The Pacers Are 1 Win from the Greatest Upset in (Recent) Finals History
Just when it looked like order might return to the NBA, the Pacers pushed the Finals to a decisive Game 7 — and prolonged the league’s season of anarchy.
The NBA has been in its Chaos Era for a while now: A bunch of uncharacteristic playoff upsets? Check. Officially seven straight seasons with a different champion? Check. And if you thought that was finally about to change? Well, think again.
On Thursday night, the Indiana Pacers — a No. 4 seed who’s served as the league’s most persistent disruptor all spring — just handed the Oklahoma City Thunder a lopsided 108-91 loss in Game 6 of the NBA Finals, thrilling the raucous Indy fans at home and sending the series to a decisive, winner-take-all Game 7 on Sunday.
Even as another aspiring addition to the NBA’s streak of unique champs, the Thunder were supposed to be the team that restored a sense of order. They’d been favored to win the title since March, had the league’s best net rating in nearly 30 years, and had just won back-to-back contests in Games 4-5 to set up a potential championship clincher. But now they’re 48 minutes away from becoming the final victim in a postseason defined by unpredictability.
And the Pacers? If they can summon just one more win, they would claim their first NBA title by completing the greatest on-paper Finals upset of the modern era.
Elo ratings admittedly have their shortcomings when it comes to the NBA playoffs, given the way that team performance tends to operate on multiple parallel tracks (regular season versus postseason) in terms of what best predicts the next given game. However, if we take this year’s pre-Finals Elo ratings at face value for the sake of argument, the Pacers will take the court Sunday with a chance to pull off the greatest Finals upset in modern NBA history.
Here’s a ranking of the most seemingly overmatched eventual champs since the playoffs expanded to four rounds for every team in 1984, based on both their pure (negative) Elo differential going into the series, and their (low) odds to win the series according to their game-level win probabilities at home and on the road:
No matter which way you look at it, the Pacers would rank No. 1 on the list of titanic recent Finals upsets, provided they can scratch out one more win on the road.
And based on how much more energized they were than Oklahoma City in Game 6, it could absolutely happen. We went from wondering whether Tyrese Haliburton would play, then wondering if he could bounce back from a dismal 4-point outing in Game 5, to then wondering if he and the Pacers could ever be stopped — and whether the Thunder had even bothered to realize there was a game Thursday night.
After Indiana blew Game 4 in the fourth quarter, I wrote that they might never get that close again — that Finals history was littered with teams who’d come so close and never made it back. But this series has now swung back and forth so many times, it’s hard to even keep count. We’ve got:
Indy’s miracle Game 1 comeback
OKC re-asserts dominance in Game 2
Indy owns Game 3 and is on the verge of a 3-1 lead
OKC storms back to tie the series, then goes up 3-2
Indy crushes OKC to force Game 7
Now, it’s all tied again, ratcheting things up to the highest do-or-die pressure there is on Sunday. OKC still has home court. Indy will be an underdog — but now with the same momentum and belief they had at earlier points in the series (and throughout the playoffs). Anything can happen in a single-elimination contest.
And in a year like this, how could it end any other way? Instead of ending the Era of Parity, this season extended it further than we’ve ever seen — and we’re one crazy plot twist away from its most improbable chapter yet.
Filed under: NBA