Basketball <\/p>\n
The NBA is a takesman\u2019s game. But the Indiana Pacers are making it impossible to be right.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m no household name in this business, but I\u2019ve seen enough to get friends and family asking me what I think will happen in the NBA Finals<\/a> between the mystical creature we call the Pacers and the truly juggernautical Oklahoma City Thunder. And I\u2019ve had the same line all week, possibly the single-most boring take in the history of professional sports:<\/p>\n There is no defensible reason to pick the Pacers over the Thunder.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve tried to find one. As a relentless contrarian, trust me when I say I\u2019ve scoured the earth for reasons to say the Pacers could win this series. Pace, surely they run a lot? No\u2026 Oklahoma City still plays faster.<\/a> Clutch stats? Like\u2026 they\u2019ve been pretty clutch. But no, it\u2019s basically a dead heat <\/a>in points per possession and shooting percentage. All traditional and advanced stats from the regular season eviscerate the Pacers. And the Thunder might have a better lineup, slots one through 12. <\/p>\n So now we have to turn to indefensible reasons why people may have picked the Pacers. The power of friendship? Youth and inexperience for the Thunder? The Pacers never get tired? Tyrese Haliburton is the most clutch player in NBA history? <\/p>\n Those are not reasons why the Pacers could win. Those are narratives that would<\/em> explain why the Pacers did <\/em>win in a hypothetical future where they already have. That type of ex-post-facto takesmanship is basically the rock on which sports media has built its church, but it\u2019s really no better than just cashing in a lottery ticket and saying you knew the winning numbers all along.<\/p>\n This is cosmos-defying <\/em>buffoonery. This is 2022 Miami Heat-level stuff, chicanery capable of causing convulsions and forcing you to call your stockbroker and put everything into Lima beans. This team is 5-3 when they go down by 15 or more points<\/a>. Tyrese Haliburton, who has never been higher than third-team All-NBA, has more playoff game-winners this postseason than Kobe Bryant did in his entire career<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is zilch<\/em> that suggests this should be possible, and yet here we are. <\/p>\n I\u2019m sure plenty of people picked the Pacers to win Game 1 via the law of large numbers. And in this world, it\u2019s so much more important if <\/em>you\u2019re right rather than why <\/em>you\u2019re right, but I\u2019m stopping those hypothetical straw man victory laps here and demanding to know why on earth this is happening. Because I don\u2019t understand. <\/p>\n Here\u2019s what\u2019s tricky: as far as I can tell, the Indiana Pacers won a run-of-the-mill, low-scoring, store-brand exciting NBA basketball game. They hung around for most of the game, never getting bowled over but never quite going strike-for-strike either. And then they turned on the jets, caught the Thunder off-guard and stole \u2014 and I do really mean stole, <\/em>111-110 with 0.3 seconds left was their first lead of the night \u2014 Game 1 of the NBA Finals. See? Perfectly explainable.<\/p>\n