The Probability That Could Haunt Indiana
The Pacers were on the verge of going up 3-1 in the Finals. Now they're tied 2-2 — playing for either a title, or a regrettable footnote in NBA history.
For a fleeting moment in Friday’s Game 4, the Indiana Pacers were on the verge of taking total control of the NBA Finals — and putting themselves in a position to finally erase decades of being just good enough to fall short of a title. With a 10-point lead late in the third quarter, the promise of a 3-1 series stranglehold was within reach. They were at home, the crowd was energized and the Thunder seemed to be in disarray.
But Oklahoma City did rally, thanks to the heroics of league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — or also, as the cynical among us might say, an officiating job led by Scott “The Extender” Foster — surging late to secure a 111-104 win that evened the series at two games apiece. For Indiana, what had been a golden opportunity turned into what might become one of the most painful “what-ifs” in Finals history.
To quantify just how devastating the swing really was, let’s go back to this method, which I used to estimate each historical playoff team’s probability of winning through every quarter of their games since 1997 (the earliest year in SportRadar’s data). Through the third quarter of Game 4, the Pacers had an 82 percent chance of winning the NBA title if we assumed equal teams and treated the rest of the game — and all subsequent contests — as a weighted coin-flip that only accounted for home-court advantage, current point differential and the state of the series:
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