INDIANAPOLIS — After an emphatic 123-107 win over the Indiana Pacers in Game 2 of the 2025 NBA Finals, Oklahoma City Thunder superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander credited his team’s bounce-back performance to a willingness to not “just throw the first punch,” but to continue to “throw all the punches, all night.”
The most important haymaker may well have been a measured counterpunch aimed squarely at the Pacers’ pick-and-roll coverage.
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“Every night, you — me, personally — try to attack the defense,” said Gilgeous-Alexander after scoring 34 points on 11-for-21 shooting with 8 assists against just 2 turnovers. “You try to just make the right play. You try to make them pay for what they throw at you, coverage-wise, scheme-wise.”
What Indiana threw at the NBA’s Most Valuable Player (and also No. 2 option Jalen Williams) in Game 1 was aggressive help in the pick-and-roll, with the defender on the player next to the screening action switching over onto the ball-handler as he turns the corner and drives to the basket, while the initial defender switches back onto the ball-handler’s now-uncovered teammate:
The Pacers’ schematic shift didn’t completely corral Oklahoma City’s two-man attack in Game 1. (Gilgeous-Alexander did finish with a game-high 38 points, after all.) It did slow things down some, though. SGA needed 30 shots to score those 38 points. The Thunder threw fewer passes than any team had in any game all season. Including plays where the ball-handler passed to someone who shot, Oklahoma City scored just 0.93 points per possession in the pick-and-roll, according to Synergy Sports tracking. And OKC’s offense lacked the flow to reach escape velocity, allowing Indiana to stay connected long enough to eventually spring one of its trademark fourth-quarter comebacks.
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“I thought Indiana is kind of an acquired taste,” Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault said after Game 2. “We haven’t played them a ton; they’re not in the West, obviously. They play a very distinct style on both ends. I felt like [in Game 2] there were a lot of things we were a little better in, and more comfortable.”
An NBA offense’s relative comfort level often comes down to space — how much of it you can generate, how freely you can move through it, and how much you can weaponize it against an opposing defense that’s trying to take it away. Oklahoma City created more of it in Game 2 by bringing its screeners higher up the floor, setting more picks on or at the edge of the Thunder’s half-court logo — 33 ball screens at least 30 feet from the rim, according to Jared Dubin of Last Night in Basketball — to give Gilgeous-Alexander, Williams and Co. a longer runway with which to build up a head of steam moving toward the paint.
After the game, Thunder center Chet Holmgren no-sold the notion that changing the location of the ball screens was intentional.
“I wouldn’t necessarily say that that’s, like, a tactical point or anything,” said Holmgren, who rebounded from a rough Game 1 with 15 points and six rebounds on Sunday. “I’d say that’s just where the screens happened to be set.”
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It’s perhaps worth noting, though, that “where the screens happened to be set” was farther away from the basket than they’d been in any Thunder game all season long …
… which, in combination with some thoughtful manipulation of Indiana’s help defenders, helped force longer rotations for the Pacers in the half-court while giving Gilgeous-Alexander and Williams more opportunities to get downhill into the lane, more cracks and crevices in the coverage in which to pull up for a jumper, and cleaner reads for when to attack the basket or kick the ball out to a waiting teammate:
All told, the Thunder scored 63 points in Game 2 on 46 plays where either the pick-and-roll ball-handler shot or he passed to someone who shot, according to Synergy — a scorching 1.37 points per possession. Six of Gilgeous-Alexander’s eight assists came on kickouts after one of those high ball screens, as he ate up the space Indiana gave him, made the simple read, and trusted his teammates to knock down the shots that clanged clear in Game 1.
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“Obviously, everyone sees the points, and how easy it may be for [Gilgeous-Alexander] to go out there and get 30, 40 points,” said Thunder swingman Aaron Wiggins, who knocked down five triples en route to 18 points in 21 minutes off of Oklahoma City’s bench. “When he’s out there sharing the ball, getting other guys involved, that’s when our team is at our best.”
And when the Thunder’s offense is at its best, it makes puncturing their phenomenal defense even harder.
“You force them into a miss, you grab the ball, get out in transition — play our best basketball,” said Pacers center Myles Turner. “But if you have to take the ball out every single time, [it] slows down our offense, obviously.”
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Case in point: With Oklahoma City scoring a mammoth 119.8 points-per-100 in the half-court, the Pacers got out in transition on just 8.7% of their offensive possessions in Game 2, according to Cleaning the Glass — their fourth-lowest rate of the season — and scored fewer than 10 fast-break points for just the seventh time in 100 regular- and postseason games.
That’s a recipe for a brutal night for Indiana, and for Oklahoma City wresting control of the run of play — if only for the night. The Thunder’s counterpunch got them Game 2, but they know the Pacers aren’t down for the count yet.
“We all calibrated to our opponent,” Daigneault said. “You have to continue to improve in a series. They’re going to be home, be very comfortable. They’ve played very well there in these playoffs. If we don’t continue to improve, we’ll get caught behind them.”
