OKLAHOMA CITY — There are many ways to describe the NBA Finals.
Some see Oklahoma City vs. Indiana as the small-market Finals. To others, it’s known as the fiscal Finals — a rare championship matchup between non-luxury-tax-paying teams.
On the court, it is a showdown between two of the league’s best guards, Thunder MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Pacers All-Star Tyrese Haliburton.
Yet how these teams reached this point, just four victories from a title, can also be captured in a different way.
“It’s the two hardest-playing teams in the NBA,” a Western Conference coach told NBC News.
Since Jan. 1, the Thunder own the NBA’s best record and the Pacers the second-best, in large part because of how each has blitzed the rest of the league through its frenetic pace and pressure. The Thunder’s harassing defense has become one of the best in playoff history at forcing steals.
Indiana, meanwhile, plays as if driven to push the ball upcourt as fast as possible. It’s common for teams to play fast off opponents’ turnovers and missed shots — but the Pacers have lived up to their name by running hard even after made baskets, and in the process they have created flurries of scoring opportunities that have knocked off the Eastern Conference’s No. 1 (Cleveland) and No. 3 (New York) seeds en route to the team’s first Finals appearance in 25 years.
NBC News spoke with NBA insiders to help analyze the series, which begins with Thursday’s Game 1. All were afforded anonymity in exchange for their candor and analysis, which their teams don’t permit them to voice publicly.
The Pacers are “organized chaos,” said a scout for a Western Conference team. “They suck you into their style of play, where it’s not going to be a lot of defense but they’re just going to race the ball up and down the court, spread you out, shoot 3s, get to the basket, try to turn you over and just get in a rat race type of game. If you can match up with teams that struggle to do that, like New York, then you’re going to have a good chance to win.
“The problem with Oklahoma City is they can play multiple ways. They enjoy playing fast, but they also can slow it down and use Shai in the halfcourt. It’ll be a chess match to see which style of play wins out. Who breaks first and wants to play one way and not the other?”
Oklahoma City, which won 68 regular-season games to earn the West’s top seed, was a heavy favorite to reach the Finals all season, even though it had the second-youngest roster ever to do so. The Thunder ranked No. 1 in defense during both the regular season and the postseason, owing to their phalanx of strong defenders. The challenge begins beyond the 3-point arc, where Lu Dort was successful during Oklahoma City’s 2-0 record against Indiana during the regular season at limiting how often Haliburton touched the ball. The rim, meanwhile, is protected by Isaiah Hartenstein and Chet Holmgren.
“I think OKC is so strong defensively that they can kind of take you away from your first and second options,” an Eastern Conference scout said. “They’ve found a way to identify players that fit the modern style of play, which is being able to defend and shoot, and then you have obviously a transcendent MVP who can create opportunities for others.”
The West scout said some teams construct defenses around a few excellent players, while others try to elevate five otherwise average defenders through a system that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
“But I think with OKC, you’re getting kind of both,” the West scout said. “You’re getting great individual performance while also very well-connected with each other. And it shows in the off-the-court stuff with them, where they like being with each other, like playing for one another.”
Haliburton on Wednesday called the Thunder “historically great on both sides of the ball.”
“This is the best team in the NBA,” he said. “It’s been the best team in the NBA all year. They’re well-coached. They just do everything so well. There’s no shortcuts to beating this team.”
Beating Indiana will require Oklahoma City to do the one thing no one has yet to do consistently — force the Pacers to beat themselves. Indiana’s preferred pace is fast, yet it rarely turns the ball over. In the postseason, Indiana has gone 6-2 on the road by owning the highest road assist-to-turnover ratio, and it has assisted on a playoff-high 65% of its baskets because it plays lineups often with five players capable of hitting 3-pointers, including center Myles Turner, whose ability to shoot “always messes teams up from a matchup perspective,” the West coach said.
That offensive depth makes the Pacers trickier to guard than Oklahoma City’s past playoff opponents; it could focus its defensive efforts to take away Ja Morant of Memphis, Nikola Jokić of Denver and Anthony Edwards of Minnesota. Though Oklahoma City is heavily favored to win the series, Indiana can’t be underestimated, an executive for an Eastern team said.
“They understand how they’re playing, and they’re very stubborn in their approach,” he said. “They kind of grind you with the way they play. They wear you down.”
Both franchises reflect the realities of the modern NBA, in which the league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players has instituted rules aimed at penalizing teams that build expensive rosters by making it harder to draft or make trades when their payrolls cross a certain threshold. Though Oklahoma City has a star in Gilgeous-Alexander and the Pacers claim Haliburton as their own, both have found success in building deep teams that can punish opponents by coming at them in waves of long arms and fresh legs.
“It’s why the day of the aging superstar will be over in the next two years,” the West coach said. “Indiana’s best talent for the majority of their roster is how hard they play. TJ McConnell, Aaron Nesmith, Benedict Mathurin, throw Pascal Siakam in there — they’re just junkyard dogs, and they do it every single night.”
