The Pacers Almost Gave Us a Totally New Championship Blueprint
Despite coming up just short, Indiana might have given future NBA title hopefuls a new path for championship team-building — by breaking all of the old rules.
On Sunday night, an NBA postseason defined by unpredictability nearly got its perfectly topsy-turvy ending: a champion nobody — and I mean nobody — saw coming. The Indiana Pacers — a No. 4 seed that opened at +6600 to win the title in preseason and entered the playoffs as an even bigger longshot (+8000); a team that lost its best player, Tyrese Haliburton, to a brutal injury early in Game 7 — came within a shaky, shorthanded third quarter1 of shocking the Oklahoma City Thunder on their home floor to win the first NBA title in franchise history.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. Instead, it was OKC who finished the job and became the seventh different NBA champion in as many seasons. (Sunday’s winner was always going to represent the league’s Parity Era in some way, no matter which team prevailed.) And make no mistake: The Thunder were a worthy champion — a historically elite young team that earned their big moment.
But the Pacers came this close to being a title team truly unlike any other we’ve seen. Not only did they nearly pull off the biggest Finals upset in recent memory, they shattered every rule of what a title contender is supposed to look like: No MVP candidates. Barely any All-NBA nods. Minimal playoff experience. No dominant regular-season metrics. Mild favorites in Round 1 and underdogs in each subsequent series. Teams like that aren't supposed to get anywhere near the Finals — much less get agonizingly close to winning them.
While the Pacers didn’t ultimately lift the Larry O’Brien Trophy, I’m not sure we fully appreciate how much of a near-miss Indiana just had with a truly paradigm-shifting NBA championship. The only question now is whether anyone else can get that close again while using such an unconventional formula.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Neil’s Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.