There was a sequence in the fourth quarter of Game 5 Monday night where I very nearly chewed through my shirt collar. I should not have had it in my mouth to begin with, but there I was, nibbling on my own shirt like a damn toddler. It was nerves! The Pacers, behind and on the back foot all night long, had pulled to within five points on a Pascal Siakam three-pointer from the corner. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, for once not doing the heaviest lifting for Oklahoma City’s offense, used a screen from Kenrich Williams, of all people, to engineer a switch onto Bennedict Mathurin, a confident and well-meaning third guard who sometimes defends as if awoken mid-possession from a happy food dream. Indiana just gave away the switch, man. A Finals team schemes and charts and toils away at the grueling work of prying switches from the stubbornest circumstances, and here the Pacers somehow let Kenrich damn Williams decide which of their guards would defend the world’s best individual scorer.
Mathurin was upright and tentative, as if he expected Andrew Nembhard, Gilgeous-Alexander’s designated defender, to swoop back in and rescue him, or possibly for a wave of support to arrive from out of nowhere and just in time, like Erkenbrand’s foot-soldiers at dawn. At any rate, Mathurin gave Gilgeous-Alexander a long runway, which in most circumstances is the same thing as rolling out a red carpet to the front of the rim. Gilgeous-Alexander crossed over to his left and drove into the paint. Nembhard trailed the play, but not in the manner of one who is recovering to his man. Mathurin, meanwhile, continued to sort of float at arm’s length from the ball-handler. It really felt as if he thought of himself as the help defender; unacceptable as this must be in Game 5 of the literal NBA Finals, the league’s MVP was functionally unguarded, while handling the basketball with a live dribble, inside the opponent’s paint. Pascal Siakam, who as the defense’s last man back was guarding Alex Caruso in the dunker spot, also did not act with any urgency at all, hovering near the opposite block as if hoping to spring an ambush at the rim. Gilgeous-Alexander requires no particular encouragements; here he simply dribbled in a straight line to the basket, and banked home an easy and entirely uncontested left-handed layup.
I had not yet done any serious shirt-slobbering. But on the very next Oklahoma City possession, following a T.J. McConnell dead-ball turnover, Chet Holmgren jogged out as the screener and Gilgeous-Alexander ran Nembhard into traffic. Obi Toppin, Holmgren’s defender, popped out as if to trap the ball-handler, but Gilgeous-Alexander waited him out—it was less a real trap than a little showy blitz, designed to give Nembhard a chance to zoom back into the play—and then knifed toward the paint. Again Nembhard was trailing the play; again no one in particular was actually guarding Shai-Gilgeous Alexander.
This is what threatened the structural integrity of my shirt—an otherwise durable oxford, blue in color—but only so much of it can be blamed on the Pacers. Of course it is a huge oversight to allow the best individual player in the series to go unguarded, but sloppiness and fatigue don’t entirely explain how it happened. As was the case in Game 2, it seemed right from the jump Monday night like Oklahoma City had worked out to a startling level of precision the exact patterns and timing of Indiana’s defensive schemes. The Pacers want to pester Gilgeous-Alexander way up the floor, they want to turn his shoulders so that his chest points toward the sideline, they want to send the first layer of help to the nail and the second level of help to the front of the restricted arc, and they want to do all that without surrendering big-on-small positional mismatches. It means hedging and blitzing and trapping on screens, it means Nembhard and Ben Sheppard furiously weaving and darting through traffic, and always sprinting back into the play, fighting like madmen to stay attached to Gilgeous-Alexander whenever remotely possible. The Pacers have done really incredibly well at this, they’re so sharp and so heroically dogged about it that if Gilgeous-Alexander takes even half an extra beat to scan the floor or size-up the whirring blur of arms in front of him, his guy is right back in his face, the Pacers are back in defensive shape, and four or six seconds of work have gotten Oklahoma City’s offense exactly nowhere.
But when the Thunder have it all measured up—when Gilgeous-Alexander and fellow drink-stirrer Jalen Williams are gazing into the code of the Matrix—that little bit of impetus can really scramble the shit out of Indiana’s whole deal. Here Gilgeous-Alexander timed his drive exactly to Toppin’s retreat from the trap, a half-step before Nembhard could get back into the play. I can’t say with any confidence where Indiana’s help was supposed to come from, but I would be very surprised to learn that Rick Carlisle approved of how it played out: T.J. McConnell dug down to the elbow from the nearside wing, leaving Aaron Wiggins standing wide open along the arc just a high-five away from Gilgeous-Alexander. Had McConnell stayed put, Gilgeous-Alexander would’ve had a clean runway to the rim, but here again we must acknowledge the existence of damn Kenrich damn Williams, lurking statue-like in the far-side corner, guarded by Siakam. I suspect that if they had this moment over again, Indiana would send Siakam flying into the paint to cut off Gilgeous-Alexander, and would live with giving a shot from deep to a guy who has played 30 total minutes and attempted seven total shots in this series. Instead, Gilgeous-Alexander basically handed the ball to Wiggins, and Wiggins basically FedEx’d the ball to the bottom of the net, pushing OKC’s lead to 10 points.
This was not Indiana’s last very good chance at stifling the home team, quieting their crowd, evening the score, and getting onto the front foot. They had it all the way down to two points with about eight minutes to go before a Jalen Williams three-pointer and a transition dunk following a live-ball turnover put Oklahoma City more or less permanently out of Indiana’s reach. The point is that the Thunder were aggressive and direct and exactly on the money all night, and the Pacers were mostly hanging on for dear life. This was the second time in the series that the Thunder have seemed to sharpen up all at once, and in such a way that you remember why they’ve been considered such overwhelming favorites. The Thunder imposed their style on the Pacers about has ruthlessly as they have all series. There was an unmistakable sense right from the outset that the floor was tilted Oklahoma City’s way, and only partly due to the referees deciding that it would be neat and fine for Gilgeous-Alexander to deploy Randy Savage’s Flying Elbow Drop against his defender, whenever he felt so inspired.
The first quarter was pretty shockingly one-sided, in terms of ease of operations and shot quality: Gilgeous-Alexander and especially Jalen Williams unzipped Indiana’s defense over and over again, while at the other end the Pacers were back to sort of thrashing their way into trouble and then heaving the ball directly into the arms of their opponents. It was often Siakam making the final error of a possession, not because he’s bad or sloppy but because he somewhat quietly carries a huge shot-creation burden in Indiana’s half-court attack, made worse in Game 5 by Tyrese Haliburton’s bum leg. Twice Jalen Williams got transition dunks from Siakam turnovers; in the second quarter he flowed into a rhythm three-pointer from yet another Siakam blunder. The Pacers finished the game with 22 turnovers, an unsurvivable spray of self-inflicted bullet holes; Siakam accounted for six of them, the most he’s ever had in the playoffs and twice as many as he’s had in a playoff with the Pacers. It felt like sort of a miracle that Indiana was still in the game at all in the fourth quarter.
The easy stuff juiced Williams up: Instead of sort of floating into passive pull-up shots and trying to pick out a tricky mid-range rhythm amid the chaos of a Finals contest, Monday night he was just gunning it at any backpedaling schlub unfortunate enough to wander into his path. When he’s going all the way to the rim, the Thunder are an even handfullier handful; when his tricky scoops and high bankers are dropping home, buddy, there is a very strong chance that a discouraged opposing head coach is going to say the words “tip your cap” into a microphone before bedtime.
“When he’s at his best, he’s playing with that type of force,” said Williams’s own head coach, Mark Daigneault, after the game. “That was an unbelievable performance by him, just throughout the whole game. He really was on the gas the entire night. Applied a ton of pressure.” Williams finished with 40 points, a new playoff career-high, on 25 shots, and the Thunder won his minutes by a hefty 14 points.
The Pacers are now firmly up against it. They looked pretty well overmatched Monday; the handful of times that they pulled within a couple of buckets I was moved to say, or think, something along the lines of how the hell did that happen. Their case was not helped by Haliburton’s calf injury, which limited him to some true Brevin Knight shifts, and to just six total shots in 34 minutes. Haliburton has vowed to gut it out the rest of the way, but this should encourage precisely no one. “If I can walk, then I want to play,” he said after the game. I think I know how he feels: If I can walk, I want to sprout wings and fly around in the blue sky, swooping and diving like a tree swallow; unfortunately, if I climb to the roof and spread my arms and jump, I will fall onto the ground very hard and die. Mere bipedal locomotion will mean not one single thing for Haliburton’s ability to contribute effectively to Indiana’s title chances in Game 6; if all he can do is walk, and thus don a jersey and amble around out there as ineffectually as he managed in Game 5, the Pacers would almost certainly be better off without him, although in either case they would probably be deader than hell.
Rick Carlisle will smash some buttons and yank on some levers for Thursday night’s Game 6. Monday night he deployed Tony Bradley, who touched the court just 14 times this regular season and had not previously appeared at all in this series. Bradley played in both halves, while poor Thomas Bryant was relegated to a minute of Johnny Furphy duty. It wasn’t the worst thing—Indiana won Bradley’s 12 minutes by two points—but there did come a moment in the third quarter where Bradley took a hit-ahead pass from Mathurin, dribbled the ball in transition, and attempted an achingly slow euro-step finish through traffic. The eventual layup floated away in an entirely unexpected direction; mercifully the box score recorded a block on the play, although I think what happened is reality glitched pretty bad at the sheer improbability of the scenario.
Bradley joined the Pacers on a 10-day contract in March. Carlisle would say that anyone in a jersey is expected to go out there and do a job, and he credited Bradley for solid spot-duty performances against the New York Knicks, but there is a reason Bradley had not touched the floor through four games of the Finals, and it is not because Thomas Bryant is anyone’s idea of a cornerstone. When the Pacers are whirring and clicking and other uhh machine things, there’s a kind of magical mechanical ingenuity to the whole thing, where big galoots like Bryant and Bradley (and shrimpy galoots like Sheppard) look like humble but functional cogs, suited to specific and valuable purposes. When Indiana’s main operations are mainly failing, and they spend most of a game mostly drowning, and Tony Bradley is doing history’s least convincing Tony Parker impression on your television, the question just what the hell are we doing here comes bubbling up from the part of your brain otherwise assigned to matters of survival.
If The Tony Bradley Gambit is an indication of Indiana’s desperation for solutions, yikes. Still, the Pacers have pulled enough rabbits by now to suspect there’s something still scurrying under their hats, hopefully something that is not just a much smaller Tony Bradley. They’ve been underdogs all along, and they are presently near their underdoggiest; it’s been more than a month since they looked anywhere near this unlikely as a potential NBA champion. They’ll need a boost from their home crowd Thursday; they’ll need Haliburton’s calf to heal up; they’ll need to sharpen up or mix up their point-of-attack defense; they’ll need Siakam to never again pirouette in traffic; they’ll need to survive however many minutes they require from Bryant or Bradley. If they can get another out-of-nowhere shooting performance from Mathurin or Aaron Nesmith or, hell, Obi Toppin, they could sure use it. If the Pacers have any credit left with Beelzebub, let no innocent barnyard animals be spared. If there are any levers left to pull, now is the time.