Oklahoma City (AFP) – The Oklahoma City Thunder crowned a dazzling season with an NBA title on Sunday, pulling away relentlessly in the second half to beat the Indiana Pacers 103-91 in game seven of the NBA Finals. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored 29 points and handed out 12 assists, and the Thunder’s swarming defense finally proved too much for a Pacers team that lost talisman Tyrese Haliburton to a leg injury just seven minutes into the contest.
The underdog Pacers hung tough and held a 48-47 lead at halftime, but the Thunder outscored them 34-20 in the third quarter and pushed the lead to as many as 22 points in the fourth. “It doesn’t feel real, so many hours, so many moments, so many emotions, so many nights of disbelief,” Gilgeous-Alexander said, his voice breaking. “It’s crazy to know that we’re all here. But this group worked for it, this group put in the hours and we deserved this.”
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Gilgeous-Alexander put himself among some of the game’s greats as he earned Finals Most Valuable Player honors to go with his regular-season MVP and scoring title along with his first championship. The 26-year-old Canadian star becomes the first player since LeBron James in 2012-2013 to win both the NBA regular season MVP and Finals MVP in the same campaign.
Jalen Williams scored 15 of his 20 points in the second half, and Chet Holmgren added 18 points, eight rebounds, a steal, and five of the Thunder’s eight blocked shots. A crowd of 18,203 at Paycom Center were given some tense moments as the Pacers chipped away at the deficit, but 23 Indiana turnovers leading to 32 Thunder points were ultimately too much for the Pacers to overcome. The Thunder, who led the league with 68 regular-season wins, captured their first title since the club’s controversial move to Oklahoma City in 2008, the franchise having won it all in 1979 as the Seattle SuperSonics.
The Pacers, three-time American Basketball Association champions in the 1970s, remain in search of a first title since joining the NBA in the NBA-ABA merger.
– Haliburton injured –
Haliburton, already nursing a right calf strain when the Pacers won game six to force the first Finals game seven since 2016, had scored nine points—all on three-pointers—when he went down as he tried to drive past Gilgeous-Alexander. Haliburton’s right leg gave out, and he sprawled forward, slapping the court in pain and disappointment. Teammates gathered around him before he was helped off the court and to the locker room, supported and hopping on one leg with a towel over his head.
“What happened with Tyrese, all of our hearts dropped,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said, adding that Haliburton was in the locker room at halftime “and he was very much a part of a group that believed that they could do this.” In his absence, the Pacers dug in. Down by three after the first quarter, they grabbed a 48-47 lead on Andrew Nembhard’s step-back three-pointer with 4.3 seconds left before halftime.
In a first half that featured 10 lead changes, the three-point shot was an early difference-maker for the Pacers, who connected on eight of 16 from beyond the arc in the first half but had just three after the break. The Thunder struggled early from long range, but Gilgeous-Alexander made his first three-pointer of the night with 8:16 left in the third, Holmgren followed with a trey, and Jalen Williams added another—the quick 9-0 run giving Oklahoma City a 65-56 lead that set the stage for the rest of the game.
“We had 24 minutes to go get it—we had 24 minutes to finish our season,” Gilgeous-Alexander said of the Thunder’s mindset coming out for the third. Carlisle said the Pacers just weren’t good enough in the third quarter. “That quarter was the killer,” he said, but he praised his team’s effort in the fourth. “There was no surrender,” Carlisle said. “It was all defiant fight until the end.”
Bennedict Mathurin led the Pacers with 24 points off the bench. Pascal Siakam and T.J. McConnell added 16 points apiece, and Nembhard scored 15. But the famously resilient Pacers, who rallied from a 10-15 season start and authored a string of stirring comeback wins, finally came up short.
© 2024 AFP
