2025 NBA Finals preview: Pacers-Thunder key matchups, schedule, biggest X-factor and championship prediction

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2 days ago

After an 82-game marathon, followed by three grueling rounds of postseason competition, we now approach the finish line of the 2024-25 NBA season. The Western Conference champion Oklahoma City Thunder — the West's No. 1 seed, and the top overall seed in the postseason bracket — will take on the Eastern Conference champion Indiana Pacers in the 2025 NBA Finals.
It's the first postseason meeting between the two franchises. The Thunder enter looking for the franchise's first title in its Oklahoma City era, and first since the former Seattle SuperSonics won it all back in 1979. Indiana similarly heads into the Finals looking to break a lengthy championship drought: The Pacers haven't raised a title banner since the great Slick Leonard led them to three ABA championships in four years between 1970 and 1973, before the ABA-NBA merger.
NBA Finals preview
What we know about the Thunder
That they've been the best team in the NBA since October's opening tip.
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Oklahoma City had the NBA's second-best record and net rating during the 2023-24 season, and were one of only two teams to finish in the top five in both offensive and defensive efficiency. (The other, the Boston Celtics, won the NBA championship.) And then they brought back all of their most important players, traded for Alex Caruso and signed Isaiah Hartenstein.
Here's what I posited as the Thunder's best-case scenario when I previewed their season all the way back at the beginning of October:
The newcomers function exactly as envisioned, resulting in the Thunder fielding top-two units on both ends and proving to be the class of the league from the opening tip. [Shai Gilgeous-Alexander] wins MVP, [Jalen Williams] and Chet [Holmgren] earn All-Star nods, and the rest of the supporting cast earns Bricktown's undying affection. Oklahoma City returns to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2012 — and wins the franchise's first championship since the move from Seattle.
At the risk of spraining something by patting myself on the back … kind of nailed it?
The Thunder finished second in points scored per possession and first in points allowed per possession, according to Cleaning the Glass. Hartenstein averaged a double-double to go with nearly four assists and a block in just 27.9 minutes per game, shooting 58% from the field and holding opponents to 56.3% shooting at the rim. Caruso knocked down 3-pointers at a league-average clip on higher volume than Josh Giddey had, posted a near-4-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio, and was arguably the most disruptive individual defender in the NBA on a per-minute basis. That'll work.
Gilgeous-Alexander, the league's premier driver and most elusive scorer, did win MVP. Williams, a picture-perfect do-it-all complement, did make the All-Star (and All-NBA, and All-Defensive) team. Holmgren very well might've joined them at All-Star Weekend if not for an early-season hip fracture; he'd return in February and finish the regular season averaging 15 points, 8 rebounds, 2 assists and 2 blocks per game while shooting 37% from 3 on more than 100 attempts. (There have only been three such seasons in NBA history. Holmgren, two years into his career, has two of them. Unicorn stuff.) The rest of the rotation, from defensive menaces Luguentz Dort and Cason Wallace to energy-injecting wings Aaron Wiggins and Isaiah Joe, play their roles to perfection.
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The results have been historic: the seventh team ever to win 68 games; the highest average margin of victory ever; a defense that profiles as one of the stingiest since the ABA-NBA merger; the best era-adjusted efficiency differential since the '96 Bulls; the top overall seed in the 2025 postseason.
After making quick work of the Grizzlies in Round 1, Oklahoma City survived a titanic test from Nikola Jokić and his champion Nuggets in a seven-game second-round war before outclassing the Timberwolves in the conference finals. The Thunder went 12-4 in the tougher conference, outscoring opponents by 11.2 points per 100 possessions — on pace for the best net rating of any champion since the Year 1 KD Warriors. Provided, of course, they spend the next two weeks looking like they have for the last eight months: like one of the best teams we've ever seen.
What we know about the Pacers
That they are damn sure not a fluke.
Plenty of pundits dismissed Indiana's run to the 2024 Eastern Conference finals as a product of merely taking advantage of multiple opponents missing injured stars. That carried over into the 2025 postseason, as Indiana faced a Bucks team missing Damian Lillard, and a Cavaliers side that saw Darius Garland, Evan Mobley, De'Andre Hunter and later Donovan Mitchell all miss time.
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The thing about that, though, as Pacers coach Rick Carlisle noted after knocking off the Knicks: 'You still gotta win the games.'
The Pacers did that, often in thrilling and heartstopping fashion, to build on last spring's success and put themselves in position to move on to the championship round. And after New York made them look uncomfortable in a Game 5 win, they simply returned to their first principles — speed, ball pressure, body and ball movement, sharing — and finally broke the Knicks … just like they've done to damn near everybody else for six months.
After a rough 10-15 start plagued by injuries to starters Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith, among other contributors, the Pacers have gone 52-21 — more victories in that stretch than any team save their Finals opponents. They have the NBA's No. 5 offense and No. 9 defense in that span — the culmination of a dramatic two-way turnaround from the summer of 2021, when the Pacers brought Carlisle back to helm a rebuild that went from 25 wins to the Finals in just four seasons.
'Well, if you have the right player to build around,' Carlisle said, 'it can happen much faster than you think.'
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The Pacers found the right player to build around on February 8, 2022.
Haliburton lives to push the pace, hunting hit-ahead passes and opportunities to probe for early, easy offense; his superpower, though, is managing to inject that kind of flow, pace and energy into the game while maintaining one of the lowest turnover rates among high-volume ball-handlers. With Haliburton at the controls, Indiana has finished second and ninth in offensive efficiency in the last two seasons — the first time the Pacers have fielded consecutive top-10 offenses since the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 seasons. (Which, not coincidentally, was the last time the Pacers made the Finals.)
Pacers president Kevin Pritchard and general manager Chad Buchanan saw what kind of pilot Haliburton was and set about building a sound-barrier-breaking spaceship around him, retrofitting the roster to surround him with sprinters and shooters. That resulted in a team capable of getting buckets in bunches … but one that still struggled to get stops, lacked size on the perimeter and was missing a credible star-caliber second weapon.
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'And then, look,' Carlisle said. 'The Siakam trade took things to another level.'
It's almost unbelievable how perfectly Pascal Siakam has fit into precisely the holes that the Pacers needed filling: an All-Star comfortable working off of Haliburton or pairing with him in the two-man game, exploiting mismatches against smaller defenders in the post or slower defenders with his face-up game, running the floor like a greyhound to create easy baskets for the offense and unyielding stress for the opposing defense, making the extra pass and calling his own number depending on what the game calls for. He does all of that while playing solid defense across multiple positions, never turning the ball over, and providing the kind of hard-won leadership to which even Indiana's longest-tenured pros can turn.
'You brought in a champion,' Pacers center Myles Turner said. 'You brought in someone that's been there before.'
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They all know what it's like now: They've faced the pressure, they've met the moment, and they've reached the highest level the sport has to offer. Four more wins and they're immortal. Getting those wins against the best team in the NBA will be the toughest challenge Indiana has faced yet. Get them, though, and not a soul alive will be able to form their mouth to call these Pacers a fluke again.
Head-to-head
Oklahoma City won the regular-season series, 2-0.
In the first meeting, on the day after Christmas, with Indiana just starting to turn things around after its early-season morass, the Thunder battled back from a 22-7 deficit to score a 120-114 win at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. It was one of Haliburton's quietest nights of the season — just 4 points on 2-for-6 shooting, though he did add 8 assists against just 1 turnover in 35 minutes — as Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault dispatched Dort and Wallace to shadow him all over the court.
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Indiana responded by going to its Plan B: getting Haliburton off the ball, kicking it to Nembhard, and allowing him to attack 4-on-4 in a more spaced-out floor. The Pacers were still able to generate offense — six double-digit scorers, led by a 23-9-7 night from Nembhard — but just had no answer for Gilgeous-Alexander, who torched them for 45 points (11 of which came in the final 3:42, as OKC closed on a 17-7 run) to go with 8 assists, 7 rebounds, 2 blocks, 1 steal and just 1 turnover in 38 minutes of work — a top-15 individual performance of the entire NBA season, according to John Hollinger's Game Score metric, which aims to provide a rough estimate of how productive a particular player was on a particular night.
The rematch came in late March, and was a nip-and-tuck battle … for about a quarter and a half.
Oklahoma City ripped off a 20-5 run over a four-minute span just before halftime to blow the game open, held Indiana's starters at bay to open the second half, and then delivered another four-minute 19-7 burst — with SGA off the floor, in J-Dub-led small-ball lineups — to push the game out of reach. The Thunder led by as many as 25 in the fourth quarter, which Haliburton, Siakam, Turner and Nesmith sat out completely, and cruised to a 132-111 win.
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The 133.3 offensive rating that OKC posted in the win marked Indiana's fourth-worst defensive outing of the season. And if you want to get a sense of just how frightening this Thunder team is … it wasn't even a top-20 offensive night for them.
Matchup to watch
Indiana's turnover avoidance vs. Oklahoma City's turnover creation
In both the regular season and playoffs, no team has forced turnovers on a higher share of opponents' possessions than the Thunder, whose roster-wide commitment to intense physicality and ball pressure has produced one of the best defenses in recent memory. In both the regular season and playoffs, the Pacers have owned the NBA's third-lowest turnover rate — a massive reason why, since they got healthy in early December, they've also owned one of the five or so best offenses in the league.
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Strength, meet strength.
Haliburton's superpower as a lead initiator — one he put on full display in his brilliant Game 4 performance against New York — is his exceptional ability to make audacious passes at breakneck speed without giving the ball to the other team. Over the last three seasons, only three players who have played at least 5,000 total minutes have assisted on more than 40% of their teammates' baskets while turning it over on fewer than 15% of their team's offensive possessions: Nikola Jokić, Luka Donćic and Haliburton — who has the lowest turnover rate (11.7%) of the bunch.
'I take pride in taking care of the ball,' Haliburton said after Indiana's Game 4 win over the Knicks. 'I'd rather do really anything else on the basketball court than turn the ball over.'
(Joseph Raines/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
Oklahoma City, conversely, would love nothing more than to take the ball away from you. The Thunder led the NBA in steals, deflections, loose balls recovered on defense and points scored off of turnovers this season, and tied for third in points per possession added in transition. They want to harass you into making a mistake, and then make you pay for it — over and over and over again.
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OKC didn't force a hailstorm of miscues in its two regular-season matchups with Indiana. Haliburton committed only one turnover in 64 minutes against Oklahoma City during the regular season. And as a team, the Pacers turned the ball over only 24 times in two games against the Thunder, leading to 26 points — fewer points per game off of turnovers than OKC scored against anyone else in the league.
The 'when' of those boo-boos matters, though. In the March meeting, the Pacers led late into the first quarter … and then committed five turnovers in the next nine minutes of game time, with a missed layup that the Thunder immediately turned into an SGA layup on the other end to boot. Before you knew it, Indiana had lost its offensive rhythm, Oklahoma City had found one, and Gilgeous-Alexander and Co. were up double digits.
As Owen Phillips has noted at The F5, turnover margin has become arguably the defining win condition in the modern NBA. During the 2024-25 NBA regular season, teams that won the turnover battle went 668-461, a .592 winning percentage, according to CourtSketch. In the postseason, the team that commits fewer turnovers is 54-20, a .730 winning percentage — equivalent to 60 wins over an 82-game season.
Oklahoma City will try to do what it did to Memphis, Denver and Minnesota: tighten the vise grip on and off the ball, reducing the amount of airspace in which the offense has to operate until it's so tightly constricted that the Thunder can just rip the ball away. Indiana, on the other hand, will try to do what it did to Milwaukee, Cleveland and New York: vary its angles of attack and take advantage of being able to run five-out spacing at virtually all times, spreading OKC out enough that even the most hellacious unit in the league can't move far enough and fast enough to keep up with the flight of the ball as it leads navy blue-and-gold-clad bodies into open shots. Whoever's able to tilt the possession battle in their favor figures to have a leg up in what promises to be an all-out sprint of a series.
Biggest X-factor
How does Holmgren change the matchup?
Holmgren didn't play in either game against Indiana during the regular season. He missed the first game during his recovery from a fractured hip, and the second as part of Oklahoma City's management plan for his return from that injury.
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At the risk of overstating the obvious: Adding a 7-foot-1, 3-point shooting, face-up driving rim protector and rebounder who plays 30 minutes a night figures to alter the chemistry of the matchup at least a little. But how?
For one thing: Who does Chet guard?
During the regular-season matchups, Hartenstein opened up on Turner and Williams began on Siakam, with Dort on Haliburton, Wallace on Nembhard, and SGA taking Indiana's fifth starter (Mathurin in the first game, Nesmith in the second). With Holmgren starting, do you slot him onto Turner, stretch-5-for-stretch-5, put Hartenstein on Siakam — a matchup he saw plenty during both the regular season and the 2024 Eastern Conference semifinals when he was with the Knicks — and slide J-Dub over to Nembhard?
Can Indiana make hay out of that, whether with Turner leveraging his strength advantage over Holmgren or Siakam using his speed to dust Hartenstein? If Dort goes shutdown-corner on Haliburton, can Nembhard (who averaged 19.5 points, 7 rebounds and 7 assists per game on 50% shooting against OKC in the regular season) use that bionic shoulder to create space against the 6-foot-6, 220-pound Williams?
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(Also: Daigneault hasn't been shy about toggling the matchups to get his wings cross-matched onto bigs and vice versa — think Wallace on Turner and Hartenstein on Nesmith — when he thinks it might wrong-foot the offense. If and when the Thunder juggle the matchups, can the Pacers' wings take advantage of the extra space and make them pay?)
Conversely: How does Indiana defend Chet, and what are the downstream effects of that?
The Pacers mostly guarded him with centers during their two meetings in the 2023-24 regular season; that was before OKC added Hartenstein, on whom Indiana stationed its centers with Holmgren absent. Wallace starting in Holmgren's place in both games gave Haliburton a like-sized, lower-usage 'hiding' spot on defense, and allowed Carlisle to station Siakam on Dort, off of whom he could roam to play free safety and muck things up as a help defender. If Carlisle starts more or less straight up — Turner on Hartenstein and Siakam on Holmgren, with Nembhard and Nesmith taking Gilgeous-Alexander and Williams — does the need to be more attentive to Holmgren on the perimeter make it tougher for Siakam to load up in help position?
With Haliburton then slotted onto Dort, how hard does OKC look to hit its guard-guard screening actions, trying to hunt the Pacers point guard more effectively than their Eastern competitors were able to in service of forcing Haliburton to handle even more physicality? And if the Pacers try to handle that hunting by pre-switching off the ball, a kind of three-card monte game aimed at keeping Haliburton out of the action, will the Thunder have opportunities to attack gaps and compromise the Pacers rotation?
Other key questions I'm curious about
Crunch-time lineups
Oklahoma City Thunder
You can write Gilgeous-Alexander and Williams' names in Sharpie. J-Dub has played 131 of OKC's 192 fourth-quarter minutes this postseason (68.2%) and SGA has played 107 (55.7%). That includes nearly all of the Thunder's (comparatively rare) 27 'clutch' minutes — defined by NBA Advanced Stats as when the score is within points in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime. Holmgren (97 fourth-quarter minutes, 23 'clutch' minutes) will likely be manning the middle, too.
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Beyond Oklahoma City's burgeoning Big Three, though, Daigneault tends to mix and match. If rebounding and rim protection are the top priorities, Hartenstein will close; if ball pressure, perimeter switchability and shooting are paramount, expect to see plenty of Dort, Caruso and/or Wallace.
Whether they go big, small or somewhere in between, Oklahoma City has the goods to throw out nightmarish defensive lineups that provide enough space for SGA to go to work. That's why, despite hardly ever letting contests come down to one or two possessions late, the Thunder have tended to fare awfully well within tighter confines: They're 21-10 in 'clutch' games, outscoring opponents by 42 points in 94 regular- and postseason crunch-time minutes.
Indiana Pacers
Nembhard, Turner, Siakam, Nesmith and Haliburton lead Indiana in fourth-quarter minutes during the postseason, and that quintet has outscored the Pacers' opposition by 18 points in 51 final-frame minutes. They've also played nearly all of the team's 'clutch' minutes.
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Carlisle has demonstrated his willingness to reach down the bench for a change-up if he thinks one's necessary: T.J. McConnell for point-of-attack pressure and an extra ball-handler, Ben Sheppard for a bit more size and shooting on the perimeter, Obi Toppin for some more offensive juice and athleticism, Thomas Bryant to stretch the floor, Jarace Walker (if healthy) for more mobility up front, etc. For the most part, though, expect Carlisle to stick with the unit that got him here — the group best equipped to play the style on both ends of the floor that can make Indiana such a difficult puzzle for opponents to solve.
Prediction: Thunder in 6
The Pacers are a phenomenal team: an explosive, efficient, fast-paced and well-drilled offense, paired with a physical, aggressive, versatile, well-schemed defense. They're deep and disciplined, creative and well-coached — a beautifully conceived and constructed modern NBA team.
It's just that the Thunder are all of that, too, only better at … well, just about all of it.
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I picked Oklahoma City to hoist the Larry O'B before the season, I did it again before the playoffs, and as impressed as I've been by Indiana, I see no reason to switch up now. SGA caps one of the most incredible individual seasons in NBA history by winning Finals MVP, and the Thunder make all of us wonder whether all that talk about the death of dynasties might not have been a bit premature.
Series odds
(via BetMGM)
Oklahoma City Thunder (-700)
Indiana Pacers (+500)
Series schedule (all times Eastern)
Game 1: Indiana at Oklahoma City on Thursday, June 5 (8:30 p.m., ABC)
Game 2: Indiana at Oklahoma City on Sunday, June 8 (8 p.m., ABC)
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Game 3: Oklahoma City at Indiana on Wednesday, June 11 (8:30 p.m., ABC)
Game 4: Oklahoma City at Indiana on Friday, June 13 (8:30 p.m., ABC)
*Game 5: Indiana at Oklahoma City on Monday, June 16 (8:30 p.m., ABC)
*Game 6: Oklahoma City at Indiana on Thursday, June 19 (8:30 p.m., ABC)
*Game 7: Indiana at Oklahoma City on Sunday, June 22 (8 p.m., ABC)
*if necessary