Pacers put Thunder on notice with stunning Game 1 win

OKLAHOMA CITY — It was a game that they did everything to win until they lost it.  Or more accurately, until the Indiana Pacers won it. 

The Pacers arrived in Oklahoma City as underdogs against the 68-win Thunder, who had followed up their dominant regular season by largely steamrolling their way into the NBA Finals, and for much of Game 1 at the Paycom Center, the two teams played to form. 

In a matchup of one of NBA’s most clinical offences — the Pacers turned it over just 13.2 times per game during the regular season despite playing a peak speed whenever possible — and the NBA’s most tenacious ballhawks — the Thunder led the league in forced turnovers with 18 a game — Oklahoma City was able to impose its will. 

They forced the Pacers into a season-high 25 turnovers while making only six of their own. 

The plus-19 turnover advantage was the Thunder’s largest through 17 playoff games and their second-largest on the season.

The Thunder were 20-2 this season when recording at least 20 opponent turnovers and 6-0 in the playoffs before Thursday night. When they had 25 or more opponent turnovers in the regular season, they won the games by an average of 18 points. Their previous high during the post-season was when they had 24 opponent turnovers against the Memphis Grizzlies and won by 51. 

But the Pacers aren’t like anyone else the Thunder have played during their playoff run. They are a team that thrives on adversity, like the 15-point deficit they were trailing by with 9:42 left in the fourth quarter of Game 1.

They had been trailing by double figures for the vast majority of the game. 

Indiana is not a team that seems bothered by such statistical improbabilities, and by the time the horn sounded, the Pacers had earned their fifth comeback from down 15 or more in 17 playoff starts, this one putting them up 1-0 and securing them homecourt advantage for the rest of the Finals. 

Once again it was Tyrese Haliburton working his magic and he shrugged off an otherwise ordinary evening by his standards (14 points, 6 assists, three turnovers) to weave his way through the Thunder defence before pulling up from 21 feet for the game winner with 0.3 seconds left, slamming the car door on the Thunder’s grabby fingers for the wholly unexpected 111-110 win. 

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I think we’re just a really resilient group,” said Haliburton of the Pacers’ penchant for playoff comebacks. “We do just a great job of sticking in and just settling into the game.

“You know, through the course of the game, it kept getting — it felt like it could get ugly, who knows where this game is heading. I thought we did a great job of just walking them down. When it gets to 15, you can panic, or you can talk about ‘how do we get it to 10 and how do we get it to five and (go) from there.’”

Haliburton got it done with a long two, but the Pacers came into the Finals as the best three-point shooting team in the playoffs and lived up to the billing as they shot 46 per cent from deep, converting 18-of-39 chances and 6-of-10 in the fourth quarter, which was their only significant statistical advantage of the game.

For the Thunder, the hope is that the loss is merely a missed opportunity rather than a critical mistake. The last time the Thunder lost a playoff game they had controlled from start to finish — the Pacers’ first lead came on Haliburton’s game-winner — was when Aaron Gordon stole Game 1 of the second round from them with a buzzer-beating putback on behalf of the Denver Nuggets. That helped Denver push the Thunder to seven games, but OKC prevailed. 

There is no guarantee the Thunder will have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes again, not against a team as opportunistic as the Pacers. 

“We just got to focus on being better,” said Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. “The series isn’t first to one, it’s first to four. We have four more games to get, they have three. That’s just where we are. We got to understand that, and we got to get to four before they get to three, if we want to win the NBA championship. It’s that simple. It’s not rocket science. We lost Game 1. We have to be better.”

Gilgeous-Alexander was pretty darn good in his NBA Finals debut. He finished with 38 points, five rebounds, three assists and three steals, although his 14-of-30 shooting was not his typical standard for efficiency. He had a good look from 14 feet with 11 seconds left that would have put OKC up by three. The Thunder had retained the ball after the Pacers used their coach’s challenge when it was ruled that Pascal Siakam (19 points, 10 rebounds) had fallen out of bounds after grabbing the rebound when Thunder wing Jalen Williams missed a floater. 

Gilgeous-Alexander got some strong support from fellow Canadian Olympic team member Lu Dort, who was the Thunder’s next most reliable offensive threat through the first three quarters. The Montreal native hit five threes — on seven attempts — for 15 points.

He also contributed four of the Thunder’s 14 steals and blocked two shots, including climbing the ladder for a spectacular contest of high-flying Aaron Nesmith after Indiana had cut the Thunder’s lead to three with 1:33 to play. 

Front and centre in the Pacers’ comeback was another Canadian Olympian, Andrew Nembhard, who scored eight of his 14 points and counted three of his six assists during the Pacers’ comeback push in the fourth, including a step-back three over Gilgeous-Alexander with 1:59 left that cut the Thunder’s lead to three. 

Nembhard was the primary defender on Gilgeous-Alexander all night and held his own as much as anyone can against him. He was present without fouling Gilgeous-Alexander’s final shot. 

“He made plays at both ends,” said Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle. “The one stop on Shai at the end was a big play, and then we got the rebound. There was (his) step-back three, which was a big momentum play. I think it went from six to three. 

“And there was an and-one, he got to the rim, I don’t know what point it was in the fourth (with 9:27 left, kicking off the Pacers’ comeback), but a lot of big plays and you’ve got to have playmakers against Oklahoma City. They make it so difficult defensively.”

Perhaps the biggest thing working in the Pacers’ favour is that even after making 19 of their turnovers in the first half, they were only down 57-45 as the Thunder, perhaps showing some of their Finals jitters, scored only nine points off those takeaways. They scored only 11 points off of Pacers’ turnovers for the game.

“I think obviously when you turn the ball over that much, you expect to be down 20-plus,” said Siakam. “So the fact that we were still in the game just for us is just …  stick to the game plan and take care of the turnovers, which is hard against a team like that, especially with the pace we play with.”

The environment was another element that should have worked in the Thunder’s favour, but didn’t. 

Oklahoma City hadn’t hosted a Finals game since 2012, when James Harden was just a guy with a beard who came off the bench behind Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, instead of The Beard, and one of three eventual MVPs the Thunder had on the roster at the time. 

Leading up to tip, the energy inside Paycom Centre was palpable. Everyone in the arena was clad entirely in white. They all had noise makers that they were slapping on their knees to the rhythm of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” and song after song after that. There was no scoreboard messaging or in-arena announcers exhorting anything. It was 18,203 people locked in on one task, being as loud and engaged as possible. 

“Look, this arena is madness. I mean, this is,  from a road perspective, this was — the decibels were insane,” said Carlisle, who was last in the Finals when he led the Dallas Mavericks to an upset over the Miami Heat in 2011. “There’s a lot going on. You know, (and we’re) grateful to hang in and give ourselves a chance in the end, but now we’ve got to keep our eye on the ball.”

If they can keep better hold of it — they only made five of their turnovers in the second half, which has to be encouraging — they might not have to go down to the wire with OKC to get a win. But they now have the confidence going into Game 2 that if they have to, they can.