Indiana didn’t lead for 47 minutes and 59.7 seconds of Thursday’s NBA finals opener. But belief, defiance and Tyrese Haliburton’s dramatic flair made the final 0.3 count
T
his is why you play the games, as the old adage goes. In recent years, the later rounds of the NBA playoffs – and the finals in particular – have felt rote. They’ve gone chalk. The drama was minimal, even under the brightest lights of the league’s biggest stage. This year has been different: a playoffs filled with suspense, tension and plot twists galore. But at the start of the finals, the scene was set for a regression to the intrigue-less mean. Every roundtable pundit, basketball expert and barbershop patron outside of Indiana state lines had Oklahoma City – basketball’s best team from wire to wire – winning the series easily.
But Tyrese Haliburton, the instigator of several of this postseason’s most jaw-dropping twists, knows a thing or two about drama. It oozes out of his pores. And he and his Indiana Pacers had other plans.
The Pacers did not lead for 47 minutes and 59.7 seconds of Game 1 on Thursday in Oklahoma City. On a night when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the regular-season MVP, scored 38 points and no Indiana player topped 19, it should have been a wrap. The Thunder’s suffocating defense, among the league’s best, forced a famously ball-conscious Indiana team – one that averages just 12 turnovers a game – into coughing it up 19 times in the first half alone. That’s hardly a recipe for success. Yet somehow, the Pacers came out victorious, against the odds, against the physics, against conventional basketball logic. Because that’s what they do. You can’t beat the Pacers by playing 47 minutes and 59.7 seconds of winning basketball. They demand all 48.
