Two sides of the coin

Good morning. Tyrese Haliburton suffers a heartwrenching injury. Oklahoma City reach the zenith. At this stage, it's all or nothing. Let's basketball.

The Indiana Pacers came to compete in Game 7. Underdogs throughout the series and in each individual game of the series, and with just about every neutral party presuming that the Oklahoma City Thunder would prevail at home, the Pacers did what they always do in these playoffs: confound the opponent, stay competitive, plant a seed of doubt, never give up.

Then seven minutes into the first quarter, Tyrese Haliburton planted his right foot to drive left and his Achilles gave up.

This was one of the strangest, most jarring injuries in NBA Finals history. It had similarities to Kevin Durant's injury in Game 5 of the 2019 Finals in Toronto, but Durant had missed a bunch of time and the point in the series was obviously different. Haliburton is an emotive person, and it was clear immediately what had happened. Watching from home, you can't really tell whether the injury shifted in the building. It shifted in my mind and heart. Watching anyone get injured is sorrowful. For a young player on the rise representing a small market and a deeply fun style of team play on this stage, it felt especially brutal.

How did the Pacers respond? They confounded the opponent, stayed competitive, planted a seed of doubt, never gave up.

This was one of the all-time gutsy team performances by Indiana, taking a 1-point lead into halftime, only falling behind significantly once OKC's incredible defense tightened the clamps in the third, still finding a way to crawl back in the fourth to the point where if a few possessions go differently in the final five minutes, we might have another all-time finish. Not every Pacer played well, but every Pacer went all out in the face of near-certain doom. They made the Thunder earn their first championship. No asterisks, no gimmes. Salute to Pascal Siakam, T.J. McConnell, Bennedict Mathurin, Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith and the rest. There's no shame in anything they did in Game 7.

There's no shame for Oklahoma City, either. They earned this.

We see so many promising young teams fall short. We saw so many promising young OKC teams fall short. The Thunder had an absolutely dominant season, playing like any other team in the NBA. They dominated two of their four playoff series, and overcome being pushed to the limit in the other two. You're going to think this is a bit, but I swear it's not: getting their hinges blown off in the NBA Cup championship game back in December helped them. They witnessed first-hand that in a one-game resolution, utter dominance can be cast aside. They stress-tested themselves in that game, learned something and applied it to two Games 7 in the playoffs. Now they have a trophy people will remember. (Apologies to the 2024 NBA Cup champion Milwaukee Bucks.)

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander cemented himself as one of the best players of his generation. He had a tough shooting night – how are SGA and his trainers going to work on solving Nembhard's defense this summer? – but hit timely buckets and had maybe the best set-up game of his life with a season-high 12 assists. (Here's the box score, by the way.) At age 26, he's four years younger than Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo and a few months younger than Jayson Tatum. It's not his league, but he's in that upper tier and, should he keep it up, will quickly climb the all-time ranks. The championship, the Finals MVP – those help cement a living legacy, just as they did for Giannis and Jokic. (Tatum lacks the individual trophy but the case applies nonetheless.)

Jalen Williams had a two-toned game – tentative in the first, aggressive in the second, whatever whoever said to him at halftime should get cross-stitched and framed and installed in JDub's locker – and Chet Holmgren was extremely valuable on defense as the Pacers kept trying to attack. Lu Dort is good for brutalizing defense and one shot every three games or so that feels like it's dropped in the hoop by the Basketball Gods themselves. Alex Caruso and Cason Wallace are unholy defensive terrors, Mark Daigneault really is a top-tier strategist and Sam Presti built a sustainable contender again. This is not a perfect team – the 16-7 playoff record showed more fallibility than the 68-14 regular season – but it's going to be in the mix for the O'Brien for years to come barring something terrible happening to Shai or an unexpected bout with the ol' Disease of Me.

Indiana would have joined that list, too: Haliburton, Mathurin, Nembhard, Nesmith and Jarace Walker are all young, and Pascal Siakam and T.J. McConnell aren't exactly old. But Hali's injury throws everything into chaos, just as Jayson Tatum's injury threw Boston's near-term future into uncertainty and Damian Lillard's injury darkened Milwaukee's outlook. This is now the single biggest issue facing the NBA: an epidemic of Achilles tears, and not just with older players. The NBA has labor peace and a long-term media rights deal. Throw all of your resources at saving young players from catastrophic injuries through research and reform.

But there's time this summer to delve into that. For now, it's the Thunder's moment in the spotlight. A parade comes first, then a title defense. Congratulations to Oklahoma City.

On Durant

Two brief notes about Kevin Durant, who will get his day in the spotlight soon.

1. I have no problem with the trade being completed and leaking on the same day at Game 7. I saw a little chatter about it being disrespectful to the teams playing in the game and "what's wrong with the NBA." It's only disrespectful to the teams playing in Game 7 if you as a fan or analyst or whatever allow it to distract you from the game, if you start writing things like "this is what's wrong with the NBA" instead of celebrating what's right. The NBA fandom is not a monolith, and acting as though it ever can be and that there's a right way to be a fan (for example, caring much more about Pacers-Thunder than Kevin Durant getting traded to the West No. 2 seed). The league can survive having two big stories on a Sunday in June! Broadly I wish people who care about the league would stop trying to foretell its doom or overstate its perceived oddities and shortcomings. Not every media focus outside the 48 minutes on the hardwood is a crisis!
2. The implosion of the Phoenix Suns since Game 6 of their 2022 second-round series against Dallas is a) reaching world-historic disaster status and b) is not over yet. Assuming the Suns keep Jalen Green for next season, this could ultimately lead to Devin Booker requesting liberation. This isn't to heap more dirt on Green, who had a better postseason than anyone on the Suns did this year. But Phoenix has remarkably little future right now, and Booker's not dumb.

Thank You

Whether you're a long-time reader or discovered the newsletter this season, THANK YOU for coming along for the ride. I launched this thing in 2014 at SB Nation because I thought there was value in quick-hitter morning links and reaction to the NBA stories of the day. It's grown in word count and scale since I left SB Nation in 2019. The audience has grown, too: never exponentially, but steadily. Wherever you came on board, I appreciate you. It's truly an honor to be one of the emails more than a thousand people read every weekday. Twelve champions have been crowned since the newsletter launched, and thank goodness it's only been the Lakers once! (My Lakers fan subscribers might deserve the most respect, because wow do they put up with a lot of rude comments like that.)

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Back on Tuesday. Be excellent to each other.