Rick Carlisle and the Pacers gave the Thunder everything they could handle in the 2025 NBA Finals.
OKLAHOMA CITY – History typically remembers the victors, while the runners-up in pretty much any endeavor are relegated to trivia questions on “Jeopardy!”
Even casual NBA fans can do a pretty good job of pulling the names of the champions, year by year, from memory. The teams that lost in the Finals, though, can be a little foggier for those who aren’t based in their markets or rooting specifically for them.
A Finals winner pops champagne corks and earns a bit of immortality, but a Finals loser pops open a beer and starts to fade.
Then there is the occasional team so underrated, unexpectedly providing moments of surprise from the start of an NBA postseason all the way through the championship, that lingers for months, maybe years.
The Indiana Pacers became one such team over the past two months. And it’s not simply recency bias of the just-completed 2025 Finals, wrapped up by Oklahoma City in Sunday’s Game 7, that says so.
Squeezed and interrupted on all fronts by other noisy league business – the Knicks’ odd coaching search, the Kevin Durant and Desmond Bane trades, two nights of the NBA Draft breathing down on its neck – this Finals had to work hard to maintain its place as a top June priority.
The Thunder get credit for that, of course, in completing their masterwork of a season, adding 16 playoff victories to the 68 they won in the regular season. Their talented, cohesive group was led by the newest Kia NBA MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. And the OKC defense was Venus flytrap-like, trapping and wrapping opponents like few others in recent memory.
So it’s hard to quibble with any element of the OKC experience, with the potential for more championships absolutely in play.
But no small credit belongs to the Pacers, too, for delivering a fun Finals of high-level basketball, plenty of individuals for whom to root and the occasional plot twist. Among Indiana’s attributes that have them stuck in our heads like an ear worm:
The pace at which they played
Indiana under coach Rick Carlisle turned exceptional conditioning and a deep roster to its competitive advantage.
There were stretches in this postseason in which Carlisle got players into and out of the game as if he were competing for the Stanley Cup rather than the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Few teams have been as capable of both pressuring its foes for 94 feet, then instantly unleashing its own fast breaks.
For a fan base familiar with vroom-vroom speed at the Brickyard each May, the style was superb.
The way they played
The Pacers committed to their up-tempo style soon after acquiring guard Tyrese Haliburton from Sacramento for big man Domantas Sabonis in February 2022. The team’s front office got busy constructing a roster around him and built in enough redundancies that the rotation had threats aplenty.
Carlisle’s crew became the first team in league history to have eight players score 200 points or more in a single postseason. During the first 82, seven Pacers averaged 10 points or more, with an eighth (backup point guard T.J. McConnell) falling just 0.9 points per game short.
The democratic attack made the whole greater than the sum of its parts, as if Hickory High in “Hoosiers” had a team of budding Jimmy Chitwoods.
The work they did
This might have ended up a storybook season but it was a scary short story to start. The Pacers lived down to the mediocre expectations many around the NBA had for them, starting 10-15 and still underwater at 16-18 when the 2025 calendar began.
A year earlier, the coaching staff embraced the reality that simply outscoring teams would not get Indiana where it hoped to go. So it began to get serious about defense, devoting practices to it, using repetition to turn it from concept to instinct for the players.
Results didn’t come overnight; in fact, they took a full 12 months to emerge consistently. But that new focus sent the Pacers on a 34-14 sprint through the rest of the 2024-25 season and then 15-8 in the playoffs.
“There’s a relationship-building element that is absolutely critical to recruiting a group of players, young players, over to your way of thinking when it comes to something like defense,” Carisle said. “This is not something that players in the AAU level are leaning into saying, ‘I can’t wait to get in there and do the shell drill.’”
The teams they beat
Indiana won 50 games and snagged the fourth seed. Then it beat Milwaukee, with Top 75 stars Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard in the first round. In the East semis, the Pacers dispatched the No. 1-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers in five games, winning all three on the Cavs’ floor. In the East finals, it was New York that felt the sting of Haliburton’s late-game heroics, a series loss that so soured Knicks bosses that they fired coach Tom Thibodeau.
The leads they overcame
This is where the Pacers’ postseason moved from exciting to improbable.
In each round, they thrilled audiences while shocking opponents. Three times, they trailed by seven points or more in the final minute of a game before rallying to win. Home, road, didn’t matter. They overcame 20-point deficits against the Bucks and the Cavaliers, and broke New Yorkers’ hearts by winning a game in overtime after trailing by 14 with less than three minutes left.
Then the Pacers did it again in Game 1 of the Finals, disrupting OKC’s home-court advantage on Haliburton’s jumper with 0.3 seconds left.
Indiana went 9-2 in clutch games in the playoffs, tops among participating teams. By the end of the postseason, they had won four times after trailing by at least 17 points and five when down by 15.
Though he was injured in Game 7, Tyrese Haliburton proves that it’s possible to win in different ways.
And now, alas, the way it all stopped
The end came suddenly, in the instant Haliburton stepped back and pushed hard off his slender right leg. It would have been one thing for the Thunder to outplay Indiana across four quarters, best against best, a clear and decisive outcome. But this was clipped 41 minutes short, Haliburton’s game-ending Achilles tendon tear depriving fans of a potentially classic Game 7 but Haliburton and the rest of the Pacers of so much more.
It takes nothing away from the Thunder, so young and humble and winning the right way to say that more people can identify with Indiana. Grabbing the trophies and rings is the goal, but most of us fall short most of the time. Having the opportunity snatched away at the worst possible time? That feels more like real life and it’s going to make a likeable star and his team even more endearing.
If people 55 years after the fact think of the seventh game in the 1970 Finals as the “Willis Reed game” rather than the “Walt Frazier game” – despite Frazier outscoring his Knicks teammate 36-4 and adding 19 assists in arguably the greatest Game 7 performance ever – it’s reasonable to think what happened Sunday will be part of Haliburton’s legacy and Pacers’ lore for years, even decades, to come.
“He went through so much during the year. A lot of criticism,” Pacers forward Pascal Siakam said. “And he just kept fighting. … he kept just working. And he did some incredible things, like this whole playoff run.”
The Indiana roster bulges with that stuff. Haliburton, largely overlooked from Oshkosh, Wis., and saddled with silly “overrated” labels to this day. Siakam, the native of Cameroon who wasn’t supposed to be here, as he reminded folks again and again.
Aaron Nesmith, discarded by the Celtics. Obi Toppin, dismissed by the Knicks. Andrew Nembhard, who slid into the Draft’s second round. Myles Turner, target of countless trade rumors for most of his career. T.J. McConnell, everybody’s consummate underdog on the biggest NBA stage.
Together they have clicked, the whole greater than its parts.
“A couple years ago, basketball was just, yeah, it was kind of dark for me,” said Siakam, a champion in Toronto in 2019 but revived by his trade to Indiana in January 2024. “It was just not fun at all.
“These guys, they just gave me a boost and starting with Ty … playing with these guys has been so incredible. [I] found my joy for the game and playing with so much swagger and happiness, and that’s all I want to do as a player.”
The connection between both Finals teams and their respective cities was evident in the decibel levels in both buildings over the past three weeks. There was a mutual sense of ownership, too, fans for players and vice versa.
Said Siakam: “We’ve said all year, like we’re not a sexy team. We’re not a team everyone wants to watch. And for a while, Indy was just like, hey, nobody cares. And we made people care, and that’s something to be proud of.
“Just to see how the city was so alive, and we feel blessed that we were the people that gave them that.”
The challenge now: What to make of 2025-26, if Haliburton misses all or most of it?
It will be a huge ask to expect a storyline to match this one from the Pacers left behind. But it’s a question many will be asking, of a team many will now be watching.
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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on X.
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