The Indiana Pacers spent several days leading up to the NBA Finals preparing for the Oklahoma City Thunder's ultra-aggressive defense. None of that seemed to matter when they had to experience it for themselves. In the first half of Game 1 on Thursday, the Pacers turned the ball over 20 times.
This was a historically miserable performance when it comes to ball security. It was also extremely out of character for a team that has taken on the identity of its franchise player, Tyrese Haliburton, a fearless but incredibly low-turnover playmaker. But this is what the Thunder do to their opponents, especially in their building. And it's normal to feel some nerves on the game's biggest stage.
"I was a little jittery in the first quarter, getting off the ball quick, flying off ball screens with no real set-up," Haliburton said. "I felt that myself. I'll admit that I felt that way, so I'm sure other guys felt that way."
There is a difference between pushing the pace and getting sped up. Indiana wants to do the former at every opportunity. The latter is what happened in the face of OKC's pressure early on.
"It's never our endgame to, like, turn them over," Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. "It's really about disruption."
Sometimes, their swarming defense forces turnovers; other times, it forces off-rhythm shots and bad decisions. In the first half, Haliburton, Aaron Nesmith and Andrew Nembhard threw bounce passes to Myles Turner and the Thunder picked them all off. Bennedict Mathurin's baseline drive into three OKC defenders wasn't technically a turnover, but it functioned just the same.
"They are a menace defensively," Carlisle said. "We too often took it into crowds, and then you know, other times they just take the ball out of your hands. The level of their defense is crazy good."
At halftime, Indiana trailed 57-45, but it could have been worse. "When you turn the ball over that much, you expect to be down 20-plus," Pacers forward Pascal Siakam said. Fortunately, Oklahoma City had scored only nine points off all of those turnovers and shot just 37% from the field.
"Not the end of the world," Carlisle told his team at halftime. "We're right there."
After that, Indiana calmed down. It cut the deficit in half near the end of the third quarter before Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's last-second 3 pushed it up to nine. A few minutes into the fourth, T.J. McConnell committed what seemed like the most costly turnover of them all, throwing an errant pass on a baseline-out-of-bounds play that led directly to a Thunder dunk. Down 15, the Pacers then put in an entirely new lineup and went on a run, eventually stealing the game in spectacular, but not shocking fashion.
Once a series, Haliburton has made an absurd buzzer-beater in a come-from-behind victory, so how can anyone be shocked anymore?
"There was never a [lack of belief] as a group, honestly," Haliburton said after the 111-110 win. "You have a half like that where you're just throwing the ball to the other team -- we like chaos, we like controlled chaos, but that was just chaos, ugly." Given how poorly the first half had gone, the situation was "not that bad" entering the third quarter. "We never think the game is over, ever. Honestly speaking. Ever. That never creeps in."
In the second half, Indiana turned the ball over only five times. Another way of putting it: Its turnover rate was 10.4%, which means it took care of the ball better than any team did during the regular season. Haliburton attacked the Thunder opportunistically and made an immediately legendary shot, but, crucially, he didn't force anything. Halfway through the fourth quarter, after a pick-and-pop with Turner didn't yield an open shot, look at him pointing at Turner to move the ball to Nembhard, who then set up the big man for a midrange jumper:
Instead of repeatedly trying to create an advantage with Lu Dort draped all over him, Haliburton was OK with getting off the ball and letting his teammates effectively play 4-on-4. Nembhard, who played hero in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals with all-world defense against Jalen Brunson, got an enormous stop against Gilgeous-Alexander late in the fourth quarter, but before that made numerous much-needed plays with the ball in his hands.
In the third quarter, Nembhard converted a driving layup over the 7-foot-1 Chet Holmgren:
Early in the fourth, he manufactured a bully-ball and-1 against Alex Caruso:
Then he created this kickout 3 for Obi Toppin:
With under three minutes left and the Pacers down by nine, Nembhard brought the ball up against Cason Wallace, drew an extra defender, almost turned the ball over, then got the ball to Toppin, who handed it off to Nesmith for a corner 3:
On the next possession, Nembhard got Gilgeous-Alexander switched onto him, then drilled a stepback 3:
Indiana didn't just win a game in which it turned the ball over 25 times. It won a game in which no one on the team scored more than 19 points. This was possible because all of the Pacers' starters scored in double figures, as did Toppin (McConnell had nine, too). This is "what makes 'em good," Thunder forward Jalen Williams said.
For much of the second half, Indiana's offensive approach looked extremely similar to its approach against the Cleveland Cavaliers in the second round. Some stars on Haliburton's level would not be OK with scoring 14 points on 13 shot attempts in a game like this, but that never seems like an issue with him. If he were not willing to get off the ball and let Nembhard initiate, he would likely not have had a chance to hit the kill shot at the end.
"They understand that it's five people out on the floor and you're definitely a more dangerous team when everybody's involved," Williams said.
Caruso said that the Pacers "stayed true to themselves, their brand of basketball," and "threw in a couple big shots down the stretch."
If they found themselves offensively over the course of the game, now the Thunder have to do the same. Even when they were forcing tons of turnovers, they weren't converting nearly enough of them into points.
"We didn't get the kind of juice for that squeeze that we normally do when we turn teams over," Daigneault said.
Oklahoma City has bounced back from a loss like this before. This was "eerily similar," Caruso said, to Game 1 of the second round against the Denver Nuggets.
What's concerning for the Thunder, though, is that their offensive performance was not exactly an anomaly. Entering the Finals, they'd collectively shot 34.2% from 3-point range in the playoffs and made up for a shaky halfcourt offense by dominating the possession game. On Thursday, Oklahoma City scored 106.8 points per 100 possessions. Gilgeous-Alexander put up 38 points (on 14-for-30 shooting) and Dort knocked down five of his nine 3-point attempts, but Williams wasn't particularly efficient and Holmgren wasn't particularly involved.
"I feel like we got some looks that usually go down that just didn't," Gilgeous-Alexander said. "But that's never an excuse. We've won plenty of games despite not shooting as well as we know we can."
The Thunder got into the paint often, but struggled to finish. According to NBA.com, they shot 20 for 37 at the rim and 3 for 17 from floater range.
"We can look at those," Daigneault said. "We gotta finish stronger, we gotta be stronger with the ball or we gotta spray some of those out."
Daigneault said that Game 1 was "a starting point, not an endpoint," and there are "a lot of things we can improve on" before Game 2 on Sunday. Given how the opener played out, the Pacers feel exactly the same way about everything except the result.
"This game, if you look at all the numbers, it's not the recipe to win," Haliburton said. "We can't turn the ball over that much. We gotta do a better job of being in gaps, we gotta do a better job of rebounding, we gotta do a better job all over the floor. But come May and June, it doesn't matter how you get 'em, just get 'em."