Oklahoma City — The lead wasn’t big enough. The Thunder had opened the 2025 NBA Finals with a borderline-unbelievable half of defensive basketball. They’d forced the visiting Pacers into a whopping 19 turnovers of all shapes and sizes — travels in the open floor, kickouts airmailed into the backcourt, thread-the-needle bounce passes picked off, bobbled pocket passes, moving screens, 24-second violations, you name it.
Indiana entered the Finals scoring nearly 120 points per 100 possessions, a pristine picture of offensive efficiency. And for two quarters, against the best defense in the NBA, it could barely successfully complete a pass.
“Through the course of the game, it kept getting … it felt like it could get ugly,” Pacers superstar Tyrese Haliburton said. “Who knows where this game is heading?”
“I think obviously, when you turn the ball over that much, you expect to be down 20-plus,” Pacers forward Pascal Siakam added.
They weren’t, though. When the halftime buzzer sounded, they were down by only 12, and after three quarters, they were only down by eight, and if we have learned anything in this postseason, it’s that if you do not decapitate these Pacers, no matter how deep you bury them, they are going to climb back out of the hole and do something to you that has a chance to haunt you for the rest of your days.
They did it to Milwaukee. They did it to Cleveland. They did it to New York. And in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, they did it to Oklahoma City, 111-110, leaving a capacity crowd at Paycom Center bereft in stunned silence, and a 68-win juggernaut as the latest victim of Indiana’s incomparable brand of grand theft — reeling from the same sort of jarring, reality-altering blow that befell the Pacers’ previous opponents.
“I mean, it sucks,” said Thunder forward Jalen Williams. “I don’t know.”
After Williams stole an errant inbounds pass and took it the other way for a pick-six dunk, Oklahoma City led by 15 with 9:42 to go. The Pacers outscored them 32-16 from there, derailing what had felt for most of the night like it should’ve been a walk of a win for the heavily favored hosts.
“I mean, I don’t know if ‘went off the rails’ is the correct term,” Thunder guard Alex Caruso said. “We lost the game. I thought we played good enough to win. We just didn’t finish the game.”
No, they didn’t. The Thunder shot just 4 of 16 from the field after Williams’ runout dunk, with nine of the misses coming from starters Williams, Chet Holmgren, Luguentz Dort and Cason Wallace — who took center Isaiah Hartenstein’s spot in the first five, in a move head coach Mark Daigneault said was aimed at giving Oklahoma City better defensive answers against the backcourt of Haliburton and Andrew Nembhard. In the biggest moment of the game, it was Wallace who found himself on the business end of Haliburton’s latest final-second dagger — yet another monstrous shot to cap a 12-2 Pacers run in the final 2:52 of the fourth quarter and deliver yet another nearly unbelievable-except-that-this-team-keeps-making-you-believe-it victory.
“Yeah, you don’t want to live and die with the best player on the other team taking a game-winner with a couple seconds left,” Caruso said. “You want to try to control the game coming down so it doesn’t fall into that.”
Oklahoma City squandered a golden opportunity to control the game in the first half, turning those 19 Pacers turnovers into only nine points and shooting just 37% from the field as a team. It squandered another in the third quarter, struggling to get stops or generate turnovers as Indiana “loosened us up a bit,” as Daigneault put it, resulting in the Thunder merely trading baskets rather than extending their lead. And it squandered one more in the fourth, coming up empty on five of its final six possessions — with plenty of help from an aggressive Indiana defense — to leave the door open for Haliburton to, once again, kick it off the hinges.
“Our offense was really slow, I think,” Williams said. “We kind of let that dictate how we played on defense. … It was kind of like we were trying to play like we were trying to keep the lead instead of trying to extend it, keep being aggressive.”
If that sounds familiar to you, it might be because Knicks forward