INDIANAPOLIS — Oklahoma City has been here before.
Just a month ago, the Thunder trailed the Nuggets 2-1 and had to win Game 4 on the road to stay in that series. They did it in a grinding, at times sloppy game, where Cason Wallace and Aaron Wiggins sparked a fourth-quarter run and comeback that gave OKC the win and showed they could win gritty, tough games.
Indiana is a very different team — don’t expect Game 4 of the NBA Finals to be a grinding and slow affair — but having done this before gives Oklahoma City confidence that it can do it again.
“We’ve been here before. Got to bounce back. Get the car back on the road,” Wallace said.
“Yeah, it feels a lot similar,” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander added. “Obviously losing Game 1 on a buzzer-beater, winning big Game 2, being up in Game 3 and losing the lead. There’s a lot of similarities…
“But at the end of the day, we have to be who we are and who we’ve been all season. I think we got back to that in that series. If we want to give ourselves a chance in this series, it has to be the same thing.”
Being themselves meant a couple of things to the Thunder. One was not turning the ball over, something they did 19 times in their Game 3 loss. Three of those were backcourt turnovers.
“Yeah, we turned the ball over at a high rate the last game,” Wallace said. “We got to turn that over.”
The Thunder also played more in isolation in Game 3 than they would have liked, with the assists and ball movement that had defined their run to the NBA Finals fading in the face of more intense and focused defensive pressure from the Pacers.
“I think we played on their terms more than we played on our terms of how we wanted the game to be and to flow,” Alex Caruso said.” I think that was apparent just with the runs that they went on when they played well.”
A large part of disrupting the Thunder’s flow and limiting their assists has been the impressive Pacers’ transition defense.
“Some of it’s been our transition, I think. I think we do a lot of damage there that we haven’t gotten in this series so far,” Thunder coach Daigneault said.
The Pacers have been here, too — they have led every team these playoffs by 2-1. They also won Game 4 in every round.
Indiana needs to do that again on Friday night, or this will be a best-of-three series where Oklahoma City will have momentum and home court advantage.
“We’re excited to play another game in front of our home crowd, approach this game the same way we approached yesterday,” Tyrese Haliburton said. “Just control what we can. I think the biggest thing is just playing hard. If we can do that, we can figure everything out from there.
“There’s no need to get super giddy or excited. There’s still a lot of work to be done.”
If the Pacers can do that work in Game 4 in front of their raucous home crowd, they will be in command of this series.
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