Richard Jefferson’s exact words—so help me God—were, “If Tyrese Haliburton was still playing, and it was a 15-point lead with six minutes to go, that’s right where the Pacers like it.” Neither Mike Breen nor Doris Burke seized the opportunity to club Jefferson over the head with a folding chair, which was a shame, but there followed five seconds of awkward silence. Indiana’s deficit was, at that moment, 14 points, and the clock showed 5:38. The Oklahoma City home crowd was chanting “O-K-C” at ear-splitting decibels, but the mood was not yet celebratory. The Pacers were mounting a 9–1 run, fueled by free-throws at one end and grinding, ineffective isolation ball at the other. Jalen Williams threw away a possession on hero shit on the right wing, but Lu Dort skittered into the paint for the offensive rebound, and kicked it out to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who deadened the ball and then dribbled into and bricked a step-back three-pointer, one of several he attempted in an effort to wield the dagger and deliver a memorable killing blow.
The Pacers grabbed the rebound and headed the other way. An engineered switch and some side-to-side action got Andrew Nembhard onto Isaiah Hartenstein, but rather than try to cook the mismatch Nembhard quickly pitched the ball over to Bennedict Mathurin, on the left wing. Alex Caruso, Mathurin’s defender, had been cheating toward the nail—the all-important help position at the middle of the free-throw line—and Mathurin used that little sliver of an attacking angle to drive left. It was a nice, decisive move, from a player who sometimes dithers and record-scratches on the ball, and the drive ended in a nice up-and-under layup. The margin was 12 points, with 4:46 on the clock; Indiana had clear momentum; Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault, having seen this play out once before, called a timeout. This was Oklahoma City’s second-to-last timeout. There were reasons, in this moment, for Thunder fans to feel exasperated, if not yet quite worried. Just about 30 seconds later the Pacers sprang a hellacious full-court press, and Caruso burned that final timeout, in order to avoid a dreaded five-second penalty.
This was the moral victory that Indiana took from Game 7, forcing the Thunder to fling away a couple timeouts and to delay celebrating until the game’s final minute. Contrary to Jefferson’s desperate blathering, “right where the Pacers like it” is precisely where every other team likes it: up on the scoreboard by 1,000 points, and preferably someplace a lot cooler than Oklahoma City. More importantly, Tyrese Haliburton was not still playing. Indiana’s all-star point guard and talisman ruptured his Achilles tendon seven minutes into the first quarter. This was an awful scene: Haliburton attempted to drive to his left, then screamed and collapsed to the floor, and immediately began pounding on the wood with his hand and screaming “No!” Replays showed Haliburton’s lower leg elongating gruesomely in the split second before he fell; later, it was Haliburton’s father who told ESPN’s Lisa Salters about the nature of the injury.
Haliburton had started the game well, knocking down three three-pointers in four tries and generally looking spry after suffering a calf strain earlier in the Finals. It probably bears mentioning, Haliburton is the third NBA superstar to rupture their Achilles tendon in just the 2025 playoffs, following Damian Lillard in Milwaukee and Jayson Tatum in Boston. Naturally you are freaked out that all three of these players wear the jersey number zero. For whatever it’s worth, former Washington Wizards all-star and current podcasting weirdo Gilbert Arenas (famously also a zero-wearer) said Sunday that Tatum and Lillard each noticed calf pain prior to their own Achilles injuries. Also, back in 2019, Kevin Durant was recovering from a calf strain when his Achilles kerploded on him, costing him the entirety of his age-31 season. It’s an awful injury for an NBA player, and the Pacers were understandably rattled by it. “What happened with Tyrese, all of our hearts dropped,” said Rick Carlisle, after the game. Obi Toppin, who had his worst game of the Finals and just the second scoreless playoff game of his career, admitted that he was actively thinking about Haliburton’s injury the whole rest of the night.
The Pacers continued for a while to scrap and zoom and in fact took a one-point lead into halftime, but the Thunder took their rest and emerged clear-headed about the opponent in front of them, and made the third quarter into a nightmarish bloodbath. Indiana had as many turnovers (eight) as made baskets in the frame, and only an improbable run of baskets from a determined T.J. McConnell kept the Pacers anywhere within shouting distance. From the three-minute mark of the third period Oklahoma City ripped off a 20–2 scoring run, building out a 21-point lead before boredom and the fidgets left them playing with their food for those few almost-nervous minutes of the late fourth.
Haliburton’s terrible injury and Indiana’s absolutely brutal third quarter sapped a lot of drama from the final act of what has otherwise been an excellent and fascinating NBA Finals. The Pacers deserved better than to finish this remarkable run on the back of a goblin-like backup point guard, pretending to throw a run at the home team mostly for old time’s sake. It’s because of the comebacks they’ve completed in this postseason that it was possible to tell yourself that anything in a given fourth-quarter possession was worthy of your attention; today, with the benefit of hindsight and a handy chart, it’s impossible to ignore that the Pacers never came within 10 points of the Thunder across the game’s final 14 minutes. This was a drubbing. To me, the worst kind of season-ending loss is one that offers to the losers no real conclusions: Next time through, uh, the Pacers should work on not having anyone’s leg-meat shred and pop at the worst possible moment.
The Thunder, too, deserved to stand over the mangled remains of an entire foe, not one that had been pre-chewed by bad luck. Their huge third-quarter run into the fourth was made possible by some of the most freakishly dialed-in team defense you will ever see; Chet Holmgren, in particular, ate up what felt like 19 consecutive Pacers possessions, blocking and changing shots, chasing Pacers guys out of the paint, and zipping all over the court like Speedy Gonzales But A Giraffe. Gilgeous-Alexander, crowned Finals MVP, wasn’t his usual efficient self on the offensive end but made himself into a ruthless perimeter menace. Dort pulverized ribs; Caruso gyrated nauseatingly. Isaiah Hartenstein continued to inspire Doris Burke to rhapsodize about intangibles. Given Haliburton’s limitations as a shot creator, I am not convinced that Indiana could’ve beaten Sunday’s version of Oklahoma City—I feel pretty certain that no one could—but I would’ve felt much better about watching the game devolve into a savage beatdown with Indiana’s star player out there on the court.
There was a final cool sequence of buckets, before the final 90 seconds or so fell into sloppy chaos. Nembhard, miraculously still on his feet after most of seven games spent as the primary Gilgeous-Alexander defender, drove into the paint but found himself stranded in the shadow of Holmgren’s armpits. In desperation he lobbed the ball out to Siakam in the left corner, and then bolted out to the wing. Siakam was stoned by Dort, and kicked it back to Nembhard, guarded by an out-of-position Holmgren, who had to sprint out to deter a catch-and-shoot. Nembhard dribbled to his left, catching Holmgren off balance, and then stepped back for a daring 30-footer. On the low block, Dort—who commits a solid 15 brutal un-whistled fouls per game—reached out and chucked Siakam to the ground, but Nembhard’s three-ball splashed home, and OKC’s lead was again knocked down to 10 points.
But the Pacers were dog-tired, and for maybe the first time in the series were playing without any authentic belief. Holmgren leaked out on the inbounds play; Siakam, who is normally Holmgren’s defender, was still picking himself off the floor, and neither Nembhard nor an exhausted and discouraged Aaron Nesmith dropped back to dissuade a long pass. Caruso inbounded to Gilgeous-Alexander, and Gilgeous-Alexander pitched it ahead to Holmgren on the run for a huge dunk. This might’ve been the 17th time that Gregg Easterbrook wrote “game over” into his notes, but this one, like the others before it, would most wisely have been done in pencil. Nembhard quickly inbounded the ball to T.J. McConnell, who tapped it back. Nembhard, keeping the pace in the Pacers, pushed ahead and fired the ball over to Mathurin on the right wing, guarded by Caruso.
Caruso is one of the handful of very best perimeter defenders in basketball, but there simply are no vulnerable spots in OKC’s best lineups, and the Pacers didn’t have time to hunt what OKC offers by way of positional mismatches, not with the worn-out and underqualified shot-creators Rick Carlisle had left at his disposal. Mathurin grabbed the ball and took off, driving Caruso all the way to the cup and dropping in a tough banked layup through contact. Breen was as authentically juiced up as he’d been since the first quarter; the crowd’s frustration and angst and euphoria collided in sonic disharmony, interrupted by an annoying in-stadium announcer guy who felt the need to remind the audience at Game 7 of the literal NBA Finals to cheer for the home team. It was possible, for the space of a few seconds, to imagine this series getting the ending it entirely deserved, whoever the hell was out there: flat-footed haymakers at the center of the ring, stopped only by the final buzzer.
Alas! There would be only one field goal made over the final 2:11 of the season, a meaningless Mathurin layup in the final 30 seconds, to keep the scoreboard respectable. Free throws slowed the finish to a crawl, but also gave plenty of time for the enormity of what they’d accomplished to sink in for the young Thunder. So it was too much to ask that the cosmos deliver one final thriller. What we got, for hoping, was six great damn basketball games, a tantalizing look into basketball’s bright future, and enough drama in the finish to sell a sequel.