INDIANAPOLIS — After spending most of Game 2 of the 2025 NBA Finals searching for any angle of approach, any avenue through which to access the highest-value real estate on the floor, only to come up empty time and again against a suffocating Oklahoma City Thunder defense, the Indiana Pacers knew two things for certain. Tyrese Haliburton, fresh off one of the most frustrating performances of what’s largely been a charmed postseason, laid them both out in his postgame news conference.
First:
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“We have to do a better job of getting to the paint,” he said.
And next:
“It’s a lot easier said than done,” he added.
The Pacers scorched the Eastern Conference, scoring 119.7 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions through the first three rounds of the 2025 NBA playoffs. Through two games in these Finals, though, the Thunder’s league-best defense has held Indiana to just 109.3 points-per-100; that would’ve slotted in between the ghastly Pelicans and Nets for 28th place in the league during the regular season.
The Pacers thrived during the regular season by pressuring the rim, ranking ninth in points scored off drives to the basket and 11th in points in the paint; they largely kept that up through the first three rounds of the playoffs. Through two games against OKC, though, their interior scoring dropped dramatically — a testament to the Thunder’s penchant for packing the paint and for smothering rotations that turn the key into a no-fly zone.
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“It starts with pressuring the ball before it crosses half-court, stopping teams from scoring in transition so we can set our defense,” Thunder big man Chet Holmgren said at Tuesday’s practice session ahead of Wednesday’s Game 3. “Defeating actions — whether it’s screens or slide-outs or whatever — kind of controlling them within those. It makes it harder to get to the paint in the first place.”
The Thunder and guard Alex Caruso haven’t made things easy for Indiana Pacers forward Pascal Siakam during the NBA Finals. (AP Photo/Nate Billings)
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If it was easy to counteract all that pressure and find a through line into the lane, you can believe that Haliburton and Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle would’ve had a roadmap drawn before the series even started. But a truly great defense forces you to dig deep into the bag of tricks, to flip all the way to the back page of the playbook.
“You’ve got to mix things up,” Haliburton said Tuesday. “You can’t give these guys the same dosage, the same look of anything. If you try to run high pick-and-roll all game, they just crawl into you, really pack the paint, nothing is open. There’s got to be a mix of things.”
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If Haliburton running the high pick-and-roll is Indiana’s fastball, then its changeup is running offense through Pascal Siakam — a big, quick, lithe, aggressive and active three-level scorer whose surfeit of skills bedeviled the Bucks, Cavaliers and Knicks. Siakam earned recognition as the Most Valuable Player of the Pacers’ Eastern Conference finals victory and entered the series drawing plenty of respect — and, with it, defensive attention — from the Thunder for what reserve stopper Alex Caruso called “the diversity that he brings offensively.”
“You know, he’s been shooting the ball extremely well in the playoffs — catch-and-shoot from 3, off-the-dribble in the midrange,” Caruso said Tuesday. “And then, obviously, he’s 6-8, 6-9, rangy, so if he gets close to the rim, he’s got great touch. And he’s a physical player, so you know, he draws a lot of fouls.”
Indiana forward Obi Toppin said Tuesday, for the most part, the Pacers “don’t try to headhunt anybody” through meticulous switching and cross-matching. (Try telling that to Jalen Brunson.) What differentiates Siakam, though, is that he’ll go into search-and-destroy mode when he sees the opportunity to seize a mismatch and draw it out into deep water.
“He’s one of the few guys on their team that, like, really looks for isolation to score,” Caruso said. “A lot of the other guys, it’s kind of through the flow of their offense and the pace. But he’s a guy that, you know, they run sets for, to get isos. The minutes that I have just kind of match up with him, so [I’m] just trying to make it tough on him.”
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Caruso and the rest of the Thunder have found some success on that front. After averaging 24.8 points on 17.5 field-goal attempts per game in the Eastern Conference finals against New York, shooting 52.9% on 2-point tries and 50% from 3-point land, Siakam has had a much rougher go of it against OKC. He’s averaging 17 points on 13 shots per game through two Finals contests, having missed 12 of his 20 attempts inside the arc and four of his six launches from beyond it, and shooting just 37.5% on drives to the basket.
“Yeah, they were super aggressive, which is what they do,” Siakam said after going 3 of 11 from the floor in Game 2. “They are a disruptive kind of team.”
Untrammeled demon Caruso and All-Defensive Team selection Jalen Williams have led the charge in disrupting Siakam, most frequently serving as the All-Star forward’s primary defender … though, as Williams explained Tuesday, that distinction is a bit of a misnomer.
“I don’t really notice having the bulk [of the responsibility for] guarding him, just because defense is so team-oriented,” Williams said. “I can only do my part correctly, which is just make it tough for him. Obviously, there’s some scouting and analytical stuff that goes into playing defense against somebody that good, and somebody that can affect the game with their scoring … I think my team has done a good job just being there for me when I’m beat.”
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Williams then smiled and quickly added, “You try not to get beat as much, obviously.”
Siakam has been able to beat Oklahoma City’s swarm at times in this series. The Pacers found some success playing through him in their stunning Game 1 win and for a brief burst in the second quarter of Game 2:
Asked after Game 1 if he was at all concerned about those Siakam bully-ball opportunities against his small-ball-shifted starting lineup, Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault said, “Only if they take advantage of it.”
More often than not, Indiana hasn’t, struggling to feature Siakam in the attack. Siakam averaged 35 total frontcourt touches per game, with 3.8 coming in the post and 4.6 in the paint, during the regular season, according to Second Spectrum tracking. That’s down to 29 frontcourt touches per game against Oklahoma City, with just four total post-ups and five total paint touches through two games.
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“Some of it is the cost of doing business, to be able to get perimeter speed on the court, get more switching in the game,” Daigneault said after Game 1. “It’s obviously something that is a tradeoff. … When we’re small, we have to be pressure-oriented and contain the ball.”
The Thunder maintained their pressure in Game 2 while doing a better job of keeping the ball out of the paint, using their quickness and length to front the post, clog passing lanes and generally make it seem unappetizing to try to thread the needle. In Sunday’s loss, multiple Pacers either missed opportunities to get him the ball when he’d drawn a switch onto a smaller defender, were unable to find a good angle to make the entry pass, or both:
“You can’t play too careful against Oklahoma [City], or otherwise you’ll never get a basket,” Carlisle said Tuesday. “You have to be aggressive.”
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The combination of Oklahoma City’s increased off-ball activity, Daigneault’s decision to play bigger lineups in Game 2 — no more Ajay Mitchell, no Isiah Joe minutes after halftime, more run for Aaron Wiggins and Kenrich Williams, and a handful of Holmgren-Isaiah Hartenstein double-big minutes — removing some of Siakam’s hunting grounds, and Indiana’s inconsistent reading and feeding mismatches on the rare occasions when they appeared resulted in a quiet night for Siakam … and, perhaps, some frustration.
Just as frustrating: When Siakam did wind up matched up against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — the closest thing to a weak link in a lot of Thunder lineups — the MVP promptly made a chair-pulls-and-deflected-entry-passes case that he’s not a weak link, actually:
“He’s obviously a really good player — he can attack you in many ways, very versatile,” Gilgeous-Alexander said Tuesday. “We’ve seen it throughout the playoffs: He’s won at a high level, he knows what it takes. Honestly, with guys like that, you just try to make it difficult for them. They can almost check every box.”
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Unless, of course, they can’t get the ball.
“They’re smaller defenders, but they swarm the ball,” Pacers center Myles Turner said. “What looks open may not be open the next second. A lot of them are bang-bang plays, and it’s just finding the moment when the moment presents itself.”
To get their offense unstuck, the Pacers might have to manufacture some moments for Siakam against whichever smaller defender he can get his hands on. Too much mismatch hunting can lead to stagnation; not enough, though, could lead to starvation.
“Yeah, you just got to balance it out. … We got to be stronger with the ball, obviously, but also, be decisive,” Siakam said Tuesday. “Whatever we decide to do, just do it.”
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At Tuesday’s practice, Daigneault deflected praise for limiting Siakam like a lollipopped entry pass: “I don’t want to, like, make that a foregone conclusion at this point. They’re coming home. He’s going to be very aggressive, Haliburton is going to be very aggressive. They play really well here.” He would allow, though, that his players had done “a decent job, conceptually, against their team in the first two games.”
“I think the strength of their team is they play a certain way that elevates everybody — I think we’ve seen that,” Daigneault said. “You really can’t key on an individual player, an individual thing. You really have to defend them conceptually, because that’s how they’re existing on offense, and just trust that if you do that, it will lower the overall effectiveness of the individual players.”
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If the Thunder can once again lower the overall effectiveness of Siakam within Indiana’s ecosystem in Game 3, it’ll dramatically improve their chances of wresting back home-court advantage and regaining control in this best-of-seven sprint to the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy.
“It’s a hard job,” Gilgeous-Alexander said of guarding up against a threat like Siakam. “But if you want to win, you’ve got to get it done.”
The same holds for Carlisle, whom Haliburton praised Tuesday as “a basketball savant,” and whose creativity and incisiveness are required, now more than ever.
“We’re going to have to adjust and create better situations,” Carlisle said. “We’re going to have to be better.”
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