Thunder vs. Pacers preview, injury news, what to know

How will the Indiana Pacers defend MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander?

In Game 6, the Pacers forced SGA into one of his worst games of the postseason, holding him to only 21 points while forcing 8 turnovers.

Indiana stopped sending a full-court press at Gilgeous-Alexander, taking away some of his driving lanes, while also double-teaming him more aggressively in the halfcourt.

How successfully the Pacers defend the MVP will go a long way in determining who wins Game 7.

Here are some quotes from the players immediately after Game 6:

“One game for everything you ever dreamed of,” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said of Game 7 on Sunday. “If you win it, you get everything. If you lose it, you get nothing. It’s that simple.”

“It’s so, so, exciting. As a basketball fan, there’s nothing like a Game 7,” Tyrese Haliburton said. “There’s nothing like a Game 7 in the NBA Finals. Dreamed of being in this situation my whole life. So, to be here is really exciting.”

“You could ask every team in the NBA. Every team would take this opportunity to take this chance,” Chet Holmgren added. “We’re no different. It’s on us to go out there and make the most of it.”

“There’s not a lot of Game 7s that happen. So, to have this opportunity to play in a Game 7 with this team is a blessing and wouldn’t want to do it with any other team,” Obi Toppin said.

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Talking with officials from the teams and within the league before tipoff, there is a general consensus: Everyone is carefully watching how relaxed the Thunder — the second-youngest team ever to make the Finals, and which cruised through the regular season only to be pushed to the limit by Indiana — come out and play tonight.

Oklahoma City has Game 7 experience during these playoffs already, having advanced out of the second round by beating Denver on their home court, but few expected this particular series to go this long.

There’s a phrase that’s ubiquitous in Indiana. You see it on chalkboard signs outside of bars. You hear it from fans, coaches and players. It was emblazoned on T-shirts at Game 3 of the NBA Finals. It’s even the slogan for the state’s basketball Hall of Fame.

In 49 other states, it’s just basketball. But this is Indiana.

It was in 1925, after all, that the inventor of basketball, James Naismith, watched a state high school tournament and declared Indiana “the center of the sport.”

Now, 100 years later, between a stunning Indiana Pacers run to the finals and the exploding popularity of the Indiana Fever, Naismith’s observation has never been more true.

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At 4-foot-11, Kristin Chenoweth is still making it to the NBA Finals.

The award-winning actress, singer, Oklahoma native, Oklahoma Hall of Fame inductee and unabashed Thunder fan is performing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before Game 7, the NBA announced.

This is the 20th Game 7 of an NBA Finals in league history, and only four road teams have ever won. Indiana is trying to join these teams among the visitors who have pulled it off:

1969: Boston Celtics over Los Angeles Lakers

1974: Boston Celtics over Milwaukee Bucks

1978: Washington Bullets over Seattle SuperSonics

2016: Cleveland Cavaliers over Golden State Warriors

League-mandated pregame press conferences with coaches don’t typically elicit much interesting material — especially after an NBA Finals that has stretched nearly three weeks.

Yet Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle appeared furious before tipoff of Game 7 when he ignored his opening question and instead said that “all I’m thinking about right now” was a video he had seen today that showed buses in Oklahoma City’s colors with “CHAMPIONS” painted along the side. Stern-faced and short with his answers, Carlisle was not happy with Oklahoma City’s preparations for a championship parade.

“I just saw a video that’s probably going to go viral,” Carlisle said, “of some buses, open-top buses, presumably for the parade that are already painted with them as champions. That’s all I’m thinking about right now.”

Both of these teams are built on winning the possession game: forcing turnovers, not turning the ball over themselves, securing some offensive rebounds, scoring easy buckets in transition, and simply creating more scoring opportunities than their opponent.

Which team has executed that has swung from game to game, but in Game 6 it was clearly Indiana.

“I think last game, we didn’t play our brand of basketball and we didn’t play our brand of defense and we just let them be comfortable,” Isaiah Hartenstein said of the Thunder. “So I think it’s a mix of things. They do a great job of never changing the way they play. So they get out, they run. And it’s our job to just get back to playing our style of defense and going from there.”

Turnovers and bench points will be bellwethers in Game 7, as they have been throughout the series.

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Cities have rallied behind their teams since sports began, yet in Oklahoma City, what is atypical is the degree to which that relationship is not one-sided. Fans, city officials and the team itself are intertwined more closely than perhaps any other NBA market. Fans show up for the Thunder in uncommon ways — during late nights at the airport, yes, but also at the ballot box, where a 2023 measure to use public money to help fund a new Thunder arena scheduled to open in 2028 passed with 71% of the vote.

The team has returned the embrace.

Sam Presti, the team’s top basketball executive since 2007, “may be the only GM in America who texts with the mayor,” the mayor himself, David Holt, said with a laugh in his office, which is decorated with a framed Thunder jersey. It hangs to the left of the desk where, this week, Holt signed an agreement that will keep the team in Oklahoma City through 2053 and could extend up to 15 additional years.

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It will be the 20th Game 7 in NBA Finals history. Home teams have gone 15-4 to this point — but a road team won the most recent one of these showdowns, when Cleveland topped Golden State in 2016.

Tyrese Haliburton’s strained left calf wasn’t much of an issue in Game 6. That doesn’t mean it should be ignored in Game 7.

There were a couple of moments early in Game 6 when he clearly hesitated to push off on his left leg, but it ultimately didn’t matter because his shot was falling and the Thunder’s defensive pressure was not cranked up to its usual intensity. Haliburton finished with 14 points, five assists, and played less than 23 minutes in the blowout.

Also of note: The Thunder rarely dragged Haliburton into a pick-and-roll and made him move laterally quickly on defense. Expect more of that in Game 7.

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At the Indiana Pacers’ team practice ahead of a crucial Game 6 of the NBA Finals, assistant coach Jenny Boucek was doing everything but focusing on the history she’s been making.

According to the league, Boucek is the first woman to be a staff assistant coach on an NBA Finals team. “I don’t think twice about it on a day to day-to-day basis,” Boucek told NBA News after Wednesday’s team practice. “I just want to coach the team, go to war with them, try to help us win a championship.”

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Brad Thomas and Vaughn Dalzell weigh in on the player props for Game 7 between the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder, focusing on the over for Tyrese Haliburton’s point total and the under for Isaiah Hartenstein.

James Capers, Josh Tiven and Sean Wright joined a very small club tonight.

Capers, Tiven and Wright were announced by the NBA as the officiating crew for Game 7 of the NBA Finals between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers. It’s the first Game 7 of a finals for all three, who are now the 22nd, 23rd and 24th referees in NBA history to land such an assignment.

Unlike the league’s four most recent champions, Boston, Denver, Golden State and Milwaukee, who drafted and developed their franchise cornerstones, or the 2020 Los Angeles Lakers, who signed LeBron James as a free agent and whose glamour status made them the preferred trade destination for its other star, Anthony Davis, Indiana’s front office has struck gold by trading its way up.

Of the 10 players Indiana has typically leaned on during this postseason, half were acquired via trades, including three of the top four scorers in Pascal Siakam, Tyrese Haliburton and Aaron Nesmith. Since the Miami Heat built a superteam through free agent signings and won consecutive championships in 2012 and 2013, the only NBA champion to have relied that much on trades were the 2019 Toronto Raptors, who traded for four of their top five leading scorers.

“There’s no one right way to do it,” Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan told NBC News. 

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Dan Patrick reacts to Game 6 of the NBA Finals between the Thunder and Pacers, where T.J. McConnell and Obi Toppin excelled for the Pacers, while Tyrese Haliburton played through his injury.

Drew Dinsick breaks down the Thunder vs. Pacers matchup in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, looking at the trends for both teams and how bettors can find profitable live betting angles.

There was one margin in particular that propelled Indiana to a stunning, 108-91 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 6 of the NBA Finals on Thursday night, the same one that coach Rick Carlisle said cost them Game 5: Turnovers.

In Game 5, the team coughed up the ball a whopping 22 times in an 11-point loss, including seven in the first quarter and eight in a tightly contested fourth. And they came in a variety of forms, from bad passes to aimlessly dribbling into traffic to picking up the ball too far away from the hoop.

In Game 6, Indiana had zero turnovers in the first quarter, only two by halftime, and seven by the end of third — building a 30-point lead before backups played the majority of the fourth quarter.

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2016: Cavaliers defeat the Warriors

2013: Heat defeat the Spurs

2010: Lakers defeat the Celtics

2005: Spurs defeat the Pistons

1994: Rockets defeat the Knicks

1988: Lakers defeat the Pistons

1984: Celtics defeat the Lakers