Thunder-Pacers is the smallest market NBA Finals matchup in modern history. So what?
Adam Silver doesn’t seem worried. Neither do league executives. Why would they be? The media rights deals are signed, sealed, and delivered. The NBA could run Jazz–Hornets on QVC and still collect every last dollar of its impending deals with NBC and Amazon.
But market size still matters, at least in how we talk about these games.
Sports media, generally speaking, has always filtered the NBA through a New York and Los Angeles lens. Oklahoma City mayor David Holt made that point this week, pushing back on the idea that the Thunder are somehow punching above their weight.
“There are 19,500 cities, towns and villages in America, and we’re bigger than all but 19 of them,” Holt said via the Sports Business Journal. “OK? You think we’re a small market? Well, there’s 19,480 cities who think we’re a big market. Ninety percent of Americans live in a smaller place than Oklahoma City. They’re not looking at this and going, ‘You know what — that city’s not big enough for me to care.’ That’s a New York media-centric narrative. We’re the big city to most Americans.”
He’s not wrong.
Indianapolis is a big city to most Americans, too. And that idea isn’t new to OKC’s opponent in the 2025 NBA Finals, either. The Pacers have also dealt with preconceived notions — and a lack of media coverage — because of the name on the front of their jerseys. They’re “just a small market,” or, as ESPN’s Tim Legler was told by network execs, not “sexy enough” to cover intensely. It all comes down to where they’re from.
The Los Angeles or New York Pacers would be getting plenty of coverage. The kind Scott Van Pelt says the national media missed.
But that’s what you’re up against when you’re a good team in the wrong zip code.
That’s what Mayor Holt is really getting at.
He’s calling out the way national sports media views cities like Oklahoma City through a narrow, coastal lens. Sure, by traditional TV ratings or advertising markets, OKC might be smaller than New York or Los Angeles. But that misses the bigger picture, which is that most Americans live in places smaller than OKC and see it as a major city.
At the same time, there’s no denying that, in NBA terms, these are objectively small markets. As Awful Announcing’s Ben Axelrod noted, the combined market size of the Pacers and Thunder makes this the smallest-market NBA Finals matchup in modern history.
Both perspectives matter. Market size is a real factor in how the league and media operate, but it doesn’t fully capture the cultural and community importance these cities hold or the quality of basketball they bring to the Finals.