NBA Finals 2025: How the Pacers present a different type of 'puzzle' for the Thunder to solve

Yahoo

2 days ago

OKLAHOMA CITY — On the court, Cason Wallace doesn't do anything slow. Seated at a podium at the Thunder's Wednesday media day session ahead of Game 1 of the 2025 NBA Finals, though, the second-year guard eased off the gas and took a second to think.
Wallace, who has blossomed into one of the NBA's best young point-of-attack stoppers, had just fielded a question about guarding Tyrese Haliburton — the Pacers' All-Star and All-NBA point guard. Wallace guarded Haliburton plenty during two regular-season meetings between Oklahoma City and Indiana; he figures to find himself across from Haliburton plenty over the next couple of weeks, too.
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So: What do you do with a problem like Tyrese, the engine of a hard-charging Indiana offense that scored nearly 120 points per 100 possessions in its 12-4 run through the Eastern Conference playoffs? What's Job No. 1 when you're dealing with a quicksilver ball-handler who's a high-volume, high-efficiency shooter capable of popping for 30 in any given game, but who'd much prefer to set the table for his teammates all night to the tune of double-digit assists? What's the first thing your defense looks to take away?
Wallace took a beat to consider. Then, with a smile, he decided.
'Everything,' he said.
What Wallace's answer lacked in specificity, it made up for in sheer soundness of logic. After all, when you're as all-consumingly excellent as the Thunder's defense is — No. 1 in points allowed per possession during the regular season, No. 1 in the playoffs, one of the stingiest units the league has seen since the ABA-NBA merger — you don't have to choose; you just erase. Specificity is for lesser beings.
Can the Thunder slow down Tyrese Haliburton? (Photo by)
(William Purnell via Getty Images)
'I go into every matchup the same — just trying to take them out,' Wallace said. 'Just trying to take the ball from them.'
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Wallace and the Thunder defense have been exceptionally good at that. Oklahoma City led the NBA in steals, deflections, loose balls recovered on defense and points scored off of turnovers this season. The Thunder landed two players on the 2024-25 All-Defensive Team — on-ball pitbull Luguentz Dort and do-it-all forward Jalen Williams — and they might not even be the third-best defenders on the court at any given point in a Thunder game, depending on how head coach Mark Daigneault is juggling his lineups and what kind of night Wallace, Alex Caruso and big men Chet Holmgren and Isaiah Hartenstein are having.
Their style is suffocation. Their brand is brutality. Their business is stuffing you in a locker and taking your lunch money … and brother, business is booming.
'They're super physical — they're annoying,' Pacers forward Obi Toppin said with a smile during Indiana's media availability. 'But they're young. They're young and they're just in your … mess. Like, I don't want to say S-H, but y'all know what I want to say. They're just in you, the whole game. It's annoying.'
[NBA Finals preview: Pacers-Thunder key matchups, schedule, X-factors and prediction]
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The task facing the Pacers: Be even more annoying to their hosts by reminding them that they can't hit what they can't catch.
The Pacers like to push the ball up the court after makes or misses, hunting leakouts and hit-aheads at every opportunity. When they can't advance the ball with touchdown passes, they just sprint with the dribble, looking to get into their first action as early as possible. Cover that up, and they'll run you through three more before the shot clock's even halfway gone, leveraging center Myles Turner's shooting prowess to spread you out with a true five-out attack — Haliburton's the only member of Indiana's starting five shooting under 40% from 3-point land in the postseason — to create passing angles and driving lanes through which to bury you in buckets.
'It really opens up the floor,' said Holmgren, who knows a thing or two about how powerful it can be for an offense to feature a floor-spacing 7-footer. 'It's not even so much about opening up the floor and being able to attack just the five — it comes down to opening up the floor for everybody else to be able to attack as well.
"[Defending it] really comes down to being able to play solid — kind of defeat the point of attack.'
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OK, so: Don't let Haliburton or Andrew Nembhard get loose off the dribble. And don't get mismatch-hunted or exploited by versatile Eastern Conference finals MVP Pascal Siakam, whom Daigneault praised Wednesday as 'kind of a matchup problem, quite frankly.'
Oh, and don't lose track of the always-relocating Aaron Nesmith, who's become fantastic shooting on the move in addition to being nails from the corners. And make sure you're closing hard on Turner all the way to 25 feet out. And don't get lost in the sauce when the ball starts popping all over the place — which it will, considering Indiana has the second-fastest average touch time in the postseason and throws the second-most passes per game — both well, well above the likes of the Grizzlies, Nuggets and Timberwolves.
… That's kind of a lot of stuff to not mess up.
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'It's one thing to understand what they're doing. It's one thing to understand what you need to do. It's quite another to execute it,' Daigneault said. 'That's what makes them really hard to play against. They pump a 99-miles-an-hour fastball at you. You can prepare all you want for that. When you're in the batter's box, it's different when it's time to hit it.'
Especially when the last few pitchers you've seen more consistently sat in the high-80s.
'They're really pushing the ball, playing with pace even in the halfcourt, which is something that has kind of been the opposite ... maybe besides Memphis that we played so far this postseason,' said Thunder super-sub Caruso. 'Memphis did a lot of that — drive-and-kick, play early — where the other teams [Denver and Minnesota] we played [ran] more sets. Just adjusting back to that, and making sure we're ready to run.'
It's certainly something the Thunder are capable of doing; by a number of pace and possession metrics, Oklahoma City has actually played faster than Indiana in these playoffs, on balance. But simply being ready to run with these Pacers doesn't necessarily mean you're ready for what they're going to do while they're sprinting all over the place — what Turner called Indiana's 'random movement' on offense, which, when combined with Haliburton's tendency toward egalitarian table-setting, makes everybody in navy blue and gold a live threat at all times.
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'Every team has their strengths and their weaknesses,' said Thunder superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. 'They're a very fast team. I think, like, above all, they understand how they're playing, and they're very stubborn in their approach. They kind of grind you with the way they play. … They know their identity and they stick to it, no matter what.'
That clarity of vision and purpose, combined with Haliburton's peerless playmaking, Carlisle's tactical acumen and a boatload of talent, helps make these Pacers an incredibly dangerous offensive team, and a complex problem to solve — the kind of challenge that Holmgren has found himself loving to wrestle with in the postseason.
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'You're also seeing the same team for two weeks, rather than playing a new team every single night,' Holmgren said. 'So you're really able to take a deep dive, get into things, and really try to … it's really like a puzzle. You know, you got to take the time to figure it out.'
The first step in solving any puzzle: singling out one piece from the pile and separating it from the rest. So which Pacers piece do the Thunder plan on starting out with?
At that, Holmgren paused.
'That puzzle is also a secret, you know?' he said, a grin spreading across his face. 'That's my answer. Sorry. I wish I could give you more of it.'
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Whatever the Thunder's plan of defensive attack, they'll need to be ready to match Indiana's intensity from Thursday's opening tip. Because if the unique brand of offensive pressure that the Pacers apply can make Oklahoma City blink, just once, in one of these first two games — as it did against Milwaukee, Cleveland and New York — then the tenor of a series that all us pundits seem to think we have pegged changes dramatically.
'We know this is a great team. If we were to win a championship, I don't want to win any other way. I don't want to go around or over. I want to go through,' Haliburton said. 'You want to go through the best team, the best challenge. This is the best challenge. This is the best team in the NBA.'
And the Pacers are going to make the Thunder prove it.