Doyel: Pacers never give up, have a star who doesn't miss in clutch time. It's who they are

Indianapolis Star

a day ago

OKLAHOMA CITY – Obi Toppin has the ball 60 feet from the basket, six seconds left in Game 1 of the 2025 NBA Finals, and Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle doesn't want a timeout. The Pacers have never led the Oklahoma City Thunder, not for one second of this friggin' game in that friggin' madhouse they call Paycom Center, and this is their chance.
And Carlisle doesn't want a timeout.
He's been here before, see, and not just in these 2025 NBA Playoffs — though Lord knows, as do Cleveland and Milwaukee and New York — he's been here before in these NBA playoffs. Carlisle was first here, so to speak, 14 years ago in Dallas. The Mavericks had a brilliant basketball savant named Jason Kidd running the offense, and Carlisle was saying earlier Thursday, maybe 90 minutes before tipoff, that the Mavericks took off only after he got out of the way and let Kidd work his magic. That was the 2010-11 season, when the Mavs won the 2011 NBA title.
This was Thursday night, Game 1 of the NBA Finals, as the Pacers are hunting the 2025 NBA title:
Toppin has the ball just short of midcourt, and Carlisle isn't calling timeout because he trusts his players to make the right choice — get the ball into the hands of Tyrese Haliburton — and then he trusts Haliburton to do whatever his brilliant basketball mind tells him.
Toppin makes the right play. He hands it to Haliburton, moving across the center stripe. And now Haliburton's mind is moving as fast as his feet, and his feet can move. Aaron Nesmith is coming to set a screen, but that beautiful mind of Haliburton is doing the math and gauging the game clock and the distance between himself and his preferred shooting spot. Nesmith is heading his way, but the numbers in Haliburton's head aren't adding up, so he doesn't wait. He dribbles past Nesmith, taking Cason Wallace along for the ride.
Poor Cason Wallace, you know? He's just an accessory at this point, a trinket Haliburton is taking with him as he hurries to a spot 21 feet from the basket. Just inside the 3-point arc now. Wallace is close, but not close enough. The clock is ticking down, close to zero — but not, for the Oklahoma City Thunder, close enough,
Haliburton is rising. He's shooting. The ball passes through the basket with 0.3 seconds left. The Pacers take their first lead of the game, 111-110.
That's the final — Pacers 111, Thunder 110 — because the Thunder cannot get off a shot. Haliburton has just won his third game of this postseason, and remember: He sent a fourth game, against the Knicks, to overtime at the buzzer.
Afterward, in the locker room, Haliburton is icing both knees. He's soaking both feet in an ice bath. Someone is trying to hype him up, tell him how amazing this game was, how amazing Haliburton was. And Tyrese Haliburton is giving a wan smile, because he's tired, and this is what he's saying.
'It's just one game.'
The Pacers beat the best team in basketball, one of the most dominant teams — statistically — in NBA history.
And the Pacers didn't even play that well.
Well, not until the final 13½ minutes. The Pacers scored 45 points in those final 13½ minutes, a frenzied pace against any team, but unthinkable against a team as dominant as the Thunder have been this season. They went 68-14 in the regular season, winning the Western Conference, by 16 games — and they were even more dominant, if you can believe it, against the Eastern Conference. The Thunder went 29-1 against teams from the East this season, the best record of any team, ever, against the opposing conference. And the Thunder did it with defense, and with a nasty homecourt advantage.
And the Pacers did that in the final 13½ minutes? To the Thunder?
In that arena?
'This arena is madness,' Carlisle was saying afterward. 'The decibels were insane.'
So was this Pacers' comeback. Again. Look, we've seen this happen so often now in these playoffs it's almost surprising when the Pacers don't rally. They stormed back from 20-point deficits twice in nine days against Milwaukee and Cleveland and were down 14 late in the fourth quarter of Game 1 against the Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals.
What do those games have in common? Haliburton heroics at the end. He beat the Bucks with a driving layup at the buzzer over Giannis Antetokounmpo. He beat the Cavaliers with a step-back 3-pointer against Ty Jerome. He sent the Knicks game into overtime with that loooooong 2-pointer that everyone thought was the game-winning 3 at the buzzer.
But before we continue celebrating another of Haliburton's heroics, how about we mention how this game was even remotely winnable? There was plenty of Haliburton earlier in the fourth quarter, sure.
But until the very end, it was even more Andrew Nembhard and Obi Toppin and Myles Turner. That was the trio at the heart of a 15-4 run by the Pacers that turned a 94-79 game — borderline blowout — into a 98-94 heart-thumper. And they did it in five possessions, scoring points in chunks of three:
A three-point play by Nembhard, attacking Thunder defensive ace Alex Caruso and cradling the ball like a fullback before finishing at the rim. Two 3-pointers by Toppin, one off a drive-and-kick from Nembhard. Two 3-pointers from Turner.
Turner adds a 15-footer. Nembhard buries a 3-pointer, and two free throws, and he's the one defending Thunder MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who scored 38 points but needed 40. On the Thunder's final shot, leading by one, SGA is attacking Nembhard and Nembhard is staying in front of him, making him take a difficult 15-footer, and doing it without fouling. SGA misses. Nesmith grabs the rebound. Passes to Toppin.
Carlisle doesn't call timeout.
Before the final second, before the fourth quarter, before the final 13½ minutes, the Pacers were almost historically bad in one category.
'We had to play a lot better,' Carlisle said of his message to his team at halftime, after it committed 19 turnovers in the first half. ' I mean, 19 turnovers in a half, if it's not a record for the Finals, it's got to be up there close to it.'
The Thunder does this to teams. They have the best set of perimeter defenders in the league, led by All-Defensive ace Luguentz Dort, built like an NFL linebacker at 6-4, 220 pounds and every bit as fast and explosive. He was shadowing Haliburton, or letting Gilgeous-Alexander do it, or letting Caruso, or Cason Wallace, or Jalen Williams. All of them can handle the task, against any perimeter player in the league, which is why Haliburton scored just 14 points on just 13 field-goal attempts — but not because he was timid. He just couldn't get open, not against an OKC team that switches everything, handing Haliburton from one defensive menace to another.
And closer to the rim, 7-1 Chet Holmgren and 7-0 Isaiah Hartenstein can move their feet like much smaller defenders.
And all of them, all five players on the floor for the Thunder — whichever five it is — claw at the ball whenever it's within reach.
At one point in the third quarter the Thunder led 67-55 and two Pacers, Turner and Nesmith, had more turnovers (five each) than Oklahoma City had as a team (four).
'You know,' Haliburton was saying afterward, 'it felt like it could get ugly — who knows where this game is heading? I thought we did a great job of just walking them down. When (the deficit) gets to 15, you can panic or you can talk about how do we get it to 10 and how do we get it to five and from there.'
The Pacers did it with defense and 3-pointers. The Thunder have a brutal defense to try to score against anywhere near the basket, so the Pacers rallied by getting hot from 3-point range. They were 18-for-39 for the game, and getting better as the game went along: 10-for-20 in the second half, then 6-for-10 in the fourth quarter.
At the other end, the Pacers' defense — no slouch of its own — was wearing on SGA and Jalen Williams. Yes, Gilgeous-Alexander scored 38 points, but he needed 30 shots (14-for-30). And Williams, who averaged 21.6 ppg this season, scored 17 on 6-for-19 shooting. Nembhard did the bulk of the work on SGA, and Nesmith did the bulk of the work on Williams, but they cross-matched at times, and Bennedict Mathurin was particularly effective when he defended SGA and Williams off the bench.
But Nembhard was the Pacers' defensive star of this game, no matter how many points SGA scored, and when a reporter asked Haliburton about Nembhard afterward, Haliburton was thrilled.
'Appreciate you for asking that question,' he said. 'He's our guy. (Nembhard's) been our guy all year. If there wasn't the 65-game rule, he's an All-Defensive guy, plain and simple.
'Shai is the hardest guy to cover 1-on-1 in the NBA. There's no one look we can give that's going to work every time. But we trust Drew in those situations. … He's done a lot of the dirty work for years now, and that's his calling card in this league and he's an elite defender.'
Nembhard at one end. Haliburton at the other. The Pacers rallying and storming back, again and again, and this is just who they are.
'The common denominator is them,' Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. 'They've had so many games like that that have seemed improbable.'
Last word goes to the guy who keeps hitting the last shot.
'This group never gives up,' Haliburton said. 'We never believe that the game is over until it hits zero, and that's just the God's honest truth.'
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Threads, or on BlueSky and Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar, or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar. Subscribe to the free weekly Doyel on Demand newsletter.