In NBA Finals, Thunder vs. Pacers reinvigorates league’s competitive soul

OKLAHOMA CITY — So, there will be a Finals Game 7 after all.

The Indiana Pacers saw to that in Game 6 on June 19 when a star player playing on one leg led a team of virtual no names past the heavily favored Oklahoma City Thunder to force the first decisive Game 7 in nine seasons. In retrospect, there is no better way to end this NBA season than with a Finals that symbolizes an ushering out of the old and ushering in of the new.

For all practical purposes, my NBA season began in August 2024 in Paris when the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team won the gold medal. Ten months later, the NBA season will end in Oklahoma City with either the Pacers or the Thunder achieving a historic milestone by winning the first NBA title in franchise history.

For the last two weeks, this compelling NBA Finals has been framed as a battle between small-market teams. In fact, this is a series that has reinvigorated the NBA’s competitive soul. There have been so many complaints over the last several seasons about load management, about a regular season that lacks meaning and about an abysmal lack of effort that has made a mockery of the NBA All-Star game.

This seven-game, no-holds-barred series between Indiana and OKC has made competition, not celebrity, its centerpiece. The series has highlighted the evolution of two young stars, Indiana’s Tyrese Haliburton and Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and showed what is possible when pride is on the line.

I’m not trying to gush over a league which saw one of its franchises, the Los Angeles Lakers, sell for $10 billion. But that’s the business of basketball, a game played on another plane by billionaire team owners. The commodity these teams market is highly skilled players playing competitively. That’s what draws us to sport and play.

What we witnessed in Paris and what we have seen during these last two weeks in the Finals, is a perfect generational symmetry of the old ushering in — or giving way to — the new.

The season began with NBA elders defending the country’s basketball honor. The season ends with two of the NBA’s youngest teams grabbing the mantle and showing what inspired competition looks like.

At an average age of 30 years, nine months, the U.S. men’s team was the oldest U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team ever. With an average player age of 24.1, the Thunder are the NBA’s youngest team. The Pacers’ average age is roughly 26.3 years old.

Team USA was anchored by NBA pillars: LeBron James, 40; Stephen Curry, 37; Kevin Durant, 36. These league icons knew what it took to reach the mountaintop. James and Curry have won four NBA titles; Durant has won two.

The Olympics performance and these Finals present a sharp contrast to a meaningless All-Star Game when nothing except corporate sponsorship is at stake. It’s the dilemma the league will continue to confront: getting players to play hard when there’s nothing to play for is a fool’s errand.

In those Olympics and during these NBA Finals, fans have seen what competition looks like when well-compensated stars play with pride on the line. In a crucial semifinal game, Curry scored 36 points as the United States overcame a 17-point deficit to win 95-91 over Serbia.

The faces of the new wave, Gilgeous-Alexander, 26, and Haliburton, 25, have mountains to climb. Reaching the NBA Finals is the first major mountain.

Each player participated in the Olympics. Haliburton was largely a spectator on Team USA. Gilgeous-Alexander was the leader of a disappointing Canadian team that was eliminated from the Olympic competition by France right off the bat.

In 2024-25, Gilgeous-Alexander enjoyed a terrific regular season that resulted in his being named NBA MVP. But if the Thunder fail to win the NBA title after being heavily favored, the season will be something of a failure.

Understanding that special moments are fleeting is precisely the mentality that drove Haliburton to play virtually on one leg in Game 6 on June 19. Haliburton re-aggravated his calf in Game 5 when the Pacers looked defeated and hardly capable of forcing a Game 7.

He played and contributed the sort of defining effort, if not performance, that may have moved his detractors off the fence.

“I think I’d beat myself up if I didn’t give it a chance,” Haliburton told reporters after Game 6. In 22 minutes of play in Game 6, Haliburton scored 14 points, had a pair of steals and handed out five assists. It wasn’t the numbers but his presence that mattered.

“He did amazing today,” Pacers forward Obi Toppin said. “He led us to a win; he’s a soldier. He’s not going to let no little injury hold him back from playing in the Finals and helping this team win. He helped us get to this point and he’s going to keep going until he can’t.”

Haliburton, for his part, was not in a reflective mood after Game 6 when he was asked to look back over his career journey and lessons learned along the way. In his view, the journey is not over.”

“I’m not trying to give you guys the journey take right now,” he said. “I’m trying to get prepared for Game 7. Maybe after that game is the time to really reflect.”

The NBA season ends on Sunday, but realistically, this has been a 10-month grind. The season has also borne witness to a crucial transition. From Paris to Indianapolis to Oklahoma City, it has been a wire-to-wire win for the NBA.