The Matchup of the Finals

League MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander vs. basketball’s clutch king Tyrese Haliburton is the headline-drawing matchup of the 2025 NBA Finals, and needless to say it delivered in spades during Game 1 on Thursday. 

Trailing by nine points with 2:52 remaining, the Pacers went on a 12-2 run to secure a jaw-dropping 111-110 win. Let’s get into how it went down.

How It Happened

For 47:57.97 seconds of action, Gilgeous-Alexander kept the Thunder in the lead with one of his signature high-volume scoring performances. SGA tallied 38 points on 14-of-30 shooting and only took eight free-throw attempts, which is a pretty standard amount for an attack-first guard given the scenario. 

Still, it wasn’t enough to prevent Indiana’s late-game devil magic. It certainly wasn’t enough to outweigh whatever deal Haliburton made with the Prince of Darkness. The superstar point guard made his fourth game-winner of the postseason with 0.3 seconds remaining to complete another inexplicable late-game comeback, before greeting his elated teammates stone-faced after taking a 1-0 lead on the road as 5-to-1 underdogs in the series.

Game Thieves

The scariest part of Indiana’s Game 1 win for Oklahoma City is the fact that the Pacers, including Haliburton, really did not play all that well. Haliburton and his running mate Pascal Siakam combined to finish with 33 points, five less than Gilgeous-Alexander had on his own. In addition, Indiana turned over the ball 25 times and only forced seven turnovers themselves. Despite that, the Pacers became the first team since 1971 to win an NBA Finals game when trailing by 9+ points, breaking a 0-for-181 streak.

The Pacers tied the biggest fourth-quarter comeback (15-point deficit) in the NBA Finals since 1971.

Indiana took its first lead of the game with 0.3 seconds left in the fourth quarter. Since 1971, this is the latest into any Finals game that a team took its first lead. pic.twitter.com/zi6ASIqR0I

— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) June 6, 2025

The Pacers also became the first team since 1998 to complete five comebacks of at least 15+ points in one postseason. All four of Haliburton’s game-winners this postseason have capped off 15+ point comebacks, again proving that some kind of supernatural deal was brokered with a dark lord.

Championship Thieves?

While Oklahoma City remains a -325  favorite to win the series, with Vegas still leaning toward a six or seven game conclusion, the fact Haliburton and the Pacers have won a third consecutive Game 1 improbably as underdogs lends credence to the idea that the team that entered as 5-to-1underdogs could plausibly leave the NBA Finals with the longest odds on upset in the league’s championship series since the 2004 Detroit Pistons took down the Los Angeles Lakers with identical 5-to-1 odds. 

Feels relevant pic.twitter.com/sudIRtGUcp

— Will Despart (@WillDespart) June 6, 2025

Some food for thought? The Pistons ended that series against the Lakers in five games in 2004. If the Pacers can steal Game 2, we could potentially be looking at a sweep favoring Indiana in a series where many questioned whether they could even make one of these games competitive. Some more historical basis? When Rick Carlisle’s Dallas Mavericks upset the heavily favored Los Angeles Lakers in the 2011 Western Conference Semifinals, that was also a sweep. The Pacers needed six games against the Knicks, but they only needed five to dispatch a recent champion in the Milwaukee Bucks and the 64-win Cleveland Cavaliers.

How Will It End?

On the other hand, we all know what happened to Allen Iverson and the 2001 Philadelphia 76ers after Iverson’s Game 1 heroics that saw him hand an all-time great Lakers team their only postseason loss with a 48-point baptism and a step over Tyronn Lue. Granted, the Lakers were about twice the favorite going into that series as the Thunder were heading into the 2025 NBA Finals and that’s even with -700 odds in their favor. 

Will Haliburton and the Pacers go the way of the ‘01 76ers or ‘04 Pistons? Will Gilgeous-Alexander join the exclusive list of players in history who have won an MVP, the Finals, and Finals MVP in the same season?  It’s not long until we find out, and the ending is clearly not as much of a foregone conclusion as many predicted.