When the Indiana Pacers host Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Wednesday (8:30 p.m. ET, ABC), it will be the first Finals game in Indianapolis in a quarter century. Yet this Pacers’ run is still ahead of schedule — if it was even scheduled at all.
Despite reaching the Eastern Conference finals last spring, Indiana was a heavy underdog to get back as the No. 4 seed, let alone advance further. The Pacers needed to knock off a 64-win Cleveland Cavaliers in Round 2, then win a second series over the No. 3 seeded New York Knicks without the benefit of home-court advantage.
Using data from SportsOddsHistory.com, ESPN Research found that just two Finals teams in the past four decades had worse title odds to start the season than Indiana’s plus-5,000 (50-1) at ESPN BET Sportsbook: the 2020 Miami Heat (plus-7,500) and 2002 New Jersey Nets (plus-6,000), with the 2022 Boston Celtics also at plus-5,000.
The history of other surprise finalists tells us their success doesn’t tend to carry over into championships. But between the runs and the comebacks they’ve pulled off along the way, the Pacers have made history accomplishing the improbable.
Let’s take a closer look at how Indiana compares to other unexpected Finals teams, what it says about this Pacers squad and if we should’ve seen this coming.
Surprise conference finalists haven’t gotten back
The skepticism about Indiana entering this season might have stemmed from what has happened to recent teams like the Pacers, who have come largely out of nowhere to reach the conference finals. Last year’s run as the No. 6 seed benefited from injuries to Giannis Antetokounmpo as well as multiple Knicks.
Since the first round went to best-of-seven series in 2003, five teams have made the conference finals with pre-playoff odds to win the title of plus-5,000 or more, according to SportsOddsHistory.com. Remarkably, all five of those have come since 2018, as upsets have become more common in the NBA playoffs.
Of those five teams, Indiana is the first to return to the conference finals, let alone advance deeper.
Three of the five clubs ended up losing in the first round the following year. Before the Pacers, only the Celtics returned to the conference finals at any point after their unlikely run, doing so in 2020 before reaching the NBA Finals in 2022 with only a handful of players left from 2018 and a new coach.
Like Indiana, the 2018-19 Portland Trail Blazers and 2020-21 Atlanta Hawks hoped getting to the conference finals, thanks to upsets and a favorable bracket, would be the start of something. Instead, it proved to be the high point of their runs. Neither has won a playoff series since.
Given the age of Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton (25) and the team’s supporting players, that kind of outcome seemed unlikely for Indiana. But something similar could have been said of Trae Young and Atlanta four years ago. It was certainly no sure thing that the Pacers’ 2024 playoff success would translate again this spring.
The huge upset over the Cavaliers
Indiana benefited from having Boston knocked out of the opposite side of the East bracket a year after the Celtics swept the Pacers en route to the title last postseason. However, to take advantage of that, the Pacers had to pull off a shocking upset.
A few factors conspired to diminish the impact of the Pacers knocking out Cleveland, whose 64 wins were tied for the third most among teams that failed to reach the conference finals. In addition to New York taking down a 61-win Boston team simultaneously, in the West the 68-win Oklahoma City Thunder trailed multiple times in a seven-game scare against the Denver Nuggets. Those other series divided the attention.
Additionally, Indiana might have been a victim of its success. The win over the Cavaliers almost transpired too quickly. After one of their trademark comebacks to win Game 2 with Cleveland All-Stars Darius Garland and Evan Mobley sitting out, the Pacers lost Game 3 at home by 22 points. But they responded with a 20-point win and took any potential drama out of the series by closing it out on the road in five games.
Still, based on pre-series odds, Indiana was one of the 10 most unlikely winners since 2000. And of the upsets that took place in the first two rounds, the Pacers joined the 2023 Heat as the only teams in that span that parlayed the result into a trip to the Finals.
Where does Indy sit among the most surprising finalists?
That cutoff of SportsOddsHistory.com’s preseason data leaves out some other notable preseason surprises. The 1977-78 Seattle SuperSonics, coming off a 40-42 season that cost coach Bill Russell his job, presumably would have had longer odds to win the title compared to this season’s Pacers. So too would the 1976-77 Trail Blazers, who had gone 37-45 the season before, with Bill Walton limited to 51 games due to injuries.
All of those teams, however, had established themselves as stronger Finals contenders by the start of the playoffs. The 1977 Blazers, 2002 Nets and 2022 Celtics were all top-two seeds, while the 1978 Sonics and 2020 Heat both benefited from wide-open playoffs due to uncertainty around Walton’s injury and the Orlando bubble, respectively.
If we instead look at title odds to start the postseason, the Pacers (plus-6,600 at ESPN BET) are again in rare company. SportsOddsHistory.com’s data goes back to 1973, and again, just two finalists were bigger long shots: the 2023 Heat (plus-12,500 coming out of the play-in tournament as the No. 8 seed) and the 1981 Houston Rockets (plus-10,000).
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Tyrese Haliburton wanted to make the Pacers fun again
Tyrese Haliburton joins Malika Andrews to reflect on leading Indiana to its first Finals since 2000 and bringing joy and success back to the Pacers.
The 1981 Rockets probably stand alone as the single most surprising Finals team since the ABA-NBA merger. Although we don’t have preseason title odds, Houston was coming off a 41-41 season and had a worse record in 1980-81 (40-42), but knocked off the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers in Round 1 and a 52-win San Antonio Spurs team in the conference semifinals before a sub-.500 conference finals matchup with the Kansas City Kings.
Like most of these teams, the Rockets saw their run end with a Finals loss. Should Indiana go on to win the Finals, it would be the least likely champion by a wide margin in terms of pre-playoffs odds. Now, that honor is shared by the 1995 Rockets, who were the defending champions but seeded sixth in a loaded Western Conference, and the 2011 Dallas Mavericks — both plus-1,800 entering the postseason.
Based on the percentages implied by the odds, those teams were considered more than three times more likely to win the title than the Pacers.
Should we have seen this coming?
This wasn’t a case where advanced statistics secretly foretold a Pacers’ Finals run. By winning 49 games, Indiana outperformed its plus-2.1 net rating, which ranked 13th in the NBA — just behind the Pacers’ first-round opponent, the Milwaukee Bucks, as well as the Detroit Pistons.
Looking deeper, there were reasons to believe in Indiana. The Pacers had two seasons where they started 9-14 before finishing 41-18 and had a 57-win pace over a full season. In part, that reflected Haliburton’s return to form after a slow start, but it was also a product of health.
Indiana struggled with starters Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith injured early in the campaign, and went 5-9 in the 14 games both missed in November and December. Adjusting to include only lineups with players in teams’ projected rotations, the Pacers ranked second in the East in Dan Feldman’s pre-playoff analysis in the Dunc’d On Basketball NBA newsletter — ahead of the Celtics.
At the same time, Indiana was still a hair behind Cleveland by this metric, without the benefit of home-court advantage. And it’s worth noting that the Pacers weren’t Feldman’s pick as a playoff sleeper based on full-strength performance. He highlighted the LA Clippers, who had the best projected rating of any team, before they lost to Denver in the opening round.
Everything is obvious after it happens, so it’s tempting to search for explanations when a team defies the odds. The reality is that any analysis that would have predicted Indiana’s rise would probably also have led us astray. We’re better off celebrating the Pacers’ run precisely because it was so unlikely.
