OKLAHOMA CITY — Tyrese Haliburton stuck a game-winner with 0.3 seconds on the clock on Thursday to give Indiana its only lead of the game and a 1-0 lead in the 2025 NBA Finals.
Reeling after a blown lead of 15 points in the fourth quarter and stunned by Haliburton’s latest heroics, league MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder are left sorting out the shock and gnaw of a deficit they never saw coming.
“It happened so fast,” Gilgeous-Alexander said of the game-ending bucket, Haliburton’s fourth go-ahead or game-winner of this postseason. “I feel like we got matched. He got down going right and pulled up from middy and knocked down the shot. I don’t know, it didn’t feel like anything crazy. He just made a play with the time winding down.”
Gilgeous-Alexander had 38 points in his Finals debut, netting at least 30 for the 12th time in the playoffs. But it wasn’t enough.
Indiana rallied from at least 15 points down for the fifth time in the 2025 playoffs. A double-digit deficit isn’t troubling, Haliburton said, and the Pacers are proving resilience is more than lip service.
“They’ve had so many games like that that have seemed improbable,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “They just play with a great spirit, they keep coming, they made plays, made shots. They deserved to win by a point. We got to learn from it. Obviously a lot of things we can clean up. Credit them, they went and got that game.”
The Pacers turned the ball over 25 times and did everything possible to spoil the opener of the best-of-seven series until closing on a 12-2 run in the last 2 minutes, 38 seconds.
Gilgeous-Alexander said the Thunder will regroup and be ready to avoid a similar outcome on Sunday in Game 2 before the series shifts to Indianapolis on Wednesday.
The Western Conference champions lost consecutive games only twice in the regular season and it hasn’t happened in these playoffs. Oklahoma City has been here before, dropping the opening game of the second round series with the Denver Nuggets 121-119 on a game-winner by Aaron Gordon.
“We just got to focus on being better,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “The series isn’t first to one, it’s first to four. We have four more games to get, they have three. It’s that simple. It’s not rocket science. We lost Game 1. We have to be better.”
