In 2025, an NBA team will win their first championship. The Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers will compete in the NBA Finals this year, with their first game in Oklahoma City on Thursday, Jun. 5.
The Thunder will play in their first finals since 2012, when the team led by Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook lost to the Miami Heat in five games. This year, the Thunder cruised past the Minnesota Timberwolves in five games, getting three of their wins by at least 15 points. The team capped off their rout of the Timberwolves with a 30-point win at home. Oklahoma City’s leader, regular season MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, added to his great season when he won Western Conference Finals MVP.
The Thunder have had an statistically outstanding season; the team posted the second highest net rating in NBA history (which measures point differential per 100 possessions) with a score of 12.8. This rating is only behind the 1995–96 Chicago Bulls who posted a rating of 13.4. In addition, Gilgeous-Alexander’s 32.7 points per game places 24th all-time.
The Thunder were the top seed in the West. They did go to seven games against Nikola Jokić and the Denver Nuggets, yet they were always supposed to win as the No. 1 seed. The Pacers’ playoff journey has been more difficult. They were the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference and had to play the East’s best team from the regular season, the Cleveland Cavaliers, in the second round.
The Pacers will make their first finals appearance since 2000, when they lost to the Los Angeles Lakers who were starting their three-year run of winning the championship. In 2000, the Pacers were led by star guard Reggie Miller’s clutch scoring at the end of games. In this year’s Eastern Conference Finals, the Pacers beat the Knicks in six games (the same number it took in 2000) and were led by star guard Tyrese Haliburton, who drew comparisons to Miller after his buzzer-beating, game-tying shot in the first game to force overtime — with Miller celebrating from the broadcast booth.
Haliburton was not named the Eastern Conference Finals MVP; his teammate Pascal Siakam took home the Larry Bird trophy instead. The Pacers acquired both of these stars via trades (Haliburton from the Kings and Siakam from the Raptors), and Gilgeous-Alexander joined the Thunder as part of the trade that sent Paul George to the Los Angeles Clippers. This trend of trading for younger stars on smaller contracts is something to watch in the league going forward as these two teams found success doing so and the league is increasingly punishing teams for spending too much money.
Even before the first tipoff of the conference finals, this year’s champions were guaranteed to make history. The NBA is experiencing unprecedented levels of parity; a different team has won the finals each year since the Toronto Raptors won in 2019. This year’s champions will become the seventh team in that streak, the longest in the NBA’s history.
Furthermore, of the four teams in the conference finals, the only one to have ever won it all was the Knicks in 1973 (the Thunder were champions in 1979 when they were still the Seattle SuperSonics). This year’s conference finals set up a new modern champion and either a team winning its first ever championship or its first one in at least four decades.
Another storyline of this postseason has been physicality. In interviews, coaches and players such as Chris Finch and Rudy Gobert of the Timberwolves have remarked that this postseason feels physical. This notion of physicality goes hand-in-hand with the idea that the referees are letting the players foul more.
Interestingly enough, players such as Gilgeous-Alexander and the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson have been criticized for ‘flopping’ to get the referees to call fouls when they shouldn’t. This season, both ranked among the top five in the league in free throw attempts per game. Gilgeous-Alexander has even dealt with fans chanting “free throw merchant” during away games this postseason. Gilgeous-Alexander is a prolific scorer even without free throws, but does take advantage of the shots when he is fouled. He will look to keep that up in the finals to help his team win.
In the regular season, the Thunder beat the Pacers both times they played, including by 21 points most recently, so the Pacers will look to turn those performances around and continue their postseason hot streak while the Thunder look to cap off their dominant season.