Full Focus: Pacers stay alive, force Game 7
INDIANAPOLIS – Tempting as it might be to declare the turning point of Game 6 to have come about two hours before tipoff – when Tyrese Haliburton and the Indiana medial staff concurred that the All-NBA point guard’s right calf strain was healed enough for him to play – that would be disingenuous.
Nice as it was for the Pacers and their fans at Gainbridge Fieldhouse to know that Haliburton was going to participate in the most crucial game of their long season, just showing up wasn’t going to cut it.
Whether Haliburton came out with a triple-double star turn or merely limped through a few plays as a Willis Reed-like inspiration, Indiana was going to have to earn a 3-3 NBA Finals series tie on the court, not in the training room.
The Pacers did that, taking one heck of a punch from Oklahoma City, the NBA’s most successful team all season, without buckling. Just when things looked shakiest for Indiana, elimination knocking, it bounced back.
Quickly. And completely.
Now the Pacers and Thunder will meet one last time Sunday night (8 ET, ABC) at OKC’s Paycom Center in the Finals’ first Game 7 since 2016.
All thanks to a turnaround in the first quarter that saved Indiana from elimination and will push Oklahoma City to be their best to beat a fully restored opponent.
The moment
The game scarcely could have gone worse for Indiana from the start. Eight shots, eight misses. A Whoa-whoa-whoa timeout by coach Rick Carlisle barely three minutes in. OKC grabbed a 10-2 lead on a layup from Chet Holmgren, then Pacers center Myles Turner had his layup blocked by Isaiah Hartenstein. Yikes.
That rejection was grabbed by Pascal Siakam, however, who maneuvered to sink a 17-footer. Then Siakam turned another rebound into a fast-break falling flip with a foul on the Thunder’s Lu Dort for the and-1.
From there, over the next three-plus minutes, it was as if Indiana was taking inventory of the pieces it would need to scale Mt. Thunder on Thursday. Eight consecutive points by guard Andrew Nembhard, whose rough finish to Game 5 had him in need of a little redemption, followed Siakam’s quick five.
Then it was Obi Toppin’s turn, the fleet-footed, high-energy big man hitting a pair of 3-pointers. Toppin heat-checked a third next time down, Turner claimed the miss and fed Haliburton, who scored from 27 feet to assure the crowd that he was, in fact, back and healthy enough.
OKC’s coach Mark Daigneault called timeout, eager to end the 22-7 turnaround. Indiana led 24-17. That lead dwindled to just one and ballooned to 31 variously over the final 40 minutes, but the Pacers never trailed again. They won 108-91.
There would be no ceremony on their court, no sticky champagne stains on the floor of the visitors’ locker room. The Larry O’Brien Trophy truly is up for grabs.
The impact
Pacers lock in from opening tip to force Game 7 in Oklahoma City
It wasn’t just the run of points, essential as that was. It was the Pacers calling on, probing and checking their many weapons to find they could count on almost all of them.
Siakam, for instance, already had seen them through so many rough patches in this postseason and this series. Nembhard gets asked to do so much, chasing around OKC’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA’s scoring champion and 2025 Kia Most Valuable Player, yet Indiana needs him to score as well. He finished with 17 points, just four fewer than SGA, with a plus-minus rating of plus-19. The guy he guarded? A minus-17.
Toppin’s eight points in the first quarter was a flex of Indiana’s depth. Through three quarters, by which time it led 90-60, the Pacers’ bench outscored OKC’s 31-6. Toppin had 15 by then, guard T.J. McConnell eight. The five guys off the Thunder’s bench, in a combined 61 minutes, had shot 2-for-9.
As for Haliburton, he was back to playmaking and orchestrating. He finished without gaudy stats (14 points on 5-for-12 shooting, just one rebound, five assists and two steals) but he was moving well and smiling wide. The Prince of the Fieldhouse was cavorting, flinging long outlet passes again or twirling a no-look offering to Siakam for a dunk that put Indy up 20.
Actually there was one gaudy stat: Haliburton’s plus-25 was the game’s best.
What they’re saying
“He’s super-important to us. The big thing was just there wasn’t a lot of drama. … He was straightforward. He didn’t want a lot of attention. He was doing everything possible to be able to play. Fortunately, we were able to keep his minutes reasonable because we had a great first half and a good start to the third quarter.”
– Carlisle on Haliburton
“I mean, the timeout thing is an art. I used five of them before the seven-minute mark of the third. So you don’t get an unlimited number. We have to have the ability to play through some things. I tried to stop the play when I could. … Our ability to course-correct in games is important.”
– Daigneault on trying to break the Pacers’ rhythm
“It’s no surprise what T.J. does out there. Any time he comes into the game, the crowd loves him, and he feeds off of that. He had a great start to the game, and it got us going. Brought juice into the game, energy into the game.”
– Toppin on the jolt McConnell offers
“We played into their hands. We tried to do too much 1-on-1. They were active with their hands and aggressive defensively. We were just a little slow to get into rotations on defense and we fell away from the stuff that has been good for us.”
– Thunder guard Alex Caruso on his team’s long night
“We would have rather liked to win it in four, but if you are telling me I got one game with a chance to win the title, I’d take that at the beginning of the year.”
– Caruso on the forthcoming 20th Game 7 in Finals history
What’s next
Win or lose, both teams were quick in their postgame comments to move on from Game 6. To move on, for that matter, from the five games that preceded it, too.
The slate gets wiped about as clean as it can be in Game 7. It might as well be a Super Bowl, a single-elimination event with some connections to and vague themes from the first six games but with an opportunity for one team or one player to change everything.
The NBA will get its seventh different champion in seven years by going to the max of seven games. That’s about as well-scripted as the league could have hoped, even as the final 48 minutes remain one big blank page, outcome to be determined.
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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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