It has been 40 days since I asked if this year’s NBA playoffs were already the weirdest we had ever seen. Since then, the Indiana Pacers had approximately 26 more improbable comebacks and the runaway best regular season team has been taken to game 7 — twice.
Okay maybe not quite that many comebacks, but the Pacers’ run through the Eastern Conference, and now in hanging in there against the Thunder, has involved so much unlikely and unprecedented stuff that it seems safe to make Weirdest Ever an official title. The comeback in game 1 of the conference finals against the Knicks essentially broke ESPN’s win probability calculator; they came into the Finals as one of the bigger betting underdogs in recent memory, and promptly ran out to 1-0 and 2-1 leads in the series before OKC seemed to figure things out. Only, no they didn’t, because game 6 was an absolute laugher, with the Pacers holding 30-point leads on their way to an easy victory over the most fearsome defense the league has seen in a while.
The Pacers being here at all is remarkable, given the NBA’s history. Before the season started, Basketball Reference had their championship odds at 66-1 — 17th highest in a league with 30 teams. That’s worse odds than other recent Finals gate-crashers, like the Mavericks last year, the Heat against both the Nuggets and the Lakers, or anyone else dating back decades.
Meanwhile, the Thunder, who very much do fit the mold of a traditional Finals team — second-best pre-season odds to the Celtics, 68 regular season wins, stifling defense and the metronomic scoring of the league’s MVP — have had two dominant postseason series against Memphis (one of the sweepiest sweeps that ever swept) and Minnesota (a 4-1 victory that never felt remotely close) but also two nail-biters. One could explain away the Denver seven-gamer by pointing at Nikola Jokić, but who do you point toward on Indiana? An injured Tyrese Haliburton?
The Finals have seen those Pacers win a game that they led for a grand total of 0.3 seconds, and the Thunder had a 96.1 percent chance of winning, per ESPN, with under three minutes remaining. Then there’s the game that the Thunder somehow won in spite of making an appalling three 3-pointers; they only even shot 16 of them, which is half as many as the regular season per-game average for the dead-last Nuggets and 23 fewer than their own average.
It’s all just a bizarro version of what we understand as Normal NBA Stuff. And so it had to come down to one more game 7, the 20th such game in Finals history. Home teams are 15-4 in those games; but history doesn’t seem to live here anymore.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
