NEW YORK — If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Indiana Pacers in these 2025 NBA playoffs, it’s this: They’ve always got time.
Down seven with 40 seconds to go in overtime of an elimination game against the Bucks in Round 1? No problem. Down seven with 47 seconds to go in Game 2 in Cleveland? No problem.
Advertisement
And now: Down 14 at Madison Square Garden with 2:51 to go in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals?
No problem.
Another night, another unprecedented comeback — or unprecedented collapse, depending on how full your glass is — for Indiana, which once again engineered a hostile takeover of a road arena, slipping past the New York Knicks in overtime Wednesday, 138-135.
“Unprecedented for other teams,” former Knicks forward Obi Toppin corrected, with a smile, after chipping in eight points with 10 rebounds, including two huge dunks in the final minute of overtime with the game in the balance. “But for us, we just keep it going. We’re always going to play until that last whistle, until that last buzzer.”
Advertisement
Last spring, the Pacers ended New York’s season, winning a Game 7 on the MSG court behind a historic offensive display. Now, they’ve snatched home-court advantage away from a Knicks team that had to be feeling like they were on top of the world with three minutes to go … and that, like Milwaukee and Cleveland before them, exits the World’s Most Famous Arena wondering what the hell had just happened.
“You just can never let your guard down against them,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said after his team squandered a 17-point fourth-quarter lead to fall behind in a series for the first time this postseason. “No lead is safe.”
They’re not safe because Indiana has multiple players who can get hot in a hurry. Assaying the role of the Human Torch on Wednesday: Aaron Nesmith, who entered the fourth quarter with 10 points on 3-for-5 shooting, and ended it with 30 points on 9-for-12 shooting, drilling six triples in the final five minutes of the fourth alone, including three in the last minute, to send peals of anxiety coursing through the concourse at MSG.
Advertisement
“I was just doing what the team needed of me, you know?” Nesmith said after the game. “I was just letting them fly. I was in a good rhythm. Didn’t really realize what I was doing in the moment.”
What he was doing in the moment was becoming the first player in NBA history to hit six 3-pointers in the fourth quarter of a playoff game.
“It’s unreal,” he said. “It’s probably the best feeling in the world for me, personally. I love it. Like, when that basket feels like an ocean and anything you toss up, you feel like it’s going to go in. It’s just … so much fun.”
“Obviously, Aaron’s heroics — I mean, I hope they’re talked about,” said Pacers All-Star Tyrese Haliburton. “They can’t be talked about enough … I think each shot that he made just kept giving us more confidence that we could, you know, really win this game.”
Advertisement
Each shot also introduced just a bit more doubt into the Knicks, who had seized control of Game 1 with a 16-1 run after star point guard Jalen Brunson picked up his fifth personal foul less than two minutes into the fourth.
OG Anunoby drilled a pair of huge shots. Reserve guard Miles McBride rotated from the weak side for a monster block of Pascal Siakam at the rim. McBride and Karl-Anthony Towns made a handful of free throws after the Pacers committed brutally ill-advised fouls on 3-point shooters. Towns, Josh Hart and Mitchell Robinson hauled in multiple tough rebounds. It was a collective effort to get the Knicks within striking distance of a 1-0 lead … and it was a collective effort to throw it away.
“We played 46 good minutes,” said Towns, who scored 35 points on 11-for-17 shooting with 12 rebounds in 39 minutes. “Those last two minutes cost us the game.”
Bad shots taken early in the clock. Lackadaisical transition defense to allow Nesmith to continually walk into open shots in rhythm. Missed free throws and costly turnovers. Every one of them opened the door a bit wider, inviting Indiana to walk through … and then, after an Anunoby free throw put the Knicks up two with 7.2 seconds to go, Haliburton kicked it open.
He dribbled the length of the court, beat Mikal Bridges off the bounce and got into the lane — where he was met by 7-foot Mitchell Robinson, walling off his pathway to the rim. So Haliburton just … turned around, dribbled back to the 3-point arc with time ticking away and let it fly.
Advertisement
“I think that the biggest thing for me is, I already have the confidence to take the shot in the moment, but I have that confidence from my group,” Haliburton said. “My group wants me to take those shots. My coaching staff wants me to take those shots. I think our organization wants me to take their shots. I think now we’re at the point where our fans want me to take that shot, you know? So, I think everybody’s living and dying with it at that point.”
When the ball’s in the air, though, an awful lot can happen between living and dying.
“In all honesty, when he pulled it out and shot it, I was like, ‘Oh, wow,’” said Nesmith, who had crashed the offensive glass and found himself standing directly under the rim, with a front-row ticket to the show.
Haliburton sent the shot off the back rim, looking as if he overcooked it a bit. But then …
Advertisement
“And then it bounced up — straight up — and I just watched it,” Nesmith said. “And I was, like, ‘Oh, that’s good.’”
“It looked like it had a chance,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “It was awfully high.”
Haliburton insists his confidence never wavered.
“No, I knew it was … I’m like it, ‘It’s going in,’” he said through a Cheshire Cat grin at his postgame news conference. “It felt like it got stuck up there, though. And honestly, when it went in, I thought my eyes might have been deceiving me in the moment. But it felt good when it left my hand, so I thought it was going to go in. You know, just the ball felt like it was up there for an eternity, but man, just a special moment.”
Tyrese Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers celebrate his game-tying basket against the New York Knicks in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday in New York. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)
(Al Bello via Getty Images)
One team’s special moment is another’s total disaster.
Advertisement
“Give them a lot of credit,” said Brunson, who scored a game-high 43 points on 15-for-25 shooting, but also committed a playoff-high seven turnovers, including a costly bad pass on what should’ve been an easy Anunoby dunk to push New York’s lead to seven with 31 seconds to go. “They closed the game out, like they’ve been doing all playoffs. Just not really good on our part.”
But what looked at the moment like a game-winning 3-pointer that launched a choke sign heard ’round the world was revealed by video replay review to be a game-tying 2-pointer — which meant both teams needed to ride the emotional waves of that moment and lock back in for five more minutes.
“Grab everybody by their jersey, their neck, their arm — whatever it takes,” Pacers center Myles Turner said. “Just get them in the huddle and tell them, ‘Let’s go, man. It’s not over.’ We gave ourselves a chance. That’s all that was. We thought it was over, you know, but it is what it is.”
And when the Knicks seized the early stage of the extra session, going up by four, Indiana just kept coming. A 3 and a driving layup by Andrew Nembhard. A tough take and finish through contact by Haliburton. A huge offensive rebound and putback dunk by Toppin. Every haymaker answered, every opportunity to continue applying pressure seized, and eventually, the Knicks started to look like a team that had been worn down by Indiana’s sheer relentless intensity.
Advertisement
“I think maybe you could say that,” Haliburton said. “They missed a couple of free throws there down the stretch. Had a couple of short misses down the end of the game … I think it’s hard for me to discredit, and say that the ‘wear-down effect’ wasn’t there, you know? I think from everything that you’re seeing, that’s a part of it, and I think that’s a part of our identity — how can we wear on teams for 48 minutes? Obviously, picking up full court, but as well as our offensive pressure, getting downhill, moving, playing fast, I thought that we did a good job offensively of playing our style.”
“I feel like everybody on this team is going to work, 110%, every single game, until that last buzzer, man,” Toppin said. “I feel like that’s what happened. I feel like they slowed down a little bit, and we just kept it going.”
That’s the secret, of course: that there is no secret. That you climb out of a big hole by stringing together positive play after positive play after positive play. That you remain resolute, that you keep charging, until there are no more opportunities to do it. Because if you stay committed to it, you give yourself the chance that the other guy might blink.
“We were very much teetering on the edge,” Carlisle said. “We talked in the huddle — we had a couple of timeouts that we had to take, and we talked in the huddle about, ‘Just keep working the game. Keep making it hard on these guys.’ … You’ve just got to keep playing, you know? The game is long.”
Advertisement
The time between Games 1 and 2, though, is short. That means the Knicks don’t have much time to wallow in the misery of missed opportunity, lest they find themselves in the unenviable position that Cleveland did: down 2-0, heading to Indiana, feeling the heat of an early summer vacation.
“You have to take disappointment and turn that into more determination. … There’s a lot of emotional highs and lows in the playoffs,” Thibodeau said. “You’ve got to bounce back quickly. You look at the film, make your corrections and get ready for Game 2.”
The Pacers will be ready — ready to get greedy and get another win, ready to turn in a better front-to-back performance than they did Wednesday (“We can’t depend on having to make hellacious shots for three minutes straight the rest of the series,” Turner said) and ready to play their way.
Brunson won Clutch Player of the Year, but the Pacers have been the best clutch team in the NBA this season, blitzing opponents by 20.9 points per 100 possessions when the score was within five points in the final five minutes and going 30-14 in “clutch” games. All that experience pays dividends in madhouse moments like “down 14 in the fourth quarter of the Eastern Conference finals.”
Advertisement
“We’ve had a lot of these games this year,” Carlisle said. “We’ve probably had a dozen of them throughout the season. A lot of the games early, where we were struggling, were games we had to pull out … it’s a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. It’s not easy. It’s not easy.”
No, it’s not. These Pacers just make it look that way.
Read the full article here
