The Oklahoma City Thunder are back in the NBA Finals for the first time since 2012, and will face another team that’s had an even longer Finals drought — the Indiana Pacers. The Thunder eliminated the Minnesota Timberwolves in Game 5 of the Western Conference finals on Wednesday, winning the West for the first time in 13 years. The Pacers, meanwhile, eliminated the New York Knicks in six games to reach the Finals for the first time since 2000.
The Thunder, who won 68 games in the regular season and are now 12-4 in the playoffs, are the heavy favorites to win the title (-750 at Caesars Sportsbook).
The Thunder blew out the Wolves in Wednesday’s Game 5, jumping out to a 17-point lead at the end of the first quarter and never looking back. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will now try to become the first player to win the MVP award and an NBA title in the same season since Stephen Curry pulled off the feat in 2015.
In the East, the Pacers have pulled off several incredible comebacks this postseason alone, including a Game 1 stunner that put the Knicks back on their heels in the conference finals.
The postseason field has now been whittled from 20 teams down to two. The Kings, Mavericks, Bulls and Hawks were ousted in the Play-In Tournament. The Grizzlies, Clippers, Lakers, Rockets, Heat, Bucks, Pistons and Magic lost in the first round, and the Nuggets, Warriors, Cavaliers and Celtics made it to the second round before bowing out. We said goodbye to the Timberwolves and Knicks in the conference finals to get where we are now — the homestretch.
The Indiana Pacers defeated the New York Knicks on Saturday to clinch a spot in the NBA Finals, and for his efforts in the series, Pacers forward Pascal Siakam won the Eastern Conference Finals MVP award. Siakam led all scorers in the decisive Game 6 with 31 points, and the 125-108 victory marked the third time he scored at least 30 points against the Knicks.
Siakam took his shot-making to another level in the conference finals. The 39-point effort in Game 2 was his highest-scoring outing of the year and well outdid his season average of 20.2 points per game. He closed the series with 24.8 points across the six outings.
“Shoutout Indy, man,” Siakam said on the TNT broadcast after he received the award. “It’s been such an amazing experience for me so far. From the first day I landed here, the love has been amazing. Just unbelievable, man. First-class organization. I’m just so happy to be here. And tonight, after a bad Game 5, we wanted to bounce back. I have, like, 100% belief in my teammates. Whenever we’re down, we always find a way. And we did that tonight.”
Siakam delivered on the high expectations that followed him to Indiana when he joined the franchise during the 2023-24 season by way of the Toronto Raptors. He averaged more than 20 points for the eighth-straight year and added 6.9 rebounds and 3.4 assists per game during the regular season. This year also marked a return to All-Star-caliber play after he missed out on the honor during the split campaign with the Raptors and Pacers.
The Pacers bounced back from their Game 5 defeat to complete a 4-2 series victory and advance to the NBA Finals for the first time since 2000. The Oklahoma City Thunder represent their biggest challenge of the playoffs and rolled through the Western Conference bracket on the heels of their 68-win regular season.
The upcoming finals appearance will be the second of Siakam’s career. He made his first trip with the Raptors in 2019 and won the championship to cap off what was then a breakout season. Siakam won the Most Improved Player award that year and posted a double-double in the clinching game of the finals.
If you want to know why the New York Knicks couldn’t beat the Indiana Pacers in their 125-108 Game 6 loss — or in the Eastern Conference finals in general — you probably have to go back to the summer of 2022. That was when they made their landmark acquisition of Jalen Brunson, of course, but he wasn’t the only significant free agent they signed in that offseason. Using the cap room that remained after signing Brunson, New York also added a little-known backup center named Isaiah Hartenstein on a two-year, $16 million deal.
The structure of that contract was ultimately what doomed New York.
Brunson became the face of the franchise, but Hartenstein was its spine. The Brunson offense, driven by his one-on-one brilliance, was not inherently efficient. New York ranked No. 4 in offense in 2023 and No. 7 in 2024, but fell out of the top 10 in terms of half-court points per play in both seasons. They were buoyed by their dominant offensive rebounding, of which Hartenstein was an essential element.
A side effect of Brunson’s dribbling is that no team consistently takes as many shots at the end of the shot-clock as the Knicks. Hartenstein’s deadly flip shot was a badly-needed safety valve for many aimless possessions. His playmaking kept teammates engaged as Brunson pounded the rock. And, most importantly, he was quite possibly the most underrated defensive player in all of basketball. By Estimated Plus-Minus, he was a top-five defender last season.
Hartenstein was, ultimately, too effective for New York’s own good. The Knicks only signed him to a two-year deal. That meant, as an unrestricted free agent in 2024, they only had Early Bird Rights available to re-sign him, allowing them to offer him no more than a 75% raise on his previous salary — which would have started a new contract at around $16.2 million. The Oklahoma City Thunder wound up paying him $30 million this season to defect from New York. Had the Knicks given him a third year in 2022, they would have had full Bird Rights in 2025 and could have paid anything to keep him. Had they carved out a bit more cap space in 2022, they could have paid him more and increased the maximum raise allowable through Early Bird Rights. They were punished for finding a bargain.
The big swing … and miss? The role player who made so much of what they did possible was gone, and his running mate at center, Mitchell Robinson, was set to miss most of the regular season due to injury. That put New York in a bind. It had no starting-caliber center going into a season in which it had just invested five first-round picks through the Mikal Bridges trade. So Leon Rose took a swing that fundamentally changed the entire theory of New York’s roster: Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo and a first-round pick for Karl-Anthony Towns.
No longer could the Knicks win with grit and defense. This was meant to be a five-out, offensive juggernaut now. It just never quite clicked to the degree they hoped it would. They finally cracked the top-10 in half-court points per play, but without their monstrous offensive rebounding advantage, they ranked only fifth overall offensively, down from the Hartenstein-era peak of No. 4. With opposing defenses mostly ignoring Josh Hart and Tom Thibodeau refusing to change his starting lineup, New York never found the five-out spacing it was built around. The Knicks were good on offense. At times very good. But they were never great.
And they had to be great, because the core problem here, the single major flaw that cost them the Indiana series, was that they could not get stops when both Brunson and Towns were on the floor together, and they weren’t quite explosive enough offensively to get away with that. Below are New York’s lineup numbers from the postseason, accurate through Game 5 of the Pacers series:
The Knicks were predictably terrible without either of their two All-NBA players on the court. When Brunson played without Towns, the offense was great enough to support a weak defense. When Towns played without Brunson, the defense was great enough to support a weak offense.
When they played together, however, a good offense couldn’t bolster a weak defense.
Each of them gives opposing offenses a different sort of target to hunt. As New York started switching more in the later postseason rounds to combat the shooting of Boston and Indiana, aggressive scorers could always find their preferred mismatch. Whether they wanted to attack a guard or a big, one was always available to them.
What moves can be made? If the Knicks want to win a championship in the near future, they are therefore left with three paths to consider this offseason:
They can try to improve the surrounding defense enough to survive having two liabilities. They can try to improve the surrounding offense enough that it’s so dominant it can survive an underwhelming defense. They can break up the Towns-Brunson duo. New York’s first blockbuster was supposed to set up its second. Part of the appeal of adding Bridges was that it theoretically gave the Knicks a second elite wing defender alongside OG Anunoby, which might have been enough for the Knicks to build a playoff-caliber defense despite their two weak links. But Bridges, a former Defensive Player of the Year runner-up, has slipped significantly since leaving Phoenix. There’s no obvious explanation as to why. He’s only 28 and in good health. Most metrics now paint him as something like an average defender. The concept of surrounding Towns and Brunson with elite wings just didn’t hold up.
There’s a possible internal solution to points No. 1 and No. 2: start Deuce McBride over Hart. Hart is a better help-defender, but McBride provides much more consistent ball-pressure. He’s also grown into at least an above-average shooter on reasonable volume, making nearly 39% of his 3s over the past two seasons. That’s a path to the five-out spacing the Knicks need to jump from good to great offensively. Too often, opponents shut down New York’s offense by putting a wing on Towns and letting their center roam off of Hart as an extra help-defender. This is probably the single biggest reason the Brunson-Towns pick-and-roll never reached the heights the Knicks hoped it would. Hart’s presence just clogged up the paint too much for it to flourish.
But Thibodeau refused to even try it, rolling out the starters with McBride in Hart’s place for only 82 regular-season possessions. The Knicks dominated those possessions in that tiny sample, but when the time came to change his starters in the postseason, he opted for Robinson, not McBride, to replace Hart.
That wasn’t an entirely unjustifiable decision. Robinson was arguably the second-best Knick in the postseason, but given his medical history, his minutes have to be managed cautiously. Starting him makes it easier to manage his workload because it offers more game time with which to find him rest. In Game 2 against Indiana, for example, he played roughly 16 consecutive minutes off of the bench. The Knicks needed him, but without starting him they just didn’t have time to find him breaks. He was predictably gassed by the end of that stretch.
Brunson and Towns have both functioned within good defenses before, and those teams have typically played with two big men. The 2024 Timberwolves had the best defense in the NBA with Towns at power forward and Rudy Gobert at center. The Knicks ranked ninth a season ago with Hartenstein as the primary rim-protector, but plenty of minutes with Julius Randle or Precious Achiuwa alongside him. The idea of starting Robinson is to recreate those formulas: make Towns a power forward again, own the offensive glass as they did with Hartenstein, and find balance between offense and defense.
A Hart-breaking proposition The playoff results were mostly bad, and the theory raises obvious further questions. Is Towns just a spacer in this alignment? Robinson is not Gobert and Brunson isn’t even Mike Conley. They’re not going to defend as well as the 2024 Timberwolves did. They’re not going to have the five-out spacing that was supposed to make Brunson and Towns an unstoppable pick-and-roll duo.
Maybe there’s work around the fringes that could help here. Anunoby is too important on both ends to get moved, and the Knicks would never be able to realistically recoup what they gave up for Bridges. McBride is so comically cheap for the next two years that giving him up would be downright irresponsible. Is Hart movable? He’s the (metaphorical) heart of the team, but the Celtics moved Marcus Smart and won a championship right afterward. With Hartenstein gone, maybe the Knicks need to divorce themselves fully of the identity they had before the Towns trade. Maybe that means dealing Hart and embracing the future.
A backup point guard to lift those non-Brunson offensive minutes would be a priority if they did. Are the Jazz interested enough in building a culture to swap Collin Sexton for Hart? Lonzo Ball would be great, but he’ll have plenty of suitors and comes with significant health concerns. There just aren’t many point guards in range of Hart’s $18 million salary. Starters make more and backups make less. This might need to be a three-team deal.
What about free agents? There are free agents out there, but with only the minimum to offer if they hope to duck the second apron, pickings are slim. Could longtime Leon Rose client Chris Paul consider a jump to New York? With his family in Los Angeles, he’s tended to prefer Western Conference teams. D’Angelo Russell isn’t anywhere close to the max player he once was, but he’s not taking a minimum.
I’m going to throw out two names, and you’re probably going to laugh at them: Russell Westbrook and Ben Simmons. One of the benefits of having a shooter like Towns at center is that it opens the door for weak shooters in bench lineups. Maybe Westbrook or Simmons can handle the ball for the 10-12 minutes Brunson rests every night, play some defense, and then skedaddle when the stakes get too high for their deficiencies. They’re interesting innings eaters, but, as their own 2025 postseasons showed, probably can’t be trusted for much more.
What’s frustrating here is that Robinson’s health and Thibodeau’s distaste for experimentation leaves the Knicks in the dark. These are calmer, more measured tweaks, and in a perfect world, they’d have tried some of them across a bigger sample already. They didn’t, and we have to be realistic here: if the Knicks couldn’t beat the Pacers, they had no chance whatsoever against the Thunder. Something drastic might be needed, and given the compressed windows created by the aprons, the Knicks might not be able to wait another year to find out.
Brunson is one of the few players in the NBA, and perhaps the only one not playing for his original team, that could elicit the sort of reaction if traded that former teammate Luka Dončić did. The city of New York would revolt if he was moved, and more than that, he’s practically family to Leon Rose, whose first client as an agent was his father, Rick Brunson. You could maybe talk yourself into a basketball justification for offering Brunson for Giannis Antetokounmpo. Antetokounmpo is better. He and Towns would fit like a glove as a frontcourt duo. Finding a starting-level point guard through trade is usually doable, especially with the wing glut the Knicks would still have. But the off-court implications of dangling Brunson are just too significant to really consider it. If the Brunson-Towns duo is broken up, it is almost certainly Towns going out the door.
The KD question The first name that’s going to come up here, as he has for so many recently eliminated teams, is Kevin Durant. There was reportedly mutual interest between the two parties at the deadline, and Towns, by virtue of his supermax contract, is the simplest matching salary. He’s also uniquely appealing to the Suns for a simple reason: they have to keep Devin Booker happy. Towns and Booker are college teammates. They are both close friends with Russell, an impending free agent. The three of them did a SLAM Magazine cover in 2019 in which they vowed to play together some day. Now might be their chance.
Does Durant make sense for the Knicks? That’s harder to parse. He doesn’t really get to the basket anymore. You’re trading for him as a shotmaker, and the Knicks already have an elite one in Brunson. In that way, the Knicks would almost be a version of what the Suns were going for, but with a shred of depth, defense and versatility.
Durant is a useful defender, but he’s not a center, and that’s a problem for the Knicks if Towns is heading out. Robinson’s health is enough of a concern that the Knicks absolutely needed another starting-caliber center on the roster as insurance against his absences and to split minutes when he’s healthy. They’d probably have to use the Hart salary slot to find that big man somewhere else. Would the Knicks extend Durant’s expiring contract? They’d almost have to, but paying star-money to a 37-year-old probably shrinks the window meaningfully in apron world. The moment Durant declines is the moment the Knicks are probably out of the championship picture.
It might make more sense to take advantage of Phoenix’s potential interest in Towns to redirect Durant for a few assets elsewhere. Houston and San Antonio obviously have plenty to offer. Other teams have less. Speculating on specifics would be difficult without knowing what his market would be, but the idea here would be to reset a bit, get a little younger, a little deeper and a little cheaper and leave the door open to potentially pivot again when the opportunity presents itself.
The trouble with Towns Are there other teams that could consider Towns? That’s tricky considering his contract. Finding teams that want to pay supermax money for a center who doesn’t protect the rim is going to be difficult. Maybe there are narrow circumstances in which someone else on the team creates that need. Take the New Orleans Pelicans. To maximize Zion Williamson offensively, they might need a center who shoots a lot of 3s. The Pelicans happen to have a wing glut. Could the Knicks talk Joe Dumars into, say, Herb Jones, CJ McCollum and rookie center Yves Missi for Towns? They could then platoon Robinson and Missi at center. With Jones, Anunoby and Bridges, they really would have the wing defense they dreamed of, and McCollum could given them the bench offense they need when Brunson rests. It’s unclear what the Pelicans are planning, though, so something like this is still purely hypothetical.
Compare the price Towns netted in a trade to the one Bridges got. Towns is the better, more accomplished player, but the fact that Bridges fits onto any roster drove up his value. The Knicks may have overpaid by offering five first-round picks for him, but Memphis had reportedly previously offered four. Versatile wings are so valuable because any team could plausibly use them. Towns is a niche fit. The teams that are interested will likely be very interested, but it’s going to be a narrower field of possible destinations.
That’s the simplest reason not to expect a Towns trade. He’s just less tradable than a player of his stature typically would be. The Knicks can and should keep their ear to the ground. But in all likelihood, the solutions here are going to have to be minor or internal. Whether it’s reorienting the rotation, signing the right minimum contracts or exploring a Hart trade, the goal for next season will probably be to make the Brunson-Towns duo viable in some way. That might mean supercharging the offense or it might mean trying to boost the defense just enough to get by, but neither path is especially clear.
This was what they lost in Hartenstein. Though not a star, he took nothing off of the table offensively or defensively. The Knicks never had to worry about his fit with Brunson or with anyone else. Their new center is more dynamic, but he’s also more vulnerable. That erases their margin for error. They have to get everything around him right if he’s going to take them through four rounds of the postseason. That means perfect roster construction, proper lineup choices and appropriate schematic decisions. If the Knicks do all of that, they can win the 2025-26 championship. But if any part of them fears they can’t? That’s when a Towns trade starts to become far likelier.
When the New York Knicks acquired Karl-Anthony Towns, the idea was to supercharge their offense in the absence of defensive stalwart Isaiah Hartenstein, who left to join the Oklahoma City Thunder. Their results on that end of the floor were mixed, but as the season progressed, the defensive downgrade from Hartenstein to Towns grew increasingly apparent. When the Knicks had both Towns and Jalen Brunson on the floor in the playoffs, they just couldn’t get stops.
Brunson, given his size, is almost automatically vulnerable on defense. Towns doesn’t have the same issue. He’s legitimately center-sized and a stellar athlete, but he’s never been a great defender. In a postmortem on New York’s season following its elimination at the hands of the Indiana Pacers on Saturday, The Athletic’s Fred Katz and James Edwards reported that over the course of the season, the Knicks grew increasingly frustrated with Towns’ defensive habits.
“Publicly, Knicks players made veiled comments all season about poor communication causing their inconsistencies,” Edwards and Katz wrote. “Behind the scenes, they and coaches expressed frustration with Towns’ defensive habits — less concerned with his talent level and more with his process on that end. Too often, Towns executed incorrect coverages without communicating why he did it. After it became a theme, players worried Towns didn’t grasp the importance of the matter.”
Longtime defensive ace PJ Tucker, signed late in the season as a veteran for New York’s locker room, summed up matters succinctly.
“They all talk to me,” Tucker said after Game 1 of New York’s second-round series against Boston. “But they didn’t talk to each other in real-time, in those situations.”
Communication has always been essential to successful NBA defense. That has never been truer than it is now. Modern offense has the spacing and creativity to stress defenses in ways that that simply weren’t possible even a decade ago, and defense has grown far more sophisticated as a result. Sticking to the scheme and communicating with teammates is paramount because an entire defensive structure can fall apart if one player is out of place. If teammates don’t trust Towns to be in the right position or do the right things, their own positions are compromised.
New York’s regular-season defense was 2.8 points per 100 possessions better when Towns was on the bench. In the playoffs, it was much closer to even, but the Towns-Brunson units got tortured. Towns was a big part of that. Whenever he played drop coverage, the Pacers killed him with the jumpers he allowed. When he switched, they beat him one-on-one.
What’s next for Knicks? New York has one fundamental roster flaw, and this offseason will focus on fixing it Sam Quinn What’s next for Knicks? New York has one fundamental roster flaw, and this offseason will focus on fixing it Realistically, the Knicks are not moving Brunson. He is the franchise player. That means the onus is going to be on Towns to make this partnership work defensively. He has never been a strong rim-protector, but he has functioned within successful defenses in the past. He did so for the Minnesota Timberwolves a year ago as they ranked No. 1 in the NBA defense. That came as a power forward, and with Mitchell Robinson now healthy again, maybe the Knicks move him back to that position next season in the hopes that it bolsters their defense.
But given the frustration evident here, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for New York to consider another Towns trade. After all, Robinson is healthy again. They have a defensive-minded center they can build around, though he likely needs another starting-caliber big on his team to protect against injuries and overuse. If the Knicks don’t view these lapses as fixable, they will at least explore what’s out their for their All-NBA big man. After all, he’s been in the NBA for a decade now. If he hasn’t figured out his defensive issues in all of that time, the odds of him ever doing so certainly aren’t in his favor.
If you’re tired of all the NBA ratings talk, you might want want to avoid the 2025 Finals, which we now know will be between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers — who eliminated the New York Knicks, 125-108, in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals on Saturday.
Or, maybe you’ll be even more interested in this matchup to see just how much there really is to the ratings debate as it pertains to “small-market” teams and next-generation stars. How big of a draw, really, are the likes of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Tyrese Haliburton?
We’re about to find out in what will mark the first NBA Finals in which both teams hail from a market outside the top 20, according to Nielsen rankings, which measure media audience size — notably TV. As of the latest ratings, Indianapolis ranks No. 25 among U.S. cities and Oklahoma City ranks No. 47. The last time we saw a small-market matchup like this was in 1971 when the Milwaukee Bucks swept the Baltimore Bullets.
That was obviously long time ago. There were only 17 NBA teams in 1971 and TV coverage was totally incomparable. If we look at even just this century, the only Finals series that come close to an all-small-market matchup were Denver-Miami in 2023, San Antonio-Miami in 2013 and 2014, and San Antonio-Detroit in 2004.
San Antonio is the only bottom-10 market in that group, based on TV audience and metro population, while Detroit, Denver and Miami rank 14th, 15th and 17th, respectively.
Indiana and Oklahoma City are two true small-market teams, and if the NBA is going to be able to ride this new wave of parity, which was created specifically to get closer to an equal-opportunity championship landscape, it will surely be gauging the level of macro interest in a series that pits two really entertaining basketball teams that are probably not very well known to a lot of casual fans.
Nuggets’ elimination seals seven-year run of unprecedented NBA parity, but is it good for the league? Brad Botkin Nuggets’ elimination seals seven-year run of unprecedented NBA parity, but is it good for the league? This is especially true of the Pacers, who some would argue don’t even have a bona fide superstar, although Haliburton certainly plays like one most nights. At least the Thunder have the MVP in Gilgeous-Alexander, but there’s foul-baiting baggage with him. There’s no question the NBA, from a pure marketing standpoint, would have preferred the Knicks instead of the Pacers.
But again, does this matter anymore? The answer to that question is still almost certainly yes, but perhaps to a smaller degree than was true even a half decade ago. With the access that fans have to all players and teams in the League Pass era, and as the talent pool has continuously deepened, great teams and players can and do come from all over. And fans, the NBA is hoping, will ultimately flock to good basketball and good stories.
The Thunder genuinely might be one of the best teams ever, and from a story standpoint, their Seattle defection combined with an all-time modern-era rebuild by Sam Presti make for a couple pretty compelling narratives. On the flip side, the Pacers are going back to the Finals for the first time in a quarter century. They did it by beating the Knicks, rekindling one of the best rivalries of the 1990s.
The Pacers play a run and gun, infectious brand of basketball that relies not on a ball-dominant point guard dribbling the air out of possessions, but rather on ball and player movement and the hot-potato passing that connects it all. If you’re betting on basketball — not star power — to drive ratings, the Pacers are a good bet.
Stories sell, too. Particularly underdog stories. Consider that among OKC and Indiana, there will be only one starter in this series who was drafted in the top five (OKC’s Chet Holmgren, who went No. 2 overall in 2022). Gilgeous-Alexander went 11th in 2018; Haliburton went 12th in 2020. Both came to their teams by way of a trade, and neither entered the league with anything close to the expectation of becoming a championship captain.
As for second options, OKC’s Jalen Williams was a virtual unknown, at least to people who don’t put together mock drafts for a living, coming out of Santa Clara, and Indiana’s Pascal Siakam has long been doubted as a true go-to option on a high-level team. He’s been putting those doubts to rest since he showed up in Indiana, and he has been spectacular in this postseason. So much for the days when he wasn’t considered a “needle mover” on the trade market.
Or how about Indiana’s Aaron Nesmith? Discarded by the Celtics only to become a defensive cornerstone and knockdown shooter in Indiana. Andrew Nembhard, and especially T.J. McConnell, embody the underdog hero. If McConnell was a football player, his name would be Rudy.
So there’s no shortage of storylines here, and certainly no shortage of high-quality, entertaining basketball — though there is a chance that OKC’s defense is so smothering that fans new to Pacers basketball might start asking what all the fuss is about their offense. The Pacers will not find many easy buckets, which is one of the more compelling facets of this series for diehard basketball fans.
But ratings, in the end, aren’t as much about the diehards as they are the casual fans tuning in for the magnitude of the event. Are the Pacers and Thunder enough of a draw for that contingent of fans? We’re about to find out in what feels like an important litmus test for the NBA as it moves, at this point seemingly pretty unstoppably, in the direction of parity. That means more small-market opportunity, and thus a greater chance of a Finals like this one becoming more of a rule than an exception.
Indiana Pacers guard Andrew Nembhard did not hoist the Larry Bird trophy on Saturday. (That was Eastern Conference finals MVP Pascal Siakam). Nembhard didn’t put up 31 points in the clincher (also Siakam) or hit the 30-plus-foot bomb that turned Gainbridge Fieldhouse into a madhouse about a minute before the final buzzer. (That was Tyrese Haliburton.) When Indiana fans look back on this Finals run years from now, though, they will remember what Nembhard did in Game 6 against the New York Knicks.
They’ll remember Nembhard’s steals. The man had six of them, five of which led immediately to buckets on the other end. Steals are extremely valuable for any team — you get a stop, plus you get a better-than-average chance at scoring on the other end! — but, for these Pacers, they are gold. Or, perhaps, more accurately: For teams trying to beat these Pacers, they are death. At all times, Indiana’s goal is to turn defense into offense as fast as possible and run their opponents ragged.
They’ll remember Nembhard hounding Jalen Brunson. Nembhard pressured Brunson full-court, got around screens and fought for every inch when the Knicks star, a master at creating space, went at him one-on-one. At certain moments during the conference finals — and during last year’s second-round series between the same two teams — it looked like Brunson was simply too comfortable when going up against Nembhard. This time, Brunson got so frustrated that he headbutted Nembhard. Brunson finished with 19 points, his lowest point total of the series, on 8-for-18 shooting, with five turnovers.
Pacers coach Rick Carlisle didn’t know how much time Nembhard was going to spend guarding Brunson. Aaron Nesmith, who was playing through an ankle injury, had the assignment at the beginning of the game, but Carlisle made the switch about 90 seconds in, after Nesmith picked up his first foul. It was “a naturally easy decision,” Carlisle told reporters after the 125-108 victory, and Nembhard “really took the challenge.”
“Drew, he was incredible tonight, man,” Siakam said. “Just seeing how hard he worked pressuring an All-NBA, All-Star, like, all night, just in his face. And that’s not even the first time he’s done that. This guy does that like every other night. I mean, it’s crazy.”
Andrew Nembhard with a tenacious defense on Jalen Brunson and the local crowd loves it (with a replay) pic.twitter.com/cwYEn2NUlu
— MrBuckBuck (@MrBuckBuckNBA) June 1, 2025 Throughout the season, Nembhard has been Indiana’s best defensive player. He’s the rare guard who can be equally disruptive defensively off the ball and at the point of attack. He’s disciplined enough to avoid getting in foul trouble, but he’s physical, smart and, at times, sneaky. No one else in the NBA regularly “pulls the chair” on his man in non-post-up situations.
Nembhard also ties the room together offensively. When opponents give the Pacers a taste of their own medicine by pressuring, blitzing and denying Haliburton, Nembhard can relieve the playmaking burden. He’s an ideal fit in the Pacers’ chaotic offensive system because he makes smart decisions quickly, is constantly in motion and is a threat without the ball in his hands. He only had two 20-point games during the regular season, but, in last year’s conference finals against the Boston Celtics, exploded for a combined 56 points on 22-for-39 shooting in the two games that Haliburton was out of the lineup. Entering Game 6 against the Knicks, he’d scored just 18 points on 6-for-26 shooting in the previous three games, but his coach wasn’t worried.
“I just had a strong belief that he was going to have a big game,” Carlisle said.
Nembhard scored 14 points on 6-for-12 shooting and dished eight assists on Saturday to go with a block, the aforementioned six steals and only one turnover in 37 minutes. In the second quarter, when it seemed like New York might take the lead, Nembhard made a midrange jumper over Brunson and, on the next possession, came up with the steal that set up the Haliburton dunk that sent the crowd into delirium. In the third quarter, when the Knicks had cut a 16-point deficit to single digits, Nembhard made a corner 3 in transition. In the fourth, after New York had started the quarter strong, Nembhard made a stepback 2 over Brunson, then picked Brunson’s pocket on the next play and pushed the Pacers’ lead back to 14 with a with an uncontested layup seconds later.
Haliburton’s deep 3 may have been a more euphoric moment, but the Knicks had already pulled their starters by then. Nembhard’s catch-and-shoot 3 a few minutes earlier, which put Indiana ahead by 19 points and forced New York to call one last timeout, was the real dagger. Despite going cold in the middle of this series, Nembhard has made 48.3% of his 3-point attempts in 33 career playoff games. He has been just a 33.5% 3-point shooter in the regular season, but I’d be surprised if the Oklahoma City Thunder treat him that way in the Finals. When Denver Nuggets coach David Adelman said on Wednesday that “there’s a premium on shot-making at the times you need it” and that regular-season percentages aren’t “real” this time of year, I thought of Nembhard.
None of Nembhard’s buckets remotely resembled the game-winning 3 he made in Game 3 of the Knicks series last year. His all-around performance on Saturday, however, is more representative of what he means to the Pacers and more illustrative of the type of team the Pacers are.
“It’s not the flashiest, sexiest team,” Indiana center Myles Turner told reporters. “We get results.”
This, more than any crazy highlights or stat lines, is what the Pacers have shown the world en route to the Finals. And when it was most important, Nembhard gave the team exactly what it needed.
Expectations are fluid in the NBA. Tom Thibodeau took over a New York Knicks team in 2020 that had just spent two decades wandering through the desert. At the time, achieving a baseline degree of competence was all the Knicks could ever ask out of a coach. Since he was hired for his first top job in 2011, he is the only person to win Coach of the Year without earning a top-three seed.
Five years ago, that’s how low the bar was in New York. Getting the Knicks home-court advantage in a first-round series seemed borderline miraculous.
And on paper, Thibodeau worked miracles as recently as a few weeks ago. No team had ever overcome multiple 20-point second-half deficits in a single series. New York did so on the road in back-to-back games in Boston. Weren’t these Knicks supposedly built specifically to beat the Celtics? They were well on their way to doing so even before Jayson Tatum went down, and Thibodeau was an essential component of that upset. On paper, beating Boston and reaching the conference finals probably exceeded New York’s expectations.
But expectations change. Eliminating Boston created a golden opportunity. The 64-win Cleveland Cavaliers were knocked out of the second round as well, giving the Knicks home-court advantage in the conference finals. The Oklahoma City Thunder remained a heavy championship favorite, but needed seven games to escape the Denver Nuggets and are younger and less experienced than they will ever be. It’s fair to suggest that this Knicks team will never have an easier path to the Finals and perhaps a championship than it just had … and botched.
Six games after the euphoria of the Boston series, the Knicks have been eliminated with Saturday’s 125-108 loss to Indiana. The Pacers are going to the Finals, and the Knicks are going into one of the most complicated summers in franchise history. They fired their roster bullets last offseason. The war chest of picks and assets was spent on Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns. They have a team with two All-NBA stars and several of the most coveted role players in basketball. And Thibodeau never quite figured out how to use it.
An identity crisis No team relied more heavily on its starters in the regular season than the Knicks. The five-man unit of Bridges, Towns, Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart and OG Anunoby played 940 minutes in the regular season. Only two other lineups in all of basketball played half as many. Cracks started showing in that unit during the regular season, then the wheels fell off in the playoffs. It took losing back-to-back home games in the conference finals to make a change.
It was necessary, but it was also desperate. Most successful coaches treat the regular season somewhat experimentally. They try different lineups so they can see what combinations work and are ready to adapt in the playoffs. Thibodeau didn’t do that to the extent that he needed to. He rarely does. His commitment to his starters is notorious among head coaches. The rest of the series reeked of panic. That’s what leads to minutes for Delon Wright and Landry Shamet when they’d been out of the rotation for the entire postseason. They had nothing else to try. That those minutes weren’t disastrous was almost a happy accident. And it was ultimately too little, too late.
What’s next for Knicks? New York has one fundamental roster flaw, and this offseason will focus on fixing it Sam Quinn What’s next for Knicks? New York has one fundamental roster flaw, and this offseason will focus on fixing it Never did Thibodeau address the core playing style concerns here. The Knicks lost their defensive identity with Isaiah Hartenstein. The theoretical purpose of the Towns trade — aside from just filling in for the injured Mitchell Robinson — was to reinvent the team as a five-out, offense-first juggernaut. It never really happened. Opponents disarmed New York’s pick-and-roll offense by putting their centers on Josh Hart. That allowed them to provide extra rim help while knowing Hart wouldn’t punish them as a shooter. The obvious counter to that would have been to start Miles McBride in Hart’s place, injecting extra shooting into the starting lineup and providing a bit more ball-pressure defensively. Instead, the starters with McBride in Hart’s place played only 82 regular-season possessions and 16 playoff possessions.
That might’ve been a solvable problem with a more creative approach to offense, but so much of what the Knicks do offensively boils down to Brunson dribbling. They ranked 18th in passes per game, 26th in average speed moved by their offensive players and 26th in pace. Unsurprisingly, that led to a suboptimal shot diet, as the Knicks ranked 28th in 3-point attempt rate and 23rd in free-throw rate. They got to the rim relatively frequently, but were inefficient once they got there.
The Knicks got away with uninspired offensive process in the past because they were the best offensive rebounding team in the NBA. With Hartenstein gone and Robinson hurt for most of the season, they weren’t nearly as good this year. They still managed to rank No. 5 in offense during the regular season. Their talent is, obviously, considerable. But playoff-level opposition and coaching weakened them significantly. Brunson’s individual brilliance saved them late in big games, but he can’t singlehandedly carry an offense for 48 minutes. The Knicks scored an impressive 120.6 points per 100 possessions in fourth quarters this postseason. They were at 111.3 or below in each of the other three. At times it felt as if they had no system, no way of leveraging their considerable talent to consistently create advantages and keep all five players engaged. It was, far too often, Brunson dribbling. When it wasn’t, it was usually just someone else dribbling.
The Knicks needed elite offense to win with this group because they just never got stops with Brunson and Towns on the floor at the same time. Some of that’s on them. Some of it has to fall on Thibodeau, ostensibly a defensive-minded coach, to find a scheme that suits them. Towns has always struggled in Thibodeau’s preferred drop-coverage. The Knicks tried to introduce more switching in the playoffs to counter the shooting of Boston and Indiana, but they lacked the muscle memory to do so all that effectively. The Pacers, for most of the series, could basically get to any matchup they wanted. They almost completely controlled the terms of engagement in the series, successfully goading the Knicks into track meets they weren’t equipped to win.
It’s not fair to lay all of this at the feet of a coach. Brunson is who he is. It’s hard to run an offense with much movement when he is your centerpiece. Remember, when Rick Carlisle had him and Luka Dončić in Dallas, he ran a dribble-dribble-dribble offense too. Towns has been vulnerable defensively forever. The Knicks knew that when they got him. Thibodeau rarely used his bench, but he didn’t have a great one to begin with. This was an impressively talented roster, but it probably wasn’t one that especially suited its coach. Last year’s team with Hartenstein fit the stereotypical Thibodeau mold to a tee. The CBA broke that group apart, so the Knicks made lemonade.
Who would the Knicks hire if they make coaching change? This wasn’t a one-and-done run. The Knicks are expensive, but they’re equipped to stay together for a few years if they want to. They can duck the second apron without cutting any core players next season. Robinson expires after that, but if the Knicks are going into the second apron in 2027 anyway, they might as well YOLO their finances and pay to keep him. The oldest core player here, Hart, is only 30, and had Aaron Nesmith not had the greatest three-minute shooting stretch in NBA history, the conference finals likely return to New York for a Game 7. This may have been a blown opportunity, but it doesn’t need to be the only opportunity. Boston is presumably sitting next year out. Cleveland has serious apron issues. The Knicks could run this thing back, take another swing at the Pacers and hope they connect.
That’s certainly the old-world answer here. But the NBA really doesn’t think that way anymore. Four of the past six championship-winning head coaches have been fired by the teams they won it all with. Memphis fired Taylor Jenkins in the middle of a playoff race in March, and that got overshadowed by Denver doing the same in April. Teams are less patient than ever. Maybe, in the era of the aprons, they have to be. Changing coaches isn’t always the right lever to pull, but it’s certainly the easiest. You can unilaterally choose to fire someone. You can’t force another team to trade you good players.
It’s easy to just say “the Knicks should fire Tom Thibodeau.” Who exactly are they hiring to replace him? The name that comes up most frequently is Michael Malone. But he’s almost as old-school as Thibodeau, and it’s not as though he could import Nikola Jokić. What kind of offense would he run without the greatest offensive player of his generation?
Typically, when a team makes a coaching change, it wants someone that significantly differs stylistically from his predecessor. With Thibodeau, that describes Mike Budenzholer. He under-utilizes his starters. His teams pluck all of the low-hanging fruit, shooting a million 3s and protecting the basket relentlessly. But his playoff track record is shaky, and he’s coming off of a bad season in Phoenix. There’s not a Carlisle out there. There’s no guarantee the Knicks could find someone better than Thibodeau.
There is a lot of untapped coaching talent in the NBA at any given time. The Knicks would do well not to limit themselves to bigger names if they do indeed conduct a search. Joe Mazzulla has quickly emerged as one of the NBA’s best young coaches. If Will Hardy hadn’t left for Utah, Mazzulla would probably still be an assistant in Boston right now. Where coaching is concerned, resumés are pretty circumstantial. Would Malone be a top candidate for future jobs without Jokić? Is there a genius assistant out there just waiting for the sort of chance Mazzulla got? Or maybe it’s a second-chance candidate who’s gone overlooked because of his circumstances?
James Borrego won 43 games in his final season with the Hornets. They’ve been stuck at 27 and below ever since. He very nearly got the Cleveland job last summer, and if he had, he might be the reigning Coach of the Year as Kenny Atkinson turned out to be. If he could go above .500 with the Hornets, he could do quite a bit more with the players New York has accumulated.
What about a coaching outsider? Is there another JJ Redick out there, someone with a proven basketball acumen who could take over a team without the baggage of a lifetime in the coaching profession? Maybe that’s an older player ready to transition. Chris Paul probably still wants to play, but he was a longtime Leon Rose client who would seemingly jump to the top of everyone’s candidates list if he decided he was interested in coaching. Maybe that’s an avenue worth exploring?
These aren’t slam dunks. Rarely are proven, elite head coaches available, and getting them usually requires some luck. Think of how the Pacers got Carlisle back. His decade-long tenure in Dallas happened to surprisingly end right as their job became available, and if Kevin Durant’s foot had been a size smaller, the Bucks probably would have fired Budenholzer and dangled the opportunity to coach Giannis Antetokounmpo in front of him. Getting the perfect coach at the perfect time is often as much about luck as it is execution.
Frankly, so is winning. The Knicks lost the Eastern Conference finals in six games, but the losses were mostly close. A bit of shooting luck here, some better bounces there and it could be the Knicks heading to the Finals right now. Merely having the chance to compete at this level was almost unthinkable when Thibodeau arrived. A coach who isn’t good enough to win the conference finals is still good enough to get there. How many Knicks coaches this century can say the same?
That’s the burden these newfound expectations have put on the Knicks. Thibodeau dragged this team out of the gutter, but the traits that take a team from bad to good are not necessarily the ones that take it from good to great. Sometimes a coach can be an essential step in a process that ends without them. Now it’s up to the Knicks to figure out whether the coach who made all of this possible is the one who can take them all the way.
The New York Knicks’ first trip to the Eastern Conference finals since 2000 ended the exact same way their last one did 25 years ago: a six-game loss to the Indiana Pacers. Now, the team faces a gut-check offseason. Do they stick with this group or look to shake things up?
Firing coach Tom Thibodeau would be the easiest change because it doesn’t require salary cap gymnastics or finding a trade partner. Our Sam Quinn argued that the Knicks should take that route, but will they? Early reports suggest no, but nothing is out of the question with James Dolan in charge.
Shortly after the Knicks were eliminated on Saturday with a 125-108 loss to the Pacers in Game 6, The Athletic reported that Thibodeau has the support of key figures in the organization:
“The coach has the backing of team president Leon Rose, league sources said, as well as full buy-in from Brunson, who signed with the Knicks in 2022 in part because he wanted to play for Thibodeau. But ultimately, owner James Dolan is the final decision-maker.”
Brunson was asked directly during his postgame press conference if Thibodeau was the coach to take the Knicks to the next level, and gave the answer you would expect: “Is that a real question right now? You just asked me if I believe he’s the right guy. Yes. Come on.”
Tom Thibodeau resurrected the Knicks, but firing him might be the only way to get to the next level Sam Quinn Tom Thibodeau resurrected the Knicks, but firing him might be the only way to get to the next level Thibodeau was hired in 2020 and immediately ended the Knicks’ seven-season playoff drought, winning Coach of the Year in 2021. During his five seasons in charge, he’s taken the Knicks to the postseason four times, won at least one playoff series in three consecutive seasons and helped them earn their first Eastern Conference finals appearance since 2000.
But while Thibodeau has re-established the Knicks as a serious player in the East, he hasn’t escaped criticism — or the ECF.
His insistence on playing his starters heavy minutes has long drawn the ire of fans and players, and was once again a main topic this season. In March, Mikal Bridges, who led the Knicks in minutes at 37 per game, which ranked fourth in the league, voiced his complaints about playing so much.
“Sometimes it’s not fun on the body,” Bridges said. “You’ll want that as a coach but also talked to him a little bit knowing that we’ve got a good enough team where our bench guys can come in and we don’t need to play 48 [minutes], 47.”
There were also questions about Thibodeau’s reluctance to make rotational changes, particularly during the playoffs. Even though the team’s regular starting lineup of Jalen Brunson, Bridges, OG Anunoby, Josh Hart and Karl-Anthony Towns finished the postseason with a minus-6.2 net rating in 335 minutes together, it took until Game 3 of the East finals for Thibodeau to make a chance. By then, the Knicks were down 2-0, and it was too late.
Thibodeau, who signed a three-year extension in 2024 that keeps him under contract until 2028, is a terrific coach, and deserves a lot of credit for the work he’s done in New York. But whether he’s capable of taking them to the next level is a fair question to ask this summer, whether Brunson thinks so or not.
The rivalry between the New York Knicks and Indiana Pacers was reignited, on and off the court, thanks to the Eastern Conference final. Following the Pacers’ series-clinching win on Saturday night, Tyrese Haliburton enjoyed the last laugh at the expense of famous and vocal Knicks fan Ben Stiller.
Throughout the Knicks’ playoff run, Stiller could be seen sitting courtside on a regular basis. During the conference final matchup, Stiller was front-and-center again, and he got the attention of Haliburton.
Prior to Game 6, the Pacers posted a video of Haliburton walking into Gainbridge Fieldhouse with a duffle bag on social media. Stiller responded with a joke about Haliburton packing his bags for Game 7 in New York.
Good thing he brought his duffel for the flight to NY. https://t.co/0vHKAEPHhI
— Ben Stiller (@BenStiller) May 31, 2025 That return trip won’t happen because Indiana eliminated New York and advanced to the NBA Finals with a 125-108 win. Haliburton totaled 21 points and 13 assists, and he made sure to fire back at Stiller after the game.
Nah, was to pack y’all up https://t.co/hhgo9fp8ib
— Tyrese Haliburton (@TyHaliburton22) June 1, 2025 Haliburton didn’t shy away from antagonizing the Knicks or their fans in the series. After hitting the game-tying shot in Indiana’s miraculous Game 1 comeback, Haliburton recreated Reggie Miller’s famous choking gesture.
With the Knicks in their rearview mirror, the Pacers will play in their first NBA Finals since 2000, when they lost to the Los Angeles Lakers in six games.
“This is no time to be popping champagne,” said coach Rick Carlisle as the Thunder await. “When you get to this point of the season, it’s two teams and it’s one goal. So it becomes an all or nothing thing and we understand the magnitude of it.”
