks. It'll just be whoever figures out, four different times, how to win one basketball game. — Albert Burneko
Styles
It is unwise, if not entirely unfair, to judge the health of a sport by its discourse. There's way more than one way of talking or caring about this stuff, and also the conversation that prevails at the highest level—people in little boxes shouting or glowering or shaking their heads or just waiting until someone stops doing that stuff so they can start doing it themselves—is generally going to be pretty lousy for a number of reasons. That stilted and straining conversation, in the NBA especially, will tend to come down to The Great Man Theory Of Hoops, and to a referendum not just on Who's Now or whatever but some number of blustering assertions about whose fault something was, or who deserves flowers, or whose legacy has forever been altered by, like, the outcome of Game 3. You don't need me to tell you that this all sucks, and that there is virtually nothing useful to be gained from it. And yet I have thoughtfully done so anyway.
By those standards, and only by those standards, this NBA Finals is pretty deficient. There are stars on these teams, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was chosen as the league's MVP last month, but this isn't the sort of thing that reduces effectively to a Clash Of Legacies. As a central star, Gilgeous-Alexander is new and modest, and as a counterpoint Tyrese Haliburton is … well, for starters, much more interesting as a basketball player than as a heroic character in a twilight struggle for The Future Of Now. If this is how you think and talk about basketball, you will struggle to find much of interest in this series. There just isn't enough in the way of individual stakes; there are too many people who are important, and none of them—from the perspective of ESPN, or in the eyes of people whose perspective is shaped by that—are famous enough. It's two good basketball teams from smallish markets that no one visits as a tourist, and if the match-up itself is both compelling as the culmination of what has been a decently enjoyable postseason and also the only game in town, there is just no way around the fact that it is also not very Now.
It is a totally different story, though, if you actually like watching basketball. That sport, as aficionados know, is played between teams, and the way in which these two teams contrast—to the point where they can appear to be almost each other's precise inverse—is fascinating to consider and should be just as fascinating to watch. The individuals on those teams will matter, and their match-ups with other individuals will be decisive from one possession to the next, but both the Thunder and the Pacers play in coherent and fully inhabited ways that tend to subsume the kind of individual heroics that are the coin of the realm in the Now-driven discourse. Gilgeous-Alexander will get to the bucket or just to the line in a crucial moment, and Haliburton will take and make a long three-pointer that his team needs, and Jalen Williams will answer with one of his own, and Pascal Siakam will swing like a wrecking ball through a collapsing defense, and some combination of those efforts will deliver the points that amount to the margin of victory. But maybe the only way I can imagine ending up disappointed by this series would be watching it for those moments, and with those moments in mind.
The styles with which these two teams play, and how insistent and virtuosic they are in sticking to them, are what got them this far, and the Finals will come down to one of those styles prevailing over the other. It is reductive, if not really wrong, to say that those styles amount to Indiana moving the basketball and basketball players around the offensive end of the floor without making mistakes, and Oklahoma City's defense refusing to let either the basketball or basketball players move around the floor, and making them make mistakes. These games will not be about some player or other forcing his will and so forging his legacy so much as they will be about two teams trying to find their respective ways around the hard fact that a team just cannot turn the basketball over and win in the playoffs. As Dan Devine notes at Yahoo Sports, "in the postseason, the team that commits fewer turnovers is 54-20, a .730 winning percentage."
The Pacers really have won in the postseason in large part by refusing to turn the ball over and letting the resulting pressure fatally stress opponents out; the Thunder have dominated by dominating, with a defense that manufactures turnovers and processes them into breakaway dunks, in ways that have not just frustrated opponents but kept them from ever really beginning to do any of what they meant to do. The Pacers never stop doing their thing; the Thunder refuse to let opponents start. There is something to admire in both styles, because they are so fully embodied and understood, and because of the ways in which they use the collective efforts of the five players working to make them unbeatable. One of them will prove more workable than the other; there's no real debate to embrace, really, about which is more right or more righteous or (lord knows) more Now. It's just a matter of the fight that these styles will make. That should be plenty. — David Roth
