I made a fateful decision ahead of the Eastern Conference Finals. I think it was Sunday. The night before, the New York Knicks had finished off the defending champion Boston Celtics. The Indiana Pacers were already waiting around, having thrashed the East's top seed in five games. It took me into Sunday to go Huh, Pacers-Knicks. Do I care about that? I considered this deeply, the way one might ponder a puppy in a pet-shop window. Am I prepared to give my heart to this stupid thing? I decided, yes, I would buy the puppy. I activated the button inside my brain that allows for a feeling of cheesedness to adhere to a matchup between these two specific franchises, in a conference final, in 2025.
You see, I am old enough to remember a little thing we used to call the 1990s. The Knicks and Pacers were good teams then, back when making the playoffs used to mean something. There was a stretch, starting in 1993, when these two teams eliminated each other six times in eight years. Do not look up how many titles they combined to win over this period! The point is that a great deal of animosity built up between them, and many goofy narratives blossomed from the rivalry, and the whole era kicked ass. These teams played to Game 7s in 1994 and 1995 (and again last year), and met in consecutive conference finals in 1999 and 2000. Reggie Miller became a folk hero; guys like Dale Davis, Charles Smith, and Travis Best were pressed temporarily but firmly into mainstream basketball discourse. John Starks brushed perilously close to bozodom. Yes, I am now openly pandering to readers of my generation, but such is my prerogative. Basketball was aesthetically better in 1997! No one can stop me! Ha ha!
Allowing history to influence my feelings about this series, it turns out, was a great fuckin' choice. Game 1 was an absolute classic. For three quarters it was two good teams playing good, normal basketball. The Pacers mostly led through the first quarter, after a quick start; the Knicks mostly led through the second, after clamping down on defense and holding the Pacers without a field goal for about five minutes. The home team held the lead through the third period, but could never quite gain much by way of breathing room. Early in the fourth quarter, Jalen Brunson picked up his fifth foul when T.J. McConnell dribbled into and out of the restricted arc like 19 times in six seconds. Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau pulled Brunson to the bench and inserted Miles McBride. Immediately, Stan Van Gundy, working the broadcast, fretted that the Knicks would need to hang on for dear life and "survive" without Brunson.
Before we get to that, Thibodeau's preference for McBride in this scenario was a fun call, to me: Earlier in the game, Cameron Payne had knocked down a couple of important three-pointers for the Knicks, and if your team is desperate to survive offensively, Payne is probably a more natural call. But unto everything under heaven there is a season, and this was The Time of McBride. He's a much sturdier defender than Payne, and a better pull-up shooter, and if Payne's level-headed stewardship is fine for a game's middle quarters, what a Brunson-less team needs for crucial fourth-quarter minutes might just be someone who can't as easily be hunted down defensively, and who can improvise a half-decent look late in a shot-clock. Thibodeau trusts McBride, which is cool, and Thibodeau, when the chips are down, is basically always going to choose the better defender. This is sometimes annoying, but here it was fun, in a styles-make-fights kind of way.
Van Gundy's fretting was annoying. For one thing, for all of Thibodeau's infamous reliance upon his starters, New York's starters haven't been real great during these playoffs. They've played the most minutes of any five-man lineup this postseason, and have been outscored by 37 points, which is also the worst differential put up by any qualified lineup. Per Cleaning the Glass, which filters out garbage time, in the playoffs so far the Knicks are a decent offensive team with their starters on the court, but are a lousy defensive one. Swap Brunson for McBride—this is the configuration of New York's second busiest lineup—and they lose about a point per possession of offense, while gaining about 1.5 points per possession on defense. Obviously the sample size is small; obviously Jalen Brunson is a star for a reason; obviously I am not saying that I could pull a reverse jam on Brunson like it was nothing. I would just like for the former NBA head coach who is working the broadcast to remain calm and refrain from hysterics when one playoff team has to give a very normally timed break to one of its high-use guys.
Anyway no one is allowed to argue with me about this, because the Knicks immediately put a huge run on the board, helped by a pair of awful Pacers fouls on three-point shooters. The Pacers became temporarily unassed. Karl-Anthony Towns dumped in a bucket over Pascal Siakam and then rudely pointed at him on his way down the court. Siakam, who has already won a title in his career and thus should know better, lost his mind and spent the following possession trying to force a bucket at Towns, and for his trouble wound up lying on his back like a total goober, having turned the ball over and embarrassed himself. During a mid-run timeout, the camera caught a delighted and lightly graying J.R. Smith getting hyped a few rows into an ecstatic home crowd. The Pacers appeared to be dead.
Brunson came back into the game at exactly the five-minute mark of the fourth, with the Knicks leading by 13 points, 111–98. You might've looked at the scoreboard in this moment, done a little finger math, and figured the Knicks were, at most, nine points from victory. What you would not have imagined, in this moment, was the Pacers getting an all-timer of a scoring explosion from Aaron Nesmith. Nesmith is a very cool player, a super-useful wing who can handle lots of different defensive assignments, do a little secondary ball-handling, cut and slash and finish, and space the floor. He is not a star—even as I sit here I am not totally certain he would crack the rotation in Boston or Oklahoma City—but his versatility and tirelessness are absolute musts for a Pacers team that needs everyone to do some of everything, and always at top speed.
At the five-minute mark of the fourth quarter of Game 1, Nesmith had 10 points on six shots; he'd knocked down two three-pointers on just three attempts. Nesmith is not generally a volume shooter, although he has a reasonably quick and versatile jumper and is comfortable enough launching while going left or right. It's not terribly surprising that he is capable of doing what he did in the final few minutes of this game, but he is certainly one of the last three names you would guess from among the 10 players on the court. After a Mikal Bridges layup pushed New York's lead to 15, Nesmith used an off-ball screen to drill a wide-open three from the top of the key. Towns finished a long Knicks possession with a bucket, the teams traded free throws, and the margin was still 14 points when, with 3:14 on the clock, Nesmith dribbled into a 26-footer from the left wing. This one also fell.
When Brunson threw in a three to end New York's next possession, man, I was so completely dead certain that the game was over. Even after Tyrese Haliburton bombed home a deep three to reset the margin to 11, the thought did not enter my brain at all that the Knicks might not win in regulation. Then Brunson took and missed an ill-advised step-back three from the left wing, and Ben Sheppard found Nesmith unguarded on the right wing in semi-transition, and that three also splashed home. I said, "Huh."
But my "huh" was silenced one minute later, when Haliburton hand-grenaded Siakam after working an entirely pointless isolation. The refs bailed out Siakam with a cheap whistle, and all the Pacers got from the possession was one measly point. Brunson immediately knifed through Indiana's defense for a slick layup, pushing the lead to nine points with 58 seconds on the clock, and once again I knew in my soul that the game was settled.
Then Brunson and OG Anunoby slogged through a sloppy switch on a side pick-and-roll, and Nesmith dribbled into another pull-up three-pointer from the left wing. Towns responded with an inside bucket, but now flames were shooting from the sides of Nesmith's face. His next three—his fifth in a row without a miss—was a preposterous pull-up 30-footer on a pitch-back in semi-transition, to bring the margin to five points with 34 seconds on the clock. Thibodeau used a timeout, but on the ensuing possession the Knicks committed a cheap turnover on a sloppy pass from Anunoby to Brunson: The ball was tipped by Andrew Nembhard but then deflected off Brunson's fingers, a redirection only detectable via slow-motion replay. I screamed with laughter when the Pacers ran a pin-down screen for Nesmith over on that left side, he head-faked Josh Hart into a stumble, and then rose up for an insane hanging jumper from 27 feet, of course drilling it.
Prior to Game 1, Nesmith had made six or more three-pointers in an NBA game just four times in his career. In the fourth quarter of Game 1, he made six three-pointers without a miss inside the final five minutes of regulation. The 20 points he scored in the fourth were the most he's scored in any quarter of his career.
Somehow we have not even gotten to the craziest shit that happened in this game. First, I would like to say that Kevin Harlan was terrific on the call. I find certain of his stylings to be annoying—his voice can become a bit much in a game's slower chapters—but he is the best in the business at showing his delight in a game's big moments. And here is something truly perverted: I was glad Reggie Miller was on the call! However bad he is at analysis—and he is still sometimes just howlingly bad; no one in the game is better at saying This ball has got to go to [insert superstar player] just seconds before the superstar's teammate scores the crucial basket—I do not think there is another hoops color commentator who is better at going OHHHHHHHHHHHHH when something cool has just happened. Listening to Miller hoot and giggle through this game's final minutes was such silly fun.
Back to the game! There was basically not a single frame of the fourth quarter that you could not pull apart for some nugget of interest. Towns and Anunoby each missed late free throws, which kept the Pacers within a bucket. The Pacers ran their wonderful spread offense inbound set, although I can't remember whether it worked this time. They also sprang an absolutely perfect backcourt trap on Brunson, who was forced to try in desperation to hurl the ball off of a defender's ankles, but missed. The loose ball magically bounced directly into the hands of a teammate, leaving not even one single piece of statistical evidence of Indiana having almost done the impossible. Later, Anunoby used a quick foul on Nesmith along the sideline, with the Knicks still up three points, so that Nesmith could not attempt another three-pointer. Van Gundy and Miller heartily praised this maneuver, somehow missing both that the shot Nesmith was lining up was an impossible one, and that by fouling Nesmith, Anunoby had stopped the clock a split second before Nesmith stepped on the out-of-bounds line.
Nesmith of course made the free throws; those plus Anunoby's miss gave the final possession of regulation to the Pacers, down two points, with just 7.3 seconds on the clock. Here's how that went:
What is fascinating to me about this—apart from Haliburton doing Miller's famous choke gesture, with Miller in the audience, at Madison Square Garden—is how the floor got scrambled in those final seconds. The Knicks had been giving up cheap switches in the fourth quarter, which I eventually took to mean that their main guys were exhausted. Haliburton is weird, though: I feel like every time I watch him he is better against his primary defender than he is trying to break down a positional mismatch. I didn't know what to want from this moment, exactly, but as Haliburton brought the ball into the front court I was watching Bridges and muttering don't switch don't switch don't switch, thinking that Haliburton would sprint toward Myles Turner on the wing and try to use a screen or traffic to get a clean look. Too often in a late-clock scenario, this ends in a little awkward knot of confusion; to me a game this cool deserved an ending with space and open sight lines.
This was great. Instead of heading for a screener, Haliburton sprinted directly at Bridges and cleanly smoked him with a left-to-right hesitation dribble, sucking in Mitchell Robinson. The Knicks appeared to communicate a switch, leaving Robinson to chase Haliburton. Haliburton, for the second time in these playoffs, turned with the ball and ran away from the paint, in order to set up a step-back kill shot. His toe was on the line, and so the shot was a two-pointer, but this was still a moment of sports near-perfection. That it bought another five minutes of Pacers-Knicks made the misplacement of that oafish toe into a happy mistake.
Listen, dammit: The Pacers won this basketball game. I have no idea what it portends for the rest of the series. If you'd asked me in the first half, I'd have said these teams are as evenly matched as you could ever hope for a conference final. If you'd asked me in the early part of the fourth, I'd have said the Pacers have had a nice run and should not feel bad at all about spending June on the rainbow bridge. Now that it's over, I do wonder about Thibodeau's starters, and their stamina for at least three more games of this shit. Towns, Bridges, and Brunson in particular looked tired as hell in the game's closing stages, and Brunson can expect a lot more targeting as the series continues. Playing the final 10 minutes of the game with five fouls, Brunson was doubly compromised: At one point he declined to defend a Nembhard transition layup and then immediately committed a live-ball turnover, highlighting and then underlining the perils of relying so heavily upon a ball-dominant dude who could not see over the crowd from the rear of a They Might Be Giants concert.
Exhaustion bordering on delirium might even have been a factor on the clinching bucket of overtime, when the Knicks just ... failed to defend an inbounds play inside of the game's final 20 seconds, when down a point. Nembhard and Obi Toppin—I haven't even mentioned that Rick Carlisle used Toppin in his closing lineup, instead of Turner—ran a completely uncomplicated two-man game on the right side, after McBride was stationed a solid 12 feet away from the sideline, allowing for an uncontested inbounds pass. Robinson appeared to want to switch onto Nembhard, but then did not, giving Toppin a clean roll to the cup. Nembhard made the easy dish, and Toppin dunked through contact from Bridges, in what could very easily have been an and-one bucket. Thibodeau extremely did not want to talk about this after the game. When he was asked by a reporter whether he'd given instructions to foul or just to let a driving player go to the cup, he grunted, "Yeah," and then looked around the room for another question.
There is no such thing as a team of destiny in basketball or any other sport. Still, it would be blogger malpractice not to note that this was the fourth 15-point comeback completed by the Pacers in just this postseason. They now have home-court advantage in the Eastern Conference Finals. You do not have to believe in them; no one can make you! But I advise you to tune in.
