The Pacers and Thunder have constructed a series that has put the lie to the notion that there are insurmountable leads in basketball. The 20-point lead, once the gold standard, is now 30, and even then there’s a little white-knuckling to be done. But like any absolute counterfactual, sometimes the percentages get in the way. In fact, in every case of a team getting a 30-point lead, it was once a 20-point lead. Sometimes an ass-kicking is just an ass-kicking.
Enter Game 7 of the NBA Finals, coming Sunday night to a television near you. The Pacers, who have gained their ultra-plucky reputation as the team that lets the other guy get the 20-point lead before eradicating it, finally went nearly wire-to-wire (minus the first three-and-a-half minutes) in a 108–91 beatdown of the Thunder to force El Juego Definitivo.
This game was far more like most Pacers games this calendar year—they took the lead and held it. They went down 10–2, but after erasing that, much of the game was, well, this:
That’s Mike Breen explaining the obvious as he must, and Richard Jefferson and Doris Burke saying nothing at all, as they must. The game they thought they were getting would not be on offer, and the Pacers would make the Thunder look ordinary for the first time in the series. Haliburton-to-Siakam was the stuff of pulling-wings-off-flies, one in a continuing series of Oklahoma City getting pantsed in what people wanted to assume would be the last game of the season. That dunk put the Pacers up 20, which is by current definition not a safe lead, and they held or built on it for the next 23:22 of game time, which makes it safe.
And, well, good. Game 7 makes its own angst, and with a three-day buildup the fantasies will run rampant. Those who do not understand that simply have other stuff to do, or are just too resistant to the charms of T.J. McConnell, who has been promoted by ABC from annoying kid down the block to heady little chessmaster with a decent midrange jumper—as long as he doesn’t use it too often.
Conversely, the Thunder, one of the most dominant single-season teams in league history, are on the verge of becoming the 2016 Golden State Warriors, which in our results-or-F-off culture is not a compliment. They are still objectively the more fearsome team in this Finals, but their few flaws have been extracted by the Indianii. They can be beaten, and not just with some Haliburton-level miracle but also by plain old Midwest whoop-ass in the 55-gallon drum.
Not that either of those are likely to happen, mind you. These are the outliers, the illogical one-time events that make every scenario possible Sunday. But all the coaching adjustments have been made, which means that the final will be not about scheme but steam. If the Thunder choose to miss 18 of their first 21 three-pointers or let Haliburton have the ball in his hands at the end of a one-point game, then they deserve to lose. Conversely, if Shai Gilgeous-Alexander gets to the free throw line 12 times because he has one of those can’t-guard-me games, or Alex Caruso out-annoys McConnell, then they deserve to win. It’s not really all that complicated, and anyone who talks to you about momentum should be covered in beer, peanut shells, and shame, then stuck with the tab blue-tacked to his shirt.
But Thursday gave us this much: All scenarios have now been sumptuously covered, and the field is wide open with possibility as regards what we are about to see. Even a James Johnson cameo, if that’s your idea of a good time.
