Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was, during the competitive portion of a not-very-competitive Game 2, about as good as it is possible to be at the sport of basketball. There was an insanely cool sequence in the first half where he seemed to take a horse-hair bow and go fiddle mode on the superstrings of reality. It started with a glaring mismatch. The Thunder were up a point inside the final minute of the first quarter, and the floor was out of shape, with Andrew Nembhard switched onto Isaiah Hartenstein, Aaron Nesmith sagging off of Alex Caruso in the corner, and Gilgeous-Alexander guarded up near the arc by Thomas Bryant, a backup center. An appalling 16 seconds were left on the shot clock, an eternity for a bumbling big guy like Bryant to spend isolated against the game's very best shot creator.
The Pacers don't normally give up mismatches so easily; I don't have a good explanation for why it happened here, except that maybe they thought an abrupt change in defensive rules would be good for a couple possessions. With Bryant in a position of extreme vulnerability, Pascal Siakam sagged way off of his man, Chet Holmgren, on the left wing, and stationed himself at the nail, arms spread wide. The Pacers are excellent at help defense, and obviously the nail is primo help positioning. It's especially important to get help in place and on time against Gilgeous-Alexander, because his whole deal is unzipping the defense right down the middle with dribble drives. A defense needs to get a helper into the lane ahead of him, at precisely the right moment, in order to cut off his path to the hoop, or he is going to produce a very good shot somewhere on the floor. Here Siakam was certainly there, and not just in time but way ahead of time, forming a wall of arms. I am so used to watching Gilgeous-Alexander force his way to the middle of the court that watching this sequence play out live it seemed that his only real option was to turn down the mismatch, swing the ball to Holmgren, and trust the offense to flow into a decent shot somewhere else.
That kind of thinking is what comes from the soft brain of a pathetic blogger, a brain poisoned from watching a lifetime of Wizards games. Yes, Gilgeous-Alexander could have swung the ball, but that would've left Holmgren to hustle into a three-pointer against the long contesting arms of Siakam, or to make a quick and efficient dribble-drive against a well-oiled rotating defense. Instead, Gilgeous-Alexander used one of his sudden, freakish, odd-timed crossovers to drive not into the defense's middle, but to Bryant's left, away from the middle of the floor. The move caught Bryant hopelessly flatfooted and sucked in three Pacers defenders. Siakam wasn't one of them, but his attention was rightly drawn away from Holmgren, who drifted along the arc in order to keep a line of sight to the ball-handler. Gilgeous-Alexander made as if to shoot a floater, but at the top of his jump he whipped the ball across the court to Holmgren, who stepped into and buried a wide-open three-pointer. It was the same pass expected by my pathetic underdeveloped basketball imagination, but done in the manner of a genius: Instead of passing a teammate into a set of responsibilities generally above his pay-grade, SGA did some extra work on the front-end so that seconds later the same pass would produce as easy a shot as Chet Holmgren will ever have in an NBA playoff game.
Over the next few minutes of game time, there was a lot of this. It became clear in the first half that Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder had mapped Indiana's defensive rotations, down to a scary level of detail. Gilgeous-Alexander or Jalen Williams would lope into some downhill running room with absolute confidence that the Pacer sliding into the lane would be Tyrese Haliburton, or T.J. McConnell, or another of Indiana's guards, and take another aggressive dribble into contact; next time down, when the helper was Siakam or Myles Turner, the kick-out pass to a corner shooter would come with startling precision and timing. This didn't quite open the floodgates—Oklahoma City produced a 118 offensive rating in the first half, good and healthy but only two points per 100 possessions better than their regular season performance—but that the Thunder could score efficiently at all gave them a huge advantage during the part of the game when the Pacers just absolutely fucking could not.
Give most of the credit for this to Oklahoma City's incredible defense. It's worth nothing, though, that a couple of Indiana's best dudes were pretty lousy in the game's early stages. Siakam, Indiana's first option on offense, was dreadful: The Pacers labored to set him up with a mismatch on the low block, and he backed his way directly into a turnover; he had a runout against Holmgren and lumbered into a flailing mess of a bricked layup; at the end of the first quarter, McConnell passed him into a wide-open look from the arc, but he took too long to load up and was thwarted by the buzzer. It wasn't just Siakam: Too often the Pacers found themselves in situations where Turner or Nesmith or Bennedict Mathurin would need to do some dribbling, sometimes just to complete a hotly contested hand-off but often to try to penetrate the world's best defense. It's a consequence of bringing an overachieving egalitarian outfit to the dang Finals: Inevitably the pressures will force moments of white-knuckled improvisation, and it's in these moments that you are reminded why the Pacers tend to avoid isolation offense, and try their damnedest to avoid facing dug-in defenses.
It eventually became impossible to ignore that Haliburton was not contributing many shots or points to an Indiana attack that was struggling mightily to keep up. A slow half from Haliburton isn't usually an emergency: Whereas the Thunder would quite simply die if an opposing defense figured out how to shut down Gilgeous-Alexander, the Pacers are built so that their scoring can and should come from lots of places. Richard Jefferson, too prominent a part of a disappointingly lousy broadcast trio, honed in on Haliburton's quiet performance during the third quarter, energetically referring to Haliburton as Indiana's "engine" and "the head of the snake," and suggested that the Pacers were getting shut down largely because the Thunder were stifling Indiana's point guard. This went on for whole minutes.
Later Sunday night, after Oklahoma City finished off a 123–107 victory to even the series, I abducted Jefferson at harpoon-point and brought him to my lair, buried in deep caverns beneath an imposing mountain range. There I sat him in a heavy chair under a single harsh overhead light and subjected him to ruthless interrogation.
"Richard, would you care to guess which rotation player led the Indiana Pacers in usage this season?"
Jefferson, clearly frightened and uncomfortable, managed to answer with confidence. "Tyrese Haliburton." I pursed my lips and shook my head disappointedly, even sadly. Jefferson's eyes became troubled.
"Wrong," I answered. "The Pacers were led in usage by Pascal Siakam. Would you care to guess which rotation player was second on the Indiana Pacers in usage this season?"
Embarrassed, concerned for his safety, but still confident of his answer, Jefferson replied, "OK, you got me, it's Tyrese Haliburton, fine." This time I stared into his eyes with a look of deepest disgust. Seconds ticked by in terrible silence.
"Wrong." Jefferson flinched, as if struck. "T.J. McConnell was second on the Pacers in usage. Would you care to guess which player was third on the Indiana Pacers in usage this season?"
More silence. Jefferson's lower lip trembled. Veins stood out on his forehead. Sweat darkened his collar. Soon fat tears crested his lower eyelids and rolled down his glistening visage, beneath eyes that now darted in shame, searching the chamber's corners for help that would never arrive. "I-i-it's got to be ... come on, man ... th-this time i-i-it's got to be Tyr—" I cut him off with a wave of the hand, a clear dismissal. Jefferson broke. Painful sobs shook his chest and echoed into the caverns, down into the planet's roots, where for all I know they will go on sounding forever.
Anyway Jefferson is back home now, tired and ashamed but not otherwise worse for wear. I like to think some part of him is grateful for having learned a valuable lesson, about the Indiana Pacers.
Tyrese Haliburton is not "the head" of any snake. Three Pacers rotation players used more possessions this season than Haliburton; his helping, at 21 percent, is barely above average, below Cleveland's De'Andre Hunter and in the range of players like Quentin Grimes, Devin Vassell, and Malik Beasley. If anyone says to you that Quentin Grimes is "the head of the snake" of an NBA offense, you should assume that person has suffered a recent severe head wound, and call the paramedics. In the first half of games this season, Haliburton used just over 20 percent of Pacers possessions, slotting behind even Myles damn Turner in Indiana's attack. Haliburton does not rank in the NBA's top 60 in isolations per game; he doesn't rank in the NBA's top 40 in handoffs or drives per game; he doesn't rank in the NBA's top 20 in pick-and-rolls; he shows up not at all on the post-ups leaderboard; he's not even in the top 20 in front-court touches. His job is not to create shots for himself, which is a good thing because he's not very good at that. Haliburton's job, in Rick Carlisle's offense, is to make hit-ahead passes, to swing the ball, to space the floor, to work screens, and to take late-clock shots when necessary. Jalen Brunson, one of the NBA's premier shot-creators, handles the ball for about six seconds per touch, Gilgeous-Alexander for about 5.55 seconds; Haliburton handles the ball for about 3.65 seconds per touch, less time than is used by Aaron Holiday, Scottie Pippen Jr., and Bronny James. Haliburton is not that dude!
The Pacers will probably need more buckets from Haliburton going forward, not because he is Their Beating Heart or whatever but because balance is absolutely essential to Indiana's offense. They are not a snake, but if they were a snake, you would have to say they are a headless one. Haliburton would like to have a better start in Game 3. "I just got to figure out how to be better earlier in games," he said Sunday, after the loss. It might not look like more on-ball work, thank God. Haliburton is a good ball-handler but he lacks the juice to beat the primary defenders Oklahoma City can put in front of him, and fighting for switches just means taking all the pep out of Indiana's zippy attack. Better to use Haliburton as a Rip Hamilton type, zooming around away from the ball. "We had some success there, me playing off the pitch a little bit more, flying around rather than if I'm in that high ball screen, which I feel like I am really successful at, but that gives them a chance to really load up, pack the paint," he said after the game.
The differences between the two cool telegenic all-star guards in this series can be confusing, in particular during stretches of play where the Thunder are kicking the bejeezus out of the Pacers. Gilgeous-Alexander spent the middle quarters of this game absolutely eviscerating Indiana's point-of-attack defense, downing screens, splitting traps, wrong-footing mismatched defenders, stringing together delicious dribble moves, dishing pocket passes with both hands, rifling skip passes to the weak corner, and coolly dropping in buckets from every one of his favorite spots. He made everyone else on the court look underpowered, not just Haliburton.
To be sure, I did not spend an evening terrorizing Richard Jefferson in a bone-strewn subterranean dungeon out of some entirely wrong conviction that Haliburton should be excused from all scoring duties. Certainly the Pacers could've used more buckets from their point guard. But it's wild and infuriating, to me, to praise the Pacers for the brand of basketball that got them to the Finals and then to express exasperation when they don't now do something entirely outside of that identity, and while insisting that their success comes down to one guy doing a bunch of stuff that actually he is not too good at. Haliburton is not Shai Gilgeous-Alexander; he is not declining to be SGA; it is not a consequence of good defense that Haliburton is not Going SGA Mode. The Pacers are doing a different thing, a thing that works for them, and in order for it to work they need their point guard to do the things he is good at and nothing else.
The gulf of shot creation abilities and responsibilities between Gilgeous-Alexander and Haliburton winds up making for not much of an observation, because no one else in basketball can do even a respectable generic-brand-level impersonation of Gilgeous-Alexander, not when it comes to ungluing a half-court defense off the dribble. Other things happened in this game—Mark Daigneault rolled with two bigs after playing small-ish in Game 1; Aaron Wiggins was terrific off the bench; Johnny Furphy touched the court—but The Thing That Happened was Gilgeous-Alexander methodically and efficiently vivisecting Indiana's defense during a stretch of play where Indiana's depth let them down and they struggled to string together coherent possessions. The score got out of hand, and the Pacers never mustered up much more than a couple halfhearted countercharges. They had a chance toward the end of the first half to get their feet under them, but instead they spent about 50 seconds exposing every one of their own deficiencies, trying a series of isolations and getting absolutely nowhere, despite securing a sequence of three straight offensive rebounds. It is precisely when their players try to take matters into their own hands that Indiana's offense goes pinwheeling into the dumpster.
This is not to say that this series will be decided simply by whether the Thunder play well. Matters are not so securely in their hands, and the Pacers still have home-court advantage. Indiana's shooters had a rotten first half, and the second quarter was a comprehensive mess, with a couple of the goofs that have had nice moments in these playoffs—Mathurin, Obi Toppin, Ben Sheppard—failing to hold their own at either end. The Pacers will have more juice back in Indianapolis, and Rick Carlisle will have some stuff for Daigneault and Gilgeous-Alexander to work out on the fly. But if you are waiting for A Hero To Emerge, and especially if you are expecting that hero to be Tyrese Haliburton, you are watching the wrong game! The Pacers pass and run and scrap and share, and the safe money is on them sticking with horse that brung them, for no better reason than because it's the only one they've got.
