Oklahoma City are the heavy favorites—and for good reason. But the offense-vs.-defense stylistic clash, persistent pests on both sides, and a crop of potential first-time champions ensures the Finals will be far from boring.
ByMatthew Roberson
June 5, 2025
Image may contain Shai GilgeousAlexander Moses Sakyi Pascal Siakam Alexander Caruso T. J. McConnell People and Person
Photographs: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte
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Trying to score on the Oklahoma City Thunder’s defense can be like trying to ram a feather through a brick wall. Trying to contain the Indiana Pacers’ offense is similar to catching a gust of wind with an old sock. Both can border on impossible, and you need the right personnel to achieve either dream, which is what will make the 2025 NBA Finals such an alluring watch.
Please, for the love of basketball, spare us all your thoughts about the geographic locations of each team somehow being a detriment. While it is true that a coterie of expensive suits in Midtown Manhattan wanted, for rating purposes, something a little glitzier than Oklahoma City-Indianapolis—the 20th and 16th most-populous cities in the US—you, dear reader, are not the National Basketball Association. You are a person. And if you’re a fan of pedal-to-the-metal hoops, you should be excited about this series.
Oklahoma City won both matchups in this year's regular season.Zach Beeker/Getty Images
In boxing, they say that styles make fights. If these upcoming games were taking place in the ring, the canvas would resemble a Jackson Pollock painting. Among teams who have played at least 10 games this postseason, the Thunder and Pacers are the two who play at the fastest pace. These teams—and, blessedly, their young legs—love to run, which makes for some of the most entertaining basketball there is. The antidote to the attention span crisis is an OKC-Indy matchup, because they won’t leave any time to take your eyes off the screen.
If there is any time during the Finals to quickly check your phone or, I don’t know, engage with your loved ones, it’ll be when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is at the free throw line. Because believe me, he will be a frequent attendee. SGA—the principal player in the series, and maybe, at least in the vacuum of this particular season, the entire league—has averaged 9.2 foul shots per game during the Thunder’s playoff run. The measured take is that in order to be the type of heavyweight he wants to be, Gilgeous-Alexander has to draw these whistles. His style of play utilizes an endless supply of yo-yoing drives to the rim, the type that gets a player scratched and clawed with so much regularity that you could argue a foul happens more often than not. It’s just on the referee to call them.
The extremist, most-irritating-guy-at-the-bar take is that Shai is an indefensible foul baiter and free throw merchant who should be ashamed of his every dribble. These are all things loudly crowed by people who are willingly missing the forest for the trees. Getting to the line is a necessary part of any MVP’s game, and just because he gets a handful of ticky tack fouls every quarter doesn’t mean that Gilgeous-Alexander is a grifter who’s in bed with the officials. It means he understands his role—which, at the moment, is to be the brightest player on the NBA’s brightest stage. On a wider level, the free throw conversation is the odds-on favorite to be the dominant topic of these Finals. It’s nice to have a monocultural sports thing! “Does Shai need to kick his flopping addiction?” is something you can discuss with a rando at the grocery store, your grandparents, or your friend’s kid in equal aptitude. That’s what these tentpole sporting events are all about, after all: grasping onto that increasingly fleeting feeling that we’re all watching the same thing and analyzing it in similar ways.
Speaking of which, get ready to hear all about the Pacers’ three-point shooting, especially if they go cold in Oklahoma and drop the first two games, or catch a hot streak and steal one of them. Indiana owns the best three-point percentage and offensive rating of any team that logged at least 10 playoff games, and every member of their starting lineup is more than qualified from deep. Sweet shooting—particularly the way the Pacers do it, which is often the product of swinging ball movement that gets someone wide open—is one of the more pleasurable things to watch on a basketball court. Don’t expect Aaron Nesmith to connect on 53% of his threes like he did in the Eastern Conference Finals against the Knicks. But that barrage, plus Conference Final MVP Pascal Siakam knocking in half of his attempts, and mustachioed role player Ben Sheppard draining 55%, does prove that Indiana is capable of snapping the nets. Lightning can strike twice, and when it does, it’s a powerful way to counteract the Thunder. (By the way, Tyrese Haliburton shot uncharacteristically poorly against New York. Some positive regression to the mean is almost surely coming his way.)
So, we’ve got green, energetic, fresh faces going at it for a championship—prepare yourself for the first firmly Gen Z Finals MVP, by the way—but we’ve also got some guys who’ve been around the block. The oldest player on the Thunder, a team so complete that they can’t possibly be this young, is 31-year-old icon Alex Caruso. He is, without question, one of the more annoying players in the NBA. What I mean by that is that playing against Alex Caruso looks about as enjoyable as wrestling in a pit of quicksand. With his pestilent defense and non-stop freneticism, Caruso shadows opposing ballhandlers better than almost anyone. While the task of guarding Haliburton will mostly fall to fellow defensive stopper Luguentz Dort, there will undoubtedly be some instances where Caruso is summoned off the bench with the sole directive of pissing Haliburton off.
Like Caruso, the Pacers have a player in their second unit who I imagine would be flattered by the “annoying” label. T.J. McConnell—the lazy fan would call him a gym rat, a scrappy veteran, or a shameless instigator; the educated ball knower would call him Edie Falco’s biggest opp—is playing in his first NBA Finals after 10 full years of trying. Undrafted like Caruso, and about four inches shorter, McConnell has never met a challenge he didn’t relish. Remember in the 2015 Finals, when little guy legend Matthew Dellavedova had to be hospitalized for severe cramping, needing an IV after chasing Steph Curry around? If McConnell senses a chance to disrupt Gilgeous-Alexander all the way to a monumental upset, don’t be surprised if the Pacers install a drip bag for him right there on the bench.
Caruso (left) and McConnell (right), your NBA Finals grit lords.Zach Beeker/Getty Images
We could go on and on about the secondary and tertiary elements that will make this series compelling for both casuals and basketball nerds alike. The fact that the league will crown its seventh different champion in the last seven years is very cool in its own right, as is the chance for both franchises to earn their first ring. (I don’t care what the NBA’s official stance on this is, the Seattle SuperSonics’ 1979 championship does not count for Oklahoma City.) A win for the Thunder will validate their player development prowess. Jalen Williams—a first-time All-Star and extremely ripe second banana to Gilgeous-Alexander—is all of 24 years old. Avid reader Chet Holmgren is 23. Rotation players Jaylin Williams and Cason Wallace are 22 and 21, respectively. Oklahoma City is the only organization all four of them have ever known, and bringing home a title this soon would leave no doubt as to which team is getting the most out of its puppies.
In the other corner, watching Myles Turner raise a banner after a decade of steady, quietly productive grinding in Indiana would be truly touching. The Pacers can’t claim the same style of draft-picks-to-diamonds construction that got Oklahoma City to the top, but their front office’s extremely shrewd trades for Haliburton, Siakam, and Nesmith also deserve a whole acre of flowers. The head coaches’ 25-year age gap (Indiana’s Rick Carlisle, boomer, bald; Oklahoma City’s Mark Daigneault, millennial, coiffed) makes for a fun aesthetic wrinkle as well. And we haven’t even talked about the omnipresent “Yes ‘Cers” shirts!
The biggest fit in Indiana is a free goldenrod T-shirt.Ron Hoskins/Getty Images
Should you feel inclined to bet on this series—and, I say this grimly, statistically speaking I know a lot of you will—I’d advise you to pick OKC ten out of ten times. They were the best team in the regular season, have remained the best team in the playoffs, and have the luxury of the best player in the Finals being on their roster. It’s likely that they’ll make quick work of the Pacers, but that shouldn’t damage the entertainment value of each individual contest. Either way, when all is said and done, a city in what many would consider a flyover state will be hosting its first NBA championship parade. You can complain about that city not being in a large enough media market to truly stimulate the sports economy (like a mark), or you can sit back and watch a bunch of high-level games that will conceivably end in the 120s, ushering in a new tide of basketball supremacy.
Call it whatever you want—just don’t call it boring.