He's the Coach Who Took Down LeBron. Now the NBA's Giant Slayer Is Hunting an Even Bigger Upset.

Wall Street Journal

8 hours ago

Oklahoma City
When the NBA Finals began, the Indiana Pacers weren't merely underdogs. They were afterthoughts.
Their opponents, the Oklahoma City Thunder, had just posted the best record the NBA has seen in nine years. The Pacers, meanwhile, posted the fourth-best record in the Eastern Conference. At the end of the regular season, oddsmakers gave Indiana a 1% chance of winning the NBA title.
That the Pacers now find themselves deadlocked at 2-2 with the heavily favored Thunder counts as an astonishing development. But it's not one that's hard to understand. In fact, there's a fairly straightforward reason that Indiana stands on the brink of one of the biggest playoff shockers in modern NBA history.
They're coached by a man who has spent his career as the NBA's resident upset maestro.
Since 2000, Carlisle has won 49 playoff games against teams with a better seed, according to Stats Perform—the highest total in the entire NBA.
And more than a decade before he led the out-of-nowhere Pacers to the brink of a championship, he pulled off one of the most confounding upsets the NBA has ever seen.
It was 2011, and LeBron James had just joined the Miami Heat, forming a superteam that he declared would win 'not five, not six, not seven' championships, but even more. The Heat bullied their way to the Finals, where they met Carlisle's Dallas Mavericks—a team that had just a single All-Star to go against Miami's superstar trio.
Then Carlisle pulled off the remarkable: Dallas beat Miami four games to two. The outcome stunned not only James and the Heat but the entire basketball world—including a heartbroken 11-year-old LeBron fan who tested the limits of his bedtime in hopes that he'd see James's first championship. His name was Tyrese Haliburton.
'I was confused as to why Dallas was winning,' said Haliburton, who now happens to be the Pacers' starting point guard. 'I didn't understand it.'
He understands it a lot better now. Because the key to Carlisle derailing Miami's coronation wasn't too different from the game plan he and Haliburton are putting to work against the Thunder 14 years later. Other teams might have bigger superstars, but superstars can make a team predictable, as they feed the ball to their best players over and over.
Carlisle's underdogs run a free-flowing attack. And they're willing to try any tactic to turn a series in their favor—no matter how outlandish.
'Rick liked to go against the grain of what everybody else in the NBA does,' said Mark Cuban, the former Mavericks owner who hired Carlisle. 'We played zone defense when no one else did. Why? Because no one played or practiced against it.'
Carlisle's zone helped flummox Miami's high-powered attack. In one game James scored a measly eight points. And on offense, his teams are engineered not to funnel the ball to one player but to zip it across the court, bringing the entire roster—from star forward Dirk Nowitzki to backups unknown to most fans—in on the action.
'We started calling it 'flow.' Everybody was moving, and everybody got shots,' said Terry Stotts, an assistant coach on that Mavericks team. 'Indiana is doing that now, just taking it to another level.'
Indeed, this year's Pacers have gotten contributions from nearly every player in uniform. Haliburton has hit astonishing last-second shots in each round of the playoffs. Bennedict Mathurin, a player who barely saw the floor earlier in the playoffs, scored 27 points in Indiana's Game 3 win over the Thunder. That ranked as the most points by a backup player in the Finals since 2011, when Jason Terry hopped off the bench to score 27 against the Heat.
Like those Mavericks, this year's Pacers have turned to a defensive strategy rarely seen in the NBA. They've spent the Finals subjecting the Thunder to a full-court press, slowing down and wearing out Oklahoma City's dynamic offense.
But all the strategy in the world means nothing without getting players to believe that it will work. Terry said that this is Carlisle's secret sauce—convincing teams that the whole world thinks will lose that the whole world is wrong.
'He's the ultimate used car salesman,' Terry said. 'He can get you to buy into anything.'
With up to three games remaining, the Thunder are still the favorites. They have the better record, the starrier names and home-court advantage, with two of the games scheduled to take place here in Oklahoma City. Logic and reason say the Thunder should win, which means exactly one thing.
Carlisle has them right where he wants them.
Write to Robert O'Connell at [e-mail]