"I can't say enough about the effort he gave us. That's the type of effort it's going to take for us to win."
It could have been said about any number of Pacers after Wednesday night’s brilliant 116-107 win in Game 3 of the NBA Finals, which gave Indiana a 2-1 series lead over the Oklahoma City Thunder. In the first Finals game that Indiana has hosted in a quarter century, it was all too fitting that the catalyst of the Pacers’ impressive night was no single force. It was legion: The Pacers flipped the script on the series through the combined efforts of unlikely heroes TJ McConnell, Bennedict Mathurin, and Obi Toppin—from the corners, from the shadows, from the angles that no one on the Thunder could anticipate.
That's the type of effort it's going to take for us to win. Appropriate sentiment for any of the Pacers after Game 3, sure, but those words were actually uttered 25 years ago, by longtime Pacer Dale Davis (who was in the building on Wednesday) after a 22-point outburst in the 2000 Eastern Conference finals from Austin Croshere, who damn near became a folk hero during the Pacers’ last Finals run.
Twenty-five years is a long time. Long enough for memories once emblazoned at the core to recede to the back corner of the mind. But it just takes a little spark for it all to come rushing back. Gainbridge Fieldhouse might as well have been a time capsule on Wednesday night. The win felt like a monument to moments and momentary heroes from the last time the Pacers made a run to the Finals. Game 3 was for everyone who remembers the unlikelihood of it all. It was for those who remember Croshere’s explosion against the Knicks, for those who remember 5-foot-11 Travis Best scoring 15 fourth-quarter points four games later.
On Wednesday, those performances were reincarnated on an even grander stage, to even better results. Mathurin had the game of his life—the most efficient and self-possessed 27 points imaginable. Toppin’s irrepressible athleticism created moments of rapture in the fourth quarter on both ends of the floor. And McConnell had an all-time hell-raising performance: 10 points, five assists, and five steals—including three inbound steals that have been his signature move since he entered the league. There is a seven-minute YouTube video from 2021 that catalogs all of McConnell’s career inbound steals up to that point. Easily the most important of his career: the interception with 8:35 remaining in the game, leading to an easy layup to tie the game at 95. He was a glorious piece of shit, a real pain in the ass. “I try to play like I don’t belong and that people don’t think I belong,” McConnell told the writer Katie Heindl last year. “And it just gets me to play harder.” He’s a perfect token of Finals ephemera—the Marcus Smart of J.J. Bareas.
Can a game be won in the second quarter? The Pacers made a compelling case in Game 3: 40 points in 26 possessions, on 60.9 percent shooting, turning the ball over only once. For 12 minutes, the Pacers were caught in their own flashbulb moment—a revelation that they can dictate the state of play through physicality and relentlessness just as much as Oklahoma City can. The Thunder lock teams in a funhouse of mirrors. During ABC’s pregame interview, Tyrese Haliburton talked about how the OKC defense can trick you into seeing things, feeling things that aren’t there. But exposure grants teams new opportunities to adapt. The Thunder play defense on a string, to which the Pacers responded, Why not us, too? Indiana sent countless bodies at Shai Gilgeous-Alexander all game long, cleverly implementing double-teams and taking full advantage of just how well Andrew Nembhard understands SGA’s tendencies. The on-ball pressure was consistent, as was the screen navigation. For just the second time in 19 postseason games, the Thunder had a higher turnover rate than their opponent.
If the Pacers' stunning Game 1 victory felt like biding time and creating the nest for a miracle to hatch, Game 3 felt more like months of accumulated knowledge crystallizing at once. The Pacers were decisive in their actions from the jump—Pascal Siakam, who struggled to get proper touches in Game 2, hunted defenders on advantageous post matchups early and often. Every drive had a secondary and tertiary action following it; the Pacers kept the Thunder in an endless recovery as they made opportune cuts down into the paint and along the baseline. Haliburton, for all the noise, was largely himself: slithering his way into the lane either to kick the ball out or to show off his top-tier touch on floaters.
There was always going to be a fundamental misreading of Haliburton on the Finals stage, where legends are cast in a certain mold. Calls for Haliburton to be more “aggressive” weren’t necessarily wrong, but what aggression ought to look like for Hali is different than what it might look like for a Kobe or a Jordan. Haliburton seldom takes over games with pure volume (though, for what it’s worth, he took the most shots of any Pacer on Wednesday, and the third-most overall behind only SGA and Jalen Williams). When Haliburton takes over, it’s less a violent bolt of lightning and more an atmospheric shift. Everything amplifies, and the Pacers are more accustomed to the change in pressure than the team they’re facing. One of the most heartening things about these Pacers has been their steadfast belief in their specific process. They’re going to play relentlessly, win or lose; they’re going to make you work for every possession. It must be tiring, but more for the opponent, especially when the late-game pressure compounds every thought, judgment, and action. That’s nothing new to these Pacers. They’ve been molded by it for months.
Last season, Bobby Portis created something of a meme-able tagline for the Pacers amid what most of the general basketball public had fairly assumed was a miracle postseason run. “I mean, just quite frankly, they’re front-runners, bro,” Portis said. “Y’all can just tweet that or whatever it is, bro. When the shit going good, they laughing, clapping, all that. When it’s going bad, they not saying nothing.”
In one season, they’ve inverted the narrative completely, practically taking residence in clutch time, swiping victory from the gaping void of defeat time and time again. And in one game, they’ve turned the tables on the Thunder, giving them a taste of their own medicine. For a night, the Thunder were the ones seeing things, both real and imagined. For a night, they succumbed to the swarm. It doesn’t happen without McConnell, without Mathurin, without Toppin, without Siakam. And it doesn’t work without the faith that Haliburton instills.
"This is the kind of team we are,” Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle said after the game. “We need everybody."
