With a 125-108 win in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals on Saturday night, the Indiana Pacers clinched a spot in the 2025 NBA Finals, setting up one of the most surprising championship matchups in league history.
In some respects, the fourth-seeded Pacers and the top-seeded Oklahoma City Thundercouldn’t be further apart. OKC entered this season among the favorites for the title and dominated the Western Conference from start to finish, while Indiana scuffled to a losing record until flipping the switch in January. The Thunder have the league MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, plus another All-NBA honoree and two All-Defensive selections; the Pacers’ only recipient of any season honor is Tyrese Haliburton, who landed on the All-NBA third team.
Yet in other respects, the finalists have a lot in common, as two young teams led by dynamic guards who play in the middle of the country. These are the first NBA Finals since the introduction of the luxury tax in which neither team is a taxpayer. Both finalists play in a fun, engaging style and are set up for more postseason success in the seasons to come.
Before the Finals tip off on Thursday (8:30 p.m. ET on ABC), here are the stats, trends and head-to-head wrinkles to know about this unexpected Thunder-Pacers showdown.
Although it’s unlikely the two players will actually spend much time guarding each other — more on that below — the point guard matchup will be well worth watching in this series. Gilgeous-Alexander and Haliburton are the first pair of All-NBA picks at point guard to meet in the Finals since Stephen Curry and Kyrie Irving a decade ago. Sadly, that matchup was short-lived: Irving suffered a left patella fracture in Game 1 of the series. (However, we got to see the two players square off again in both the 2016 and 2017 Finals.)
Gilgeous-Alexander and Haliburton succeed offensively in wildly different fashions. The MVP has never averaged more than this season’s 6.4 assists per game; but he led the NBA by scoring 32.7 points per game, the sixth-highest average all time for a full-time point guard. Meanwhile, Haliburton is the ultimate table setter, having led the league in assists per game in 2023-24 at 10.9 and finishing third this season at 9.2. Haliburton is a dangerous scorer too, having topped 30 points twice in the conference finals, but he is capable of dominating a game without scoring 20.
Both players enjoyed strong play en route to the Finals. After a slow start to the playoffs that saw him shoot just 35% in the first three games of the Thunder’s sweep of the Memphis Grizzlies, Gilgeous-Alexander has more than validated his MVP award. He leads all players in wins above replacement player (WARP) during the playoffs by my metric. Haliburton entered Game 6 of the conference finals third in WARP behind Gilgeous-Alexander and Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves.
