It’s the NBA’s Biggest Game in Years—and Absolutely No One Saw It Coming
The Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers will play one momentous game with a championship at stake. Here are the twists and turns that led to the NBA Finals Game 7.
Key Points
The Thunder and Pacers will face off in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the first winner-take-all contest in nearly a decade.
A 2019 trade transformed Oklahoma City, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander becoming MVP and a draft pick turning into All-Star Jalen Williams.
Historically, home teams have an advantage in Game 7s, which tend to be low-scoring, potentially favoring the Thunder’s top defense.
Oklahoma City
Games like this don’t come along often.
The eight-month marathon that is the NBA season will come down to one 48-minute showdown when the Oklahoma City Thunder square off against the Indiana Pacers on Sunday night in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
It’s the first winner-take-all contest in nearly a decade—and one of the rarest occurrences in all of sports.
There have been 24 pitchers who have thrown a perfect game in Major League Baseball. But this is just the 20th NBA Finals Game 7 in the history of the NBA.
“Nothing that’s happened before matters, and nothing that’s going to happen after matters,” Pacers point guard Tyrese Haliburton said. “It’s all about that one game.”
What makes Sunday’s game even more of an anomaly is that in the context of other NBA Finals Game 7s, this one is historically unlikely. The Thunder spent the season loudly announcing themselves as championship favorites, rolling to the league’s best record. The Pacers, on the other hand, opened the playoffs with oddsmakers giving them a 1% chance of winning the title.
Here’s how two teams made their way to the biggest basketball game since 2016—and the keys to one of them, finally, lifting the trophy.
The Trade That Transformed Oklahoma City
This side of the Yankees trading for Babe Ruth, you’re unlikely to find a single swap that has meant as much to a team as the one Thunder general manager Sam Presti pulled off in 2019. At the time, Oklahoma City was a good—but decidedly not great—club that had just lost in the first round of the playoffs.
So when the Los Angeles Clippers came calling after the Thunder’s All-Star forward Paul George, Presti demanded a haul that would help the organization retool for the future. The Clippers sent the Thunder a whopping five future first-round picks—and threw in a young rookie with a name so long it barely fit on the back of his jersey.
Five years later, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has become the NBA’s MVP and leading scorer. And one of the draft picks they got from the Clippers turned into Jalen Williams, an All-Star forward who exploded for 40 points in a Game 5 win.
By contrast, George’s scoring dipped to its lowest average in a decade this year, and he missed the season’s last month with injuries. The two guys Oklahoma got for him have accounted for half of the Thunder’s points in the NBA Finals.
The Pacers Never Say Die
What’s more difficult than stopping the Pacers in the closing seconds of a playoff game? Figuring out which of their outrageous postseason comebacks is the most mind-blowing.
Maybe you’re a fan of their early stuff, when they came back from a 7-point deficit in the last 35 seconds of overtime to beat the Milwaukee Bucks in Round 1. Maybe you prefer Haliburton’s buzzer-beater against the Knicks—which bounced so high off the rim it nearly knocked the dust off New York’s championship banners—that led to an overtime comeback in the conference finals.
More Haliburton last-second heroics set the NBA Finals on their topsy-turvy course. In Game 1, the Pacers trailed by 15 points in the fourth quarter before charging on yet another comeback sealed with—what else?—a Haliburton jump shot with 0.3 seconds left on the clock.
“This group never gives up,” Haliburton said. “We never believe that the game is over until it hits zero. That’s just the God’s-honest truth.”
Data and Defense
The Pacers make it tempting to think that no piece of data matters in playoff basketball—that all that counts is what happens when Indiana starts on another of its mind-blowing comebacks. But for hoops rationalists, there’s some Game 7 precedent to consider.
Home teams have gone 15-4 in Game 7s. And these winner-take-all games tend to be low-scoring affairs, historically, as teams play cautious basketball hoping to avoid crucial errors. Teams have scored an average of 98.8 points per game in the NBA Finals this century. In the four Game 7s, that drops to just 85.3.
A rock fight in Oklahoma City would figure to disadvantage the free-flowing Pacers and favor the Thunder, who boasted basketball’s top defense all season.
So the only question is whether the Pacers can make common sense fly out the window one more time, in the last game of the season.