The Oklahoma City Thunder are NBA champions after defeating the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of the Finals on Sunday. It’s a historic achievement for the Thunder and a heart-shattering outcome for the Pacers, who lost Tyrese Haliburton for the game and likely next season when the star point guard tore his Achilles five minutes into the first quarter. All in, it’ll be a Finals the NBA will remember for a long time.
Throughout the postseason, we have detailed the lessons learned by each team eliminated over the course of the playoffs. It seems fitting to do so one last time for the final two teams standing. Here are the lessons learned by the Thunder and Pacers that they can take into the offseason as they look forward to next season.
Oklahoma City Thunder It worked!
This is the most important lesson the Thunder take away from their championship season—. All of it. Every move they made or did not make in the last seven years proved to be the right one. Not every choice worked out as intended, or panned out the way decision-makers were hoping, but it all led them right here.
Sam Presti’s blockbuster trades to send Paul George and Russell Westbrook out of town in 2019 worked. It kicked off the current era of Thunder basketball that was just minted as a championship-caliber success. It brought Shai Gilgeous-Alexander into the fold, a truckload of draft picks and molded the landscape so OKC could lose for a few years to acquire more talent. Then from 2021 to ’23, the Thunder made the right decision at the draft podium over and over again; they picked Josh Giddey in ’21, Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams in ’22, then Cason Wallace in ’23. Those players all had their question marks, but the Thunder trusted their scouting—and, clearly, were right.
Just as important as making those selections was holding onto them. The Thunder have loomed in trade discussions for every decent player to hit the market since the SGA trade, thanks to the sheer number of picks at their disposal. Whether it’s the constant Giannis Antetokounmpo rumors or just a 3-and-D swingman becoming available, OKC was regularly pegged as a possible landing spot because the franchise has the ability to outbid everybody should they desire it. Obviously, they didn’t end up making any significant move, instead holding to the firm belief that this Thunder core could compete for titles if given the opportunity to grow. That they did.
The one big trade OKC make, of course, worked out just fine. It capitalized on the success of the scouting department to develop and then flip Giddey for Alex Caruso, a winning player if there ever was one. He wound up pivotal to the Thunder’s championship this postseason, and it’s a real question if OKC gets past the Denver Nuggets in the second round without his relentlessly physical defending of Nikola Jokić—a role so important his pair of 20-point games in the actual Finals feels like an afterthought comparatively.
That situation serves as a microcosm of the Thunder’s operating procedure that led to these results—the patience required to see things through, while still seizing on the right opportunity at just the right time. Many NBA franchises have watched championship-caliber cores crash and burn because they cannot find that right balance. Heck, the Thunder themselves had to watch that unfold as James Harden, then Kevin Durant, then Westbrook all departed following the 2012 NBA Finals run.
In a lot of ways, winning a title is about validation—the most concrete confirmation possible that the front office and coaches were and all their decisions helped reach the mountaintop. It’s not the driving force to win, but it is a very tangible aftereffect of earning a ring. After all the questions about Presti’s resume and the team’s inertia as they slowly built up a championship core within the building, that should feel very good for OKC.
But there’s still room to improve
The Thunder do not fit the typical box of an NBA champion who was better at everything than their opponent. The 2024 Boston Celtics are a solid archetype in that regard—between their perimeter and interior defense, shooting and slashing, there wasn’t a single area on the court where they were outmatched by their opponents nearly every single night. OKC was not the same. Instead, the newly minted champs were defensively than anybody else they won nearly all their games, to put it simply. In a few areas, they were decidedly average, particularly in the shooting realm.
That obviously doesn’t matter now. The Thunder won! It sounds nitpicky to complain about their offense, and it is to an extent. But in looking at how OKC can build off its championship season, shooting is the one area of obvious improvement, and it’s frightening to consider how much better the Thunder can be if they catch up to the rest of the league in that department.
During the playoffs, the Thunder ranked 13th of 16 teams in three-point shooting percentage, hitting only 33.8% of their tries from deep. They ranked eighth in shots attempted from beyond the arc and 11th in shots made from that area. OKC shot 34.5% from three in the Finals and averaged two fewer made threes per game than the Pacers—and still won.
This isn’t a call for the Thunder to do their best Celtics impression. They, obviously, are more than good enough to compensate for a lack of outside shooting with their various other dominant traits. But think about it this way: Lu Dort led the team by far with 2.1 three-pointers made in the playoffs. There were 81 players in the NBA who averaged at least that number throughout the regular season. Eighty-one! If Presti uses some of his treasure trove of assets to land one or two more playoff-ready shooters, the Thunder could make living up to the dynasty talk currently happening around the league look very easy indeed.
Indiana Pacers There can be no pain greater than this
What can you even say? The Pacers made one of the unlikeliest NBA Finals runs in recent history, took a statistical juggernaut of a Thunder team to Game 7, looked very ready for the moment … and then tragedy strikes. Haliburton goes down with a torn Achilles. Fans cannot look away as the broadcast shows slow-motion replays over and over of the Pacers’ star point guard going down with perhaps the worst injury possible in the franchise’s biggest game ever. The bright light of hope, of seeing Indiana bring home a championship, was immediately extinguished.
There’s nothing that can be said that will make anyone in Indianapolis feel better about this. But perhaps some solace can be found in the idea that it cannot possibly get any worse.
I mean, talk about the worst-case scenario. Coming within 48 minutes of a title only for the roster’s superstar leader to go down with an injury so serious it not only knocked him out of Game 7 but will likely keep him sidelined through the next season? For the players to rally despite that and take a one-point lead into halftime, only to self-destruct in the second half as the pressure weighed? And then to make one final push late in the fourth only to come up short one last time? Sports can’t be more cruel than that.
So hold strong, Pacers fans. There’s nothing basketball can take from you now that will hurt more than these last few days.
The future remains bright
O.K., we’ve established the Pacers have gone through a pain unlike any other. Now it’s time to turn the optimism meter up for the first time since Sunday afternoon—the future is still quite bright in Indiana.
Haliburton’s injury has cast a shadow over the next few years, to be sure, but that has also masked how ahead of schedule this postseason run was for most of the Pacers’ rotation. Pascal Siakam is obviously a veteran and has done this before, but the other key contributors are just getting started relative to their career arcs. Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith are both only 25 years old. Ben Sheppard is about to turn 24 and Bennedict Mathurin just turned 23. Even Myles Turner, the longest-tenured member of the team, is only 29. Siakam and T.J. McConnell are long in the tooth by comparison at 31 and 33, respectively, but even that’s still pretty young in NBA terms. That’s not even to mention Haliburton himself, clocking in at 25 years old.
A team with that kind of youth isn’t often seen making serious NBA title runs, and when they do they usually feature a top-five player in the NBA. The Thunder are such a team. But Indy came within one game of a title with a largely inexperienced group and no perennial MVP candidate. Growth is not linear in this league, but the Pacers should feel very optimistic about the years to come even before any possible additions via the draft, trade or free agency.
Haliburton’s heartbreaking injury even provides a possible opportunity. Without him directing the offense other Pacers players are going to have to step up, which is a great chance to develop playoff-ready skills. Siakam is a known quantity at this point, but can Nembhard become a true pick-and-roll maestro instead of an off-and-on scorer? Mathurin, in particular, seems like he has a golden chance to develop into a more well-rounded offensive threat without Haliburton out there to make life easy. Is there a chance Nesmith can become more than a spot-up shooter? These are questions the Pacers may not have gotten answers to if not for the gaping hole Haliburton’s injury opens up in the offense. Everyone would still much rather have him out there, but Indiana may prove grateful for the chance to develop the secondary creators down the line in the postseason.
Next year may be shot for the Pacers with Haliburton almost definitely missing the whole season. But the long-term outlook is bright as it can be given those circumstances.
