NBA Playoff Takeaways: NBA Finals

Photo by Matthew Stockman from Getty Images

These NBA Finals were the best I’ve watched in almost a decade.

The entire postseason was excellent, but the Finals were outstanding.

Up until one specific point.

Thunder defeat Pacers 4-3

Indiana Pacers

We’ll get the obvious huge moment last night a little bit later.

This team thrived in adversity.

Nobody thought they’d get here, and in game 7 after losing their star, nobody thought they had a chance.

And despite that, they lead at the end of the first half.

It was a typical Pacers performance. Everyone doing their part. They played great defense. Their first half performance was, considering the circumstances, one of their best in the postseason.

Their second half was one of their worst.

The only good player for the Pacers in the second half was T.J. McConnell, who was excellent.

But nobody else showed up. Turnovers kept mounting and mounting, and it was all she wrote late in the 3rd quarter of game 7.

It was an incredible postseason, but it’s going to be hard not to have a bad taste in their mouths after how game 7 played out.

Oklahoma City Thunder

I stopped caring about the NBA MVP award a while ago.

It went away from “Most VALUABLE Player” and had turned into “This guy had an excellent season and the other nominees have won some already, so let’s just give it to him.”

So while Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won MVP, and he was amazing this year, I thought it was wrong as Nikola Jokic should have been MVP.

My reasoning was that SGA had a great team around him, while Jokic dragged a poor team to the second round on his back alone.

But game 7 made me realize I was wrong.

Because at halftime, 4 of the 5 OKC starters had 5 points. Jalen Williams was a no show. They were blowing a massive opportunity to win their first championship.

But SGA had 16 points and 7 assists.

He dragged that team along with him in the first half, and frankly kept them in the game at a time where Indiana couldn’t seem to miss.

And once Williams and Chet Holmgren got hot, it enabled OKC to pull away and win it all.

SGA this season was the deserving Most Valuable Player, and he showed it last night.

The Almost Perfect Series

I grew up never missing an episode of How I Met Your Mother. I know lots of people did that with Game of Thrones as well.

They are TV shows we absolutely loved and adored. They were perfect in our eyes.

That’s how this series was.

Two deep teams that have great ball movement and play excellent defense.

I’m not here to debate the efficiency of the three point shot or whatever, but running down and just shooting threes wasn’t fun TV for me.

This wasn’t that. It felt like the NBA of my childhood.

And game 7 was looking like it was going to be a classic.

Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton started 3-4 from 3, and quitted the Paycom Center crowd.

And then, Haliburton slipped.

You didn’t need a replay to know that whatever happened was bad, as his reaction to it was absolutely devastating.

But the replay confirmed it was a torn Achilles.

Indiana hung on as long as they could, but not having their star eventually became too much to overcome, and game 7 ended up as a snoozer.

Much like How I Met Your Mother, Game of Thrones, or any other TV show that relates to this, there will be moments from this series we will remember forever and will always enjoy.

Haliburton’s game 1 winner. OKC’s game 4 comeback.

But when we do look back on it, we will always remember that we deserved an ending far better than the one we got.

And we’ll never get it.