I was convinced it was happening again.
With 7:41 left in Sunday night's NBA Finals Game 7, the Oklahoma City Thunder took a 22-point lead, a lead that would have felt insurmountable against any other team in the league. But there is no other team in the league like the Indiana Pacers, and they took control, pressuring the inbounds pass, springing double and triple teams at ball-handlers, and letting Bennedict Mathurin bash his way into the lane. OKC wobbled, and the lead tumbled to 12 in three short minutes. The Thunder, playing prevent offense, did not make another basket for the remainder of the game. The pressure forced Shai Gilgeous-Alexander into committing his fifth foul, and Alex Caruso into calling the team's final timeout with over four minutes left. You could feel the arena hold its collective breath. How fitting it would have been, for a postseason defined more by the Pacers doing the impossible than by anything else, for them to win Game 7 on the road by turning on the blender.
They did not win Game 7, in part because Tyrese Haliburton had torn his Achilles at the very start of the game and in part because OKC's defense clamped down and kept the Pacers from ever narrowing the fourth-quarter gap to single digits. If you, like me, have watched the Thunder all year and marveled at what looks like the future of hoops, the natural narrative current to want to read into their championship was one of the youth seizing power from the sclerotic establishment. That is not what happened in the Finals. The highest compliment I can pay the Pacers is that they played even more ambitious, experimental basketball than the champs.
The Pacers' somewhat uncomfortable reason for doing so was necessity: They did not have the best individual player in any single series of these playoffs. In the playoffs, the team with the best player usually wins, and while there's a certain element of confirmation bias at play in that truism, it expresses a fact of postseason life. Nothing cheap or easy works, as opposing coaching staffs have the time to implement bespoke scouting reports designed to take away opponents' best stuff and make them work for everything. What tends to be available tends to also be simple; I am thinking in particular of the Thunder winning Game 4 by spamming the mildly inverted Jalen Williams–Shai Gilgeous-Alexander pick-and-roll and just letting the MVP go one-on-one against an overmatched defender.
No Indiana player is too good to occasionally be schemed and muscled out of the game, but the Pacers managed to make it as far as they did because they were able to apply pressure, on both ends of the court, as a five-man unit. Simply succeeding by that style alone would be special, but the magnitude of Indiana's success made me question how much basketball can actually be understood as something cold and rational. It was pretty obvious, if you watched the games, that the Pacers were winning because they made their opponents panic. They won because they themselves felt an enormous flow of confidence. That effect can only be faintly quantified, but when you see four straight postseason opponents totally forget how to play basketball while the Pacers fly around, you start to wonder what else the numbers don't say.
The experience of watching the Pacers throughout this postseason run was the experience of watching such a protracted sequence of irrational things happen, to the point that they made sense. You are not supposed to steal inbounds passes, run off of every made layup, or suddenly turn into a deadeye stepback shooter. You are not supposed to win games that you trail by seven with 39 seconds left, nor seven with 57 seconds left, nor eight with 41 seconds left, nor by nine with 2:52 left. Aaron Nesmith is not supposed to turn into Ray Allen for two minutes and make six threes. Tyrese Haliburton is not supposed to make every potential game-winner. T.J. McConnell is not supposed to turn into Michael Jordan for five minutes of a Game 7. All-star opponents are not supposed to forget how to dribble the basketball late in games.
Each of these discrete experiences is only irrational in isolation, but everything the Pacers did was together. That was the trick of their season, and the thing that nearly won them the title. The point is winning, not making sense, and they nearly did it.
