INDIANAPOLIS — Before Game 3 of the 2025 NBA Finals, Rick Carlisle did not want to talk about the Indiana Pacers’ pickup points — how far away from their own basket they would have a defender meet the Oklahoma City Thunder’s ball-handlers. Specifically, the one who’d averaged 36 points per game through the first two games of the series and just got named the NBA’s Most Valuable Player.
“I’m not going to talk about strategy,” Carlisle said, cutting off the question before it could even escape the asker’s mouth. (Which, all things considered, is a pretty aggressive pickup point, Coach.)
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After Game 3 of the 2025 NBA Finals, Carlisle … still didn’t really want to talk about strategy. But he did want to praise his players for holding the Thunder to 18 points on 6-for-17 shooting with five turnovers in the fourth quarter — an exceptional defensive effort that helped the Pacers seal a 116-107 victory and take a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven series, setting up an absolutely massive Game 4 on Friday in downtown Indianapolis.
“I mean, we have great, great guys on our team,” Carlisle said. “Things that make sense aren’t a hard sell for our guys.”
One thing that makes sense: If the Thunder’s best and most consistent offense comes when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has the ball … what if we tried to make it so he doesn’t have the ball?
The Pacers, far and away the most aggressive full-court defense in the NBA, cranked the pressure knob up to 11 in Game 3 and finished with 33 possessions of press defense, according to Synergy — more than Game 1 (28) and nearly twice as many as Game 2 (17). Oklahoma City was able to break it at times, getting into the teeth of the coverage for 4-on-3 attacks that yielded layups or swing-swing 3-pointers.
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More often than not, though, they didn’t: The Thunder scored 30 points on those trips — 0.91 points per possession, significantly below their overall offensive efficiency mark in this postseason. And, critically, many of those trips were commandeered by players not named Gilgeous-Alexander.
Through his MVP-winning regular season, Gilgeous-Alexander averaged 71.1 touches per game, possessing the ball for an average of 6.6 minutes per contest. Through the first three rounds of the 2025 NBA playoffs, which saw Oklahoma City sweep the Grizzlies, outlast the Nuggets and outclass the Timberwolves, he averaged 76.3 touches per game, spending 7.8 minutes a night on the ball.
Through two games in these Finals — one that saw the Pacers essentially dare him to beat them by doing everything himself, and another that saw the Thunder shift tactics to make his life easier — Gilgeous-Alexander was averaging 73.5 touches per game, holding on to the ball for 8.6 minutes per game. In Game 3, though, Carlisle decided to see what would happen if Indiana made it as hard as possible for Gilgeous-Alexander to even receive the ball, let alone hold on to it. The result: Just 64 touches and 6.5 minutes of possession, with the rest of those plays redistributed to players who — while very good and capable of doing positive things with them — are not the MVP of the whole stinkin’ league.
The Pacers did dramatically extend their pickup points on SGA, sending a defender — chiefly Andrew Nembhard, with Ben Sheppard and Aaron Nesmith also pulling shifts — to greet him an average of 68 feet away from their own hoop, according to Owen Phillips of The F5.
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A basketball court, you’ll remember, is 94 feet long. This means that Gilgeous-Alexander, on average, only had a quarter of a court of breathing room before a Pacer was directly in his grill.
Again: That was chiefly Nembhard, who’s been one of the best perimeter defenders in the world for the last two seasons, and is making the NBA-watching world acutely aware of that in these playoffs. Gilgeous-Alexander scored just six points on 2-for-7 shooting with Nembhard on him in Game 3, according to NBA Advanced Stats’ matchup data, with two assists and three turnovers.
“I think Andrew is doing a great job of staying in front, being physical, just making it hard on him, just trying to give him different looks,” said Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton. “He’s the MVP, the best scorer in the NBA. Feels like when he wakes up he has 30. “… With a guy like Shai, you can never give him the same look. Drew does a great job of mixing things up. We’re just trying to make life hard on him as best as we can.”
One of those turnovers came on literally the first possession of the game, with Nembhard sprinting from the opening tip into SGA’s lap, jostling and jousting for every inch … and eventually getting the almost preternaturally calm, cool and collected superstar to throw a quick elbow to Nembhard’s chops. The uncharacteristic rush of blood to the head earned Gilgeous-Alexander an offensive foul eight seconds into the game, got the Pacers an early extra possession and instantly set the tone for the kind of frustration Indiana intended to elicit all night long.
“He’s a competitor — got to give it to him,” said Thunder stopper Luguentz Dort, a teammate of both Gilgeous-Alexander and Nembhard on the Canadian men’s national basketball team. “He’s been like that since high school. It’s not new. He takes the challenge every time. He’s a tough player. Knowing he’s going against the best player in the league, he’ll give it his best shot. Give him a lot of credit for that.”
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At Thursday’s practice session for both teams, nobody gave too much credence to the notion that Nembhard has taken up residence under Gilgeous-Alexander’s skin — not Nembhard, not Thunder coach Mark Daigneault, and not the MVP himself.
“I’m not too sure,” Gilgeous-Alexander said, a smile playing across his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t feel emotionally agitated at all. So I don’t know what’s going on. But I don’t feel emotionally worked up at all.”
You’d forgive him if he was, though, after dealing with the aggressive ball denial of Nembhard and Sheppard and Co. — what Carlisle called “absolute, full-capacity effort, all the time,” in trying to prevent Gilgeous-Alexander from even finding his way to a catch. And with Indiana’s bigs playing him higher up the floor in pick-and-rolls. And with the Pacers occasionally sending a second defender at him, springing double-teams when he tried to isolate in the post and trapping the ball in the pick-and-roll. And with Indiana consistently looking for opportunities to go after him defensively, putting him in actions and forcing him to deal with the quickness of Haliburton in space, handle the physicality of Pascal Siakam in the paint, and navigate ball screens and traffic.
“I think that’s what we’re trying to do: just make him work on both ends,” Game 3 folk hero T.J. McConnell told me after Game 1. “I mean, he’s a great player. And you know, when great players play a lot of minutes, it can kind of get into their legs. … It’s a process thing.”
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As is the full-court pressing. The intensity, physicality and constancy with which Indiana hectored Gilgeous-Alexander on the inbounds quickly led Oklahoma City to look for alternate pathways to matriculating the ball up the court.
By the midpoint of the first quarter, Dort and Alex Caruso were bringing the ball up the floor; with just under a minute to go in the frame, 7-foot-1 optical illusion Chet Holmgren dribbled the length of the court, with Pacers center Thomas Bryant shadowing him the entire way. By the fourth quarter, it was largely All-Star running buddy Jalen Williams on the handle late, with Gilgeous-Alexander carrying Nembhard around the court like an unpaid debt, searching for a moment’s respite, some room to breathe, a second to think.
“There’s a lot of guys that can make plays and handle on the team,” Gilgeous-Alexander said Thursday. “I don’t have to be on it 24/7. There’s moments where it is beneficial for the team for me to touch it early. It’s a mixture. It’s a blend, just like anything else.”
All told, non-SGA Thunderers initiated the offense on 66 possessions in Game 3, according to Phillips — a season-high for Oklahoma City. In a related story, the Thunder posted a 105.9 offensive rating, according to Cleaning the Glass — their 12th-least-efficient offensive performance of the season (OKC’s 5-7 in those 12 games) — and committed a postseason-high 19 turnovers.
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Six of those cough-ups came off the fingertips of Gilgeous-Alexander himself — tied for his third-highest mark of the season, and his most in any game since late December. And by the closing stages of the game, with SGA taking just three shots without an assist in the fourth quarter, it certainly felt as though the Pacers’ process had paid dividends — that the sum total of the effort they’d put into making things difficult had muted the MVP, had relegated him to being a bystander.
“It’s physical. It’s tough, gritty. It’s really, really hard,” Siakam said Thursday. “You feel every single possession out there when you’re on the floor.”
Gilgeous-Alexander didn’t chalk up his quiet close to the effects of feeling all those possessions — “We’ve had games like that where I’ve been great late, games where I’ve stunk late” — but he did acknowledge that, with just one day between Games 3 and 4, he couldn’t allow fatigue to be a factor come Friday.
“You got to suck it up,” Gilgeous-Alexander said Thursday. “There’s a maximum four games left in the season. It’s what you worked the whole season for. It’s what you worked all summer for. To me, the way I see it, you got to suck it up, get it done and try to get a win.”
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