THIEVES IN THE NIGHT
The game plan was the obvious one. Just chip away, the Indiana Pacers said, because there was no other option that would have made any sense at that point.
They were down by 15 with 9:42 remaining. They were turning the ball over about once every three possessions, couldn’t stop Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and had the Oklahoma City crowd in a deafening fury.
“We just said, ‘Hey, let’s just keep chipping away at the rock,‘” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “Got to keep pounding the rock and just chip away and hang in.”
With 0.3 seconds left, there was no more rock left to pound.
Not for Game 1, anyway.
Tyrese Haliburton scored with that much time left and the Pacers stunned the Oklahoma City Thunder, 111-110, in the opener of this year’s NBA Finals on Thursday night.
A look inside the comeback:
The Pacers outscored the Thunder 32-16 in that final 9:42, with only six players getting used for those final minutes and all of them scoring.
Obi Toppin took two shots. Both were three-pointers. Both connected.
Myles Turner and Andrew Nembhard each scored eight points to lead Indiana during the flurry. Aaron Nesmith led the Pacers with four rebounds in that stretch. And Haliburton provided the exclamation point with the jumper at the end.
“I’ve worked my entire life to get to this stage, so there’s no holding back,” Turner said.
The Thunder shot 4-for-16 in that closing stretch. Gilgeous-Alexander was 2-for-4; everyone else on the Thunder combined to shoot 2-for-12. The MVP had 10 points; everyone else on the Thunder combined for six.
The reasons for all that?
“A little bit of everything,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “They made some plays. On some of those plays they made some shots. They got a couple that you wish you’d get back. We had bonus fouls, which were costly. Then offensively, we didn’t move the scoreboard as well as we could have. So you just add all that up and that’s how you get that sort of comeback.”
There was no choke sign from Haliburton, no celebratory dance, just a bunch of hugs with teammates and a big hug with his father John Haliburton in the hallway near the Pacers’ locker room afterward.
The Pacers, Carlisle said, haven’t engaged in a ton of raucous postgame victory laps during this playoff run.
“This is going to be a long journey and a lot going on,” Carlisle said. “So, we’re just going to have to keep our eye on the ball and keep focusing on one another.”
