Thunder coach made no excuses for young team's dreadful Game 6 effort
The Oklahoma City Thunder are on the brink of completing one of the best seasons the NBA has ever seen with the first championship in franchise history. But despite their tremendous accomplishments to this point of the 2025 NBA Finals, the Thunder still show us their youth and glaring inexperience now and then. That much was clear in a blowout 108-91 Game 6 loss to the Indiana Pacers that honestly wasn't even as close as the final score appears.
After a competitive first quarter, the wheels came all the way off for the Thunder. They wound up with 21 turnovers as a team while finishing with just 14 assists (they only had four assists over 30 minutes into the game!). Reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had just 21 points and contributed eight of those turnovers on his own. His running mate, Jalen Williams, got viciously dunked on by Pascal Siakam during the key sequence of the night and was kind of a non-factor otherwise. Meanwhile, T.J. McConnell was creating havoc all over the place.
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Essentially, every mistake the Thunder made in the halfcourt was immediately punished by a Pacers squad that was ready to pounce. I mean, when guys like Ben Sheppard are making buzzer-beating 3-pointers off of crazy bounces, you know it's not your night:
In other words, whatever possibly could go wrong for the Thunder inevitably and eventually did. They looked every part of a team that knew it could win the NBA title by winning Thursday night and, at a certain point, was rattled by that reality.
The Thunder are not the first team to experience those types of jitters with the Larry O'Brien Trophy hanging in the balance, and they definitely won't be the last. That's just how championship-caliber basketball works sometimes.
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In his postgame press conference, Thunder coach Mark Daigneault was asked about his team's inexperience with an NBA Finals closeout game being put on full display. Rather appropriately, Daigneault refused to make any such excuses for his players while giving full credit to the Pacers for sending this epic series to Game 7:
Of course, these Thunder have proven to be one of the more precocious NBA teams we've ever seen. Every setback or failure they've experienced to this point has seemingly been a worthwhile learning experience. They usually don't make the same mistake twice, which is a credit to their resilience and overall team discipline. It's arguably the biggest reason they've gotten this far.
Sunday night's Game 7, with the NBA championship now on the line for both squads, will be the toughest test Daigneault's Thunder have ever faced. Full stop. The good news? They have a chance at redemption after getting the "bad closeout Finals game" out of their system.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Thunder's Mark Daigneault pulled no punches about pitiful Game 6
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