Pascal Siakam and the Indiana Pacers are two wins away from an NBA championship

Toronto Star

2 days ago

The Indiana Pacers did what they do best.
They got a lot of players doing a lot of important things, no one stood too high above another, and the 'ecosystem' on offence and defence that head coach Rick Carlisle described last week was on full display Wednesday night.
Sure, Tyrese Haliburton and Pascal Siakam posted impressive numbers, but the contributions of backups such as Bennedict Mathurin and T.J. McConnell lifted Indiana to a 116-107 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder and a 2-1 lead in the NBA Finals.
Mathurin had 27 points on just 12 field-goal attempts, McConnell added 10 points, five assists and five steals in only 15 minutes and the Pacers bench outscored Oklahoma City's 47-18 at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.
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TJ MCCONNELL WITH HIS 5TH STEAL OF THE GAME.
(🎥: @espn) pic.twitter.com/SOB4qSvrlT
— TSN (@TSN_Sports) June 12, 2025
'Those guys were tremendous,' Carlisle said after the game. 'T.J. just brought a will, competitive will, to the game. Mathurin jumped in there and immediately was aggressive and got the ball in the basket.
'Look, this is the kind of team that we are. We need everybody to be ready. It's not always going to be exactly the same guys that are stepping up with scoring and stuff like that. But this is how we've got to do it, and we've got to do it as a team. And we've got to make it as hard as possible on them.'
It was the exact kind of effort the Pacers needed.
'When we do everything better as a team, it enhances all of our guys' abilities to play better,' Carlisle said before the game. 'More attention to detail on defence, blocking out. That gets us more rebounds, gets us in transition.
'Our spatial stuff has got to be better offensively. We've got to get the floor set up the right way. Oklahoma, they're so great defensively — they swarm, they cause all kinds of problems. So, we've got to do a better job with reads.'
The Pacers got those better reads and a much improved overall defensive effort to subdue the Thunder in the first NBA Finals game played in Indianapolis since 2000.
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'I didn't think they really changed their schemes very much,' Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. 'I just thought they were sharper ... with the physicality and the pressure. Their physicality was stronger than our force in a lot of those possessions. Not all of them. Obviously we had really good stretches of the game, but not enough good stretches of the game to stack up to a win on the road.'
The Pacers forced the Thunder to commit 19 turnovers and turned them into 21 points in their best defensive game of the series.
Haliburton led Indiana with 22 points and 11 assists, while Siakam had 21 points and six rebounds. But they are expected to post those numbers; it's the ancillary contributions that made the difference.
'Their bench really came in the game and was excellent,' Daigneault said. 'I thought that they had a lot to do with the second quarter, the start they got off to. I think it was 15-4. The start of the fourth quarter as well. Those guys were the catalyst to that. So they outplayed us tonight.'
One of the most fascinating matchups so far hasn't involved any individual player from either team.
The Thunder have the best collective defence in the league — ranked No. 1 through most of the regular season — and the Pacers have an offence that's not predicated on one player with breakdown skills.
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So to suggest that it's, say, Gilgeous-Alexander against Haliburton or Siakam against Lu Dort, or even Jalen Williams going against Myles Turner, is to miss the point.
'They're a conceptual offence. They play with a lot of flow. They play with a lot of spontaneity. They don't overcontrol the game, their coaching or their players. They just go out there and play,' Daigneault said before the game. 'So it requires a conceptual approach defensively. If you go out there and you're like, hey, we're trying to stop this one player or one player, they're going to get you somewhere else. You kind of have to approach the game the way they do on that end of the floor, which is unique. It's one of the unique aspects of playing them.'
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At 31, Siakam — who added four assists, a couple of steals and a blocked shot — is better and older and more aware of what his role is here, in his second appearance in the NBA Finals.
In 2019, during Toronto's run to the NBA championship, Siakam was an integral figure in the Raptors win, but certain not a central one. That was a team of Kawhi Leonard and Kyle Lowry and Marc Gasol. Siakam was in the second wave: important, but not a headliner.
Now he knows his role. He knows how expansive his game is, and why.
'It's just the growth,' he said. 'All I could really do when I started is run, play defence, just dunk. There was nothing else. Just looking at myself now, a little bit more well-rounded skill-wise, maturity-wise. I was probably 200 pounds when I first started my rookie year, whatever. Just being a man, I think that's pretty much it. And my skills just developing.'