9 hours ago
Why this Thunder title has the inspiration and path for Tyrese Haliburton and the Pacers
This Pacers 2025 playoff run can be remembered two ways: There's the before Haliburton Achilles injury and after
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on Tyrese Haliburton: 'My heart dropped for him. I couldn't imagine playing the biggest game of my life and something like that happening'
This could be a missed window in a chaotic Eastern Conference playoff season, a 'what if?' for all of time
OKLAHOMA CITY – It's so hard to look at, that hope and upside and fury and pain crashing to the floor as Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton screamed into it and everyone in Indiana collectively wondered, 'Why us? Why now?'
Nobody can blame you if you just want to look away.
But there's hope and sustainability on this court at Paycom Center, where the Thunder just dropped confetti from the skies and celebrated its first NBA championship. It's there if you want to see it, and in the aftermath of Haliburton clanking one crutch after another to leave this place and head into the unknown, maybe that's where serenity lies.
It's at least worth dreaming on, even if just to chase away the nightmare.
This Pacers 2025 playoff run can be remembered two ways: There's the before Haliburton Achilles injury and after. One place suspends disbelief and makes the impossible real, with game-winning shots and historic comebacks in all four playoff series. The other is dark and confusing, like the cement hallway of an arena, away from where a city in the middle of the country is trying to have the party of a lifetime.
Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
But it's in this hallway between the Thunder's celebratory press conferences and the dim scene in the Pacers locker room where it all connects. It hurts and inspires here.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is walking off a podium where he just put into words one of the greatest guard seasons ever, where he followed up a league MVP with a Finals MVP for the first time since LeBron James did it 12 years ago. And his first step as a champion, with that MVP trophy in his arms, is to find the Pacers locker room.
He leads a parade of camera men and hangers-on in and spends less than a minute. There's Haliburton's locker, in the back left corner, with the Pacers letterman jacket and black T-Shirt and blue jeans he wore to the game hanging up and a black camera sitting at the bottom to capture a moment that would end in victory or agony but doesn't have him. Moments later, he'd hobble down that same hallway on crutches, wearing the things that are more feasible when you can hardly walk.
Gilgeous-Alexander didn't get the chance to say something to the All-Star point guard who dueled him for seven games and pushed this 68-win team to the brink for seven games. And so he ducks back out, grabs the MVP trophy and continues a victory march that is happy but a little subdued.
Moments before, he was at that podium reflecting on this seminal moment, and his thoughts were with Haliburton.
'My heart dropped for him,' Gilgeous-Alexander said. 'I couldn't imagine playing the biggest game of my life and something like that happening.
'It's not fair. But competition isn't fair sometimes.'
Game 7 in Oklahoma City featured a coronation of sorts for what could be a budding dynasty for one of the youngest championship teams ever. It also had a melancholy feel, so much so that the Thunder crowd felt stunned for minutes after Haliburton hobbled through that tunnel and left their post-game locker-room as muted as they come amiss the passing bottles of beer, as the Athletic's Marcus Thompson II reported from the scene.
'First, I want to say I hope Tyrese is okay. I haven't looked at my phone,' Jalen Williams said in his first comments next to the Larry O'Brien Trophy. 'Obviously, that changes the outcome of the game a little bit, changes the dynamic of the game.'
These Thunder players are too young to have felt these things, but the franchise's rise to this moment has created cosmic empathy for the spot the Pacers are in.
Indiana arrived on this stage early, as the No. 4 seed in an Eastern Conference where either the reigning champion Celtics and 64-win Cavaliers were supposed to be in this duel. When it wound up being the Pacers, a favorite like the Thunder might have felt like it had a moment to breathe but never did after Indiana stole Game 1 on this court with a ferocious comeback, capped off by Haliburton's 21-foot jump shot with 0.3 seconds left.
These Pacers pushed the series to seven games, but in the aftermath of a Finals loss, it felt a lot like that other Western Conference championship banner the Thunder have hanging here from 2011-2012, when they lost to James and the Heat in four games.
That was a squad with Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden all under the age of 25.
Haliburton turned 25 in February.
There's a way to see this Pacers franchise in two lights, the same as with this playoff run. You could see a team with a 25-year-old point guard, a veteran playoff coach in Rick Carlisle and a front office led by Kevin Pritchard that had the willingness to blow up the path to reinvent and create this team that went 15-8 in this year's postseason.
They were playing with house money in a conference seemingly run by the Celtics and Cavaliers. And, in light of Jayson Tatum's Achilles tear and taking down those Cavs in five games, the future felt as bright as ever.
You could also see a team that got as close as the Pacers ever have to an NBA title, fell short and now will face a lengthy and uncertain recovery for Haliburton that will end around when Tatum returns.
Is it an opportunity gained or an opportunity squandered?
Those same questions wrestled in these Thunder for a decade and a half until Sunday night. After all, they once had Durant, Westbrook and Harden all under the age of 25, only to not win a title and lose them all, only to trudge forward as an NBA team in 'flyover country.'
Those Thunder used to stare at a world built around 'Big Three' constructs and wonder what a new path forward was. They, too, got bold like Pritchard did and reinvented themselves with a trade for a foundational guard in Gilgeous-Alexander, only to build their own version of a 'Big Three' in him, Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren.
But the Pacers don't have to reinvent. They have Haliburton under contract through 2028-2029, and he loves being the face of a franchise that wants him, unlike the Kings franchise that drafted him.
It's a missed opportunity, to be sure. Indiana faces questions about whether to retain Myles Turner, who had a dreadful Finals; and about TJ McConnell's longevity after a tremendous playoff run at age 33. Letting a year of Haliburton's recovery pass can feel like ages in a league where Giannis Antetokounmpo could get traded to another contender and for a Midwestern franchise that will likely only dip into the luxury tax in the right moments.
The trickiest thought exercise in pro sports is to think that one near miss is the start of many more, as the Thunder learned with Durant, Westbrook and Harden.
But Oklahoma City provides a model, too, in the way it didn't have to age with ownership, leadership and the foresight that comes with that. Their young version of the 'Big Three' didn't find glory. But thanks to an changing collective bargaining agreement, the league has since evolved out of those constructs to where almost every champion of late is organically built, from this year's Thunder to last year's Celtics to the 2023 Nuggets to the 2022 Bucks.
This is a league where the prime free agents and top trade targets used to ignore the teams in the middle of the country. But that's how Haliburton and Pascal Siakam got here. And it's how the Pacers will plunge forward, too.
Nobody knows quite how this Pacers franchise will age. This could be a missed window in a chaotic Eastern Conference playoff season, a 'what if?' for all of time.
But a 'what if?' can lay the groundwork for a champion sometimes, as the Thunder have shown. Stable leadership that doesn't age on the court the way players do can pay dividends not seen when those bodies crash to the hardwood.
Haliburton is 25. Siakam is 31, but he too found new life here, is signed for three more seasons and continued to show in this series that he is built to be a Robin to a Batman on a title team, so long as that Batman is there.
It stings that the 2025-2026 season is so up in the air. The landscape of the Eastern Conference is impossible to predict beyond that.
But Indiana has a star who seems intent on staying whose aura is so strong it lived in those Thunder celebrations of a first title.
And so as Haliburton hobbled out of the arena on crutches on Sunday night, the question could be about the opportunity he's leaving or what he'll take forward into the next one.
That story has yet to be written.
