The Oklahoma City Thunder secured their first championship in franchise history with a 103-91 Game 7 victory over the Indiana Pacers on Sunday, etching their place in the pantheon of basketball history as one of the great teams in pro basketball history.
Legendary Company
With their 84th win on Sunday, the Thunder joined the Chicago Bulls to become one of two franchises to win at least 84 games in an NBA championship-winning season. The Thunder’s 11.8-point per game win differential also stands as the fourth highest in league history, trailing only the 1971 Milwaukee Bucks, the 2017 Golden State Warriors and the 1996 Chicago Bulls.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander also joined perhaps the most elite club in NBA history, becoming just the eighth player in the last 40 years to win the regular season MVP, Finals and Finals MVP in the same season. His company? Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan and LeBron James. If you’re counting, that’s six first-ballot Hall of Famers and a still-active player widely considered the greatest of all time.
Defending Like They’re Young
The Thunder also became the second youngest team in history to win an NBA championship, averaging 25.6 years of age. The 1977 Portland TrailBlazers remain the youngest title-winning team in league history with an average age of 25.03 years old, though the Thunder surely hope to avoid a fate similar to what those Blazers faced in the years immediately following their lone title as a franchise.
This Oklahoma City Thunder group will almost certainly go down as one of the great defensive units ever. OKC’s +131 turnover differential in 23 postseason games nearly doubled the next highest turnover differential in NBA playoff history, belonging to the 2019 Toronto Raptors (+79). According to Owen Phillips, the gap between the 2025 Thunder and the 2019 Raptors is equivalent to the gap between the Raptors and No. 63 on that list.
What I'll remember most about this OKC championship run is how dominant they were in the turnover differential column. The gap between them and #2 is equal to the gap between #2 and #63 pic.twitter.com/dLy2pELmMi
— Owen Phillips (@owenlhjphillips) June 23, 2025
The Thunder (+1,247) also set the NBA record for highest combined point differential in a regular season and postseason in NBA history, eclipsing the ‘71 Bucks (+1,208) for the all-time mark by 41 points. By almost any statistical metric, this crew from Oklahoma City ranks as one of the ten, if not five best teams in the history of the league.
Heartbreak Take
All of that being said, it’s impossible to talk about the events that transpired in Game 7 (LOG) on Sunday without leading with the tragic Achilles injury that Indiana Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton suffered just past the midway point of the first quarter.
As an observer, it felt like watching a car accident in real time. We all knew the risks Haliburton carried by playing on a strained calf. We vividly remember KD falling to the floor in Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals after being pressured to come back. And still, bad-faith actors in the media like Skip Bayless persisted with the idea that the most clutch player in sports was, for some reason, ducking smoke.
Please make no mistake, what a clown like Bayless or any other figure in the media said had nothing to do with Haliburton’s willingness to leave it all on the floor on Sunday. A championship game of any kind is the pinnacle of an athlete’s entire existence, and the Pacers’ improbable journey to Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals only raised the stakes.
Sobering Reality
Championships are not a birthright for basketball fans born in Indiana, like they are for fans born in Los Angeles and Boston. We’re talking about a franchise that only ever reached this series once before, and when they did in 2000, they ran into a history-defining juggernaut in the Shaq/Kobe Lakers and lost in six games.
The sobering reality for a team like this Pacers’ core is that there is no guarantee they’ll ever be back. History already indicates the odds were stacked against that possibility even before Haliburton’s injury. But for a player like Haliburton, who lives and breathes the city he plays in and the fanbase he plays for, being on the floor for Game 7 was really the only option. I don’t think he would have changed his mind even if you told him the outcome. It’s the athletic equivalent of asking a decorated warrior to put down his sword before battle. Living with the consequences is easier to accept than living with what you could have done.
My TV Ratings and Small Market Diatribe
In spite of all the pre-series doom and gloom surrounding market size and TV ratings, Game 7 delivered on the Nielsen charts. Peak viewership was 19.3 million viewers and it pulled an average audience of 16.3 million viewers, making it the most-watched NBA game of the 2020s. While casual fans of the league groveled at the matchup, the reality is that it takes new blood on the biggest stage to build brands and moments that command attention.
The dirty secret in sports is that market size translating to star power is a myth. The most popular athlete in American sports, Caitlin Clark, literally plays in the same arena as the Pacers. Perhaps her closest competitor in that regard is Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who plays in the 31st largest metropolitan market in the country. Hell, Josh Allen gets consistent media coverage and he plays in a city that most of the country can’t even find on a map.
Moments Build Stars, Not Market
The truth is, market size stopped determining the popularity of athletes pretty much as soon as social media took off. Stars are built by their performance in the arena first and foremost. Haliburton’s heroics throughout this postseason made that especially true, as I would wager a good chunk of those 19.3 million viewers on Sunday were tuning in to see if he could somehow complete the impossible run that captivated even the most casual sports fans.
Another reality is that the hundreds of millions of Americans living in cities outside of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago don’t care what city the athlete who captivates them through YouTube highlights and TikTok edits plays in. I advise the ratings doomers to stop worrying about the league’s bottom line and let the storylines play out as the sport intends them to, because that’s how you build a league with enough entertainment value to transcend the teams that play in it.
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