The NBA is a takesman’s game. But the Indiana Pacers are making it impossible to be right.
I’m no household name in this business, but I’ve seen enough to get friends and family asking me what I think will happen in the NBA Finals between the mystical creature we call the Pacers and the truly juggernautical Oklahoma City Thunder. And I’ve had the same line all week, possibly the single-most boring take in the history of professional sports:
There is no defensible reason to pick the Pacers over the Thunder.
I’ve tried to find one. As a relentless contrarian, trust me when I say I’ve scoured the earth for reasons to say the Pacers could win this series. Pace, surely they run a lot? No… Oklahoma City still plays faster. Clutch stats? Like… they’ve been pretty clutch. But no, it’s basically a dead heat in points per possession and shooting percentage. All traditional and advanced stats from the regular season eviscerate the Pacers. And the Thunder might have a better lineup, slots one through 12.
So now we have to turn to indefensible reasons why people may have picked the Pacers. The power of friendship? Youth and inexperience for the Thunder? The Pacers never get tired? Tyrese Haliburton is the most clutch player in NBA history?
Those are not reasons why the Pacers could win. Those are narratives that would explain why the Pacers did win in a hypothetical future where they already have. That type of ex-post-facto takesmanship is basically the rock on which sports media has built its church, but it’s really no better than just cashing in a lottery ticket and saying you knew the winning numbers all along.
This is cosmos-defying buffoonery. This is 2022 Miami Heat-level stuff, chicanery capable of causing convulsions and forcing you to call your stockbroker and put everything into Lima beans. This team is 5-3 when they go down by 15 or more points. Tyrese Haliburton, who has never been higher than third-team All-NBA, has more playoff game-winners this postseason than Kobe Bryant did in his entire career.
There is zilch that suggests this should be possible, and yet here we are.
I’m sure plenty of people picked the Pacers to win Game 1 via the law of large numbers. And in this world, it’s so much more important if you’re right rather than why you’re right, but I’m stopping those hypothetical straw man victory laps here and demanding to know why on earth this is happening. Because I don’t understand.
Here’s what’s tricky: as far as I can tell, the Indiana Pacers won a run-of-the-mill, low-scoring, store-brand exciting NBA basketball game. They hung around for most of the game, never getting bowled over but never quite going strike-for-strike either. And then they turned on the jets, caught the Thunder off-guard and stole — and I do really mean stole, 111-110 with 0.3 seconds left was their first lead of the night — Game 1 of the NBA Finals. See? Perfectly explainable.
What I can’t explain is how the Pacers are capable of playing that kind of game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. This isn’t the Atlanta Hawks in mid-February; this is a team of first-rate terminators ready and willing to make you look stupid on any Thursday night you want. Oklahoma City may well still prove all praise right, but games like this make it hard to look smart.
Well, I guess there is one explanation: perhaps the outcomes of basketball games are just totally random. The volume of shots is such that you can never predict what will happen in any one outing, and the players are similar enough in ability that it doesn’t really matter who is on what team. Sure, we have mountains of NBA history that disprove that explanation, but maybe none of that history — much like seemingly the laws of physics — apply to these Pacers.
In all seriousness, if the Pacers ultimately win the Finals, I acknowledge that it is possible to be right. There will be receipts kept, screenshots tweeted, and many a John Haliburton quote about all those who didn’t say Yes ‘Cers regretting it. But I do not acknowledge that there is any good reason why those people will be right, and therefore concede none of the victorious high ground to them. If the Pacers win the championship, it won’t be for basketball reasons. It will be because they are a team that defies logic and was possibly chosen by God to hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy.
