Almost nothing about these teams says they should be here. They don’t care.
When the New York Knicks and Indiana Pacers resume their decades-long rivalry this Wednesday, they will do so in perhaps the unlikeliest conference finals meeting in NBA history. The 2025 postseason has been defined by chaos, and it is a chaos these two teams have wrought.
Upset winners of 60-win juggernauts, picked by no one to advance, architects of all-time comebacks and late game heroics, beneficiaries, even, of late-game officiating debacles, these two rivals stand alone among the rubble of a conference they destroyed. In two weeks time, one of them will be four wins away from capping off one of the greatest upset runs in NBA playoff history with a ring.
History says they don’t stand a chance. But what does history know? Maybe everything, maybe nothing.
On paper, neither looks like a title contender. Consider:
In the 3-point era (beginning with the 1979-80 season), only one eventual NBA Champion (Houston in 1995) entered the playoffs with fewer than 52 regular season wins (or the equivalent, in lockout- and covid-shortened seasons). Champions regarded as surprise winners still cleared this threshold. For example, the 2003-04 Detroit Pistons won 54 games. Neither the Pacers nor the Knicks reached that win total.
In that same time period, only four teams have won the title despite violating Phil Jackson’s 40/20 rule; again, neither Indiana nor New York reached this mark.
Since 2000, 21 out of the 25 champions had a season-long top five net rating; 22 had that season’s MVP or a former MVP on their roster. Every champion had at least one of those two. Indiana and New York? No, neither.
Six criteria have tended to predict eventual title winners: Wins (40/20 rule), margin of victory (top 5 net rating), strong offensive and/or defensive performance (top 10 ratings in both, or top 5 in one and top 20 in the other), MVP talent (past or present), elite shooting (eFG%), and previous deep playoff experience for the team or its leading star(s).[1] Twenty-one out of the 25 champions this century met at least five of these six criteria; all but one met at least four of them. The 2003-04 Detroit Pistons, a true upset title winner, met three.
Indiana meets two. New York, just one.
And yet, at different points this season, each team, in their turn, did look like a title contender. New York stormed out of gates, boasting a top-5 net rating and the league’s #2 offense at the All Star break before slipping in the final months of the season.
The Pacers’ turnaround since the NBA Cup has been almost without precedent. Only one team in the last 20 years, the 2022-23 LA Lakers, was five games under .500 (or worse) through their first 25 and made the conference finals; Denver swept them. For a finalist to have started so poorly would have no precedent whatsoever. And somehow, this still undersells how far Indiana has come: Since the NBA Cup (from December 10 to present), Indiana not only righted the ship; they affirmatively look like a title contender by most historical measures.
The development arc of NBA teams follows a typical maturation path: from infancy to youthful exuberance, rebellion, and adulthood, the underlying nature of the team stays largely the same. Physically and emotionally, they grow, but many of the blemishes and talents are unchanged. The Pacers have been like butterflies, emerging from a cocoon a wholly new and unrecognizable creature, never to return to even a likeness of their early selves again.
How many more ways can I say it? What Pacers fans are watching does not happen. Teams do not spend the first two months of the season in the bottom 10 of the league and then make the playoffs—let alone win a round, or two, not with rosters like this, not to beat 64-win teams like this, they don’t come back down three scores in the final minute of play like this, certainly not twice, and they almost never do all of those things and still have a coin flip’s chance to make the NBA Finals.
And yet, on Wednesday, they do: A ball is tossed, a coin flips. A chance for history.
[1] Net rating data comes from Cleaning the Glass from 2003-04 to present and from NBA stats before that. MVP talent refers to the team having either the current MVP (likely, OKC with Shai this year), or a former MVP, such as all the Cavs teams LeBron led to the Finals against the Warriors. “Experience” is the best player(s) having reached the conference finals previously. For example, Shaq had done so with the Lakers when he helped lead the Heat to the title in 2006; Garnett made the WCF in 2004 before winning the title with Boston in 2008. Bball Index’s Taylor Wyman found shooting to be most predictive for the last ten finalists.
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