Dan Devine

1 day ago | sports.yahoo.com | Dan Devine

OKLAHOMA CITY — The lead wasn’t big enough. The Thunder had opened the 2025 NBA Finals with a borderline-unbelievable half of defensive basketball. They’d forced the visiting Pacers into a whopping 19 turnovers of all shapes and sizes — travels in the open floor, kickouts airmailed into the backcourt, thread-the-needle bounce passes picked off, bobbled pocket passes, moving screens, 24-second violations, you name it.

2 days ago | sports.yahoo.com | Dan Devine

OKLAHOMA CITY — On the court, Cason Wallace doesn’t do anything slow. Seated at a podium at the Thunder’s Wednesday media day session ahead of Game 1 of the 2025 NBA Finals, though, the second-year guard eased off the gas and took a second to think. Wallace, who has blossomed into one of the NBA’s best young point-of-attack stoppers, had just fielded a question about guarding Tyrese Haliburton — the Pacers’ All-Star and All-NBA point guard.

2 days ago | sports.yahoo.com | Dan Devine

After an 82-game marathon, followed by three grueling rounds of postseason competition, we now approach the finish line of the 2024-25 NBA season. The Western Conference champion Oklahoma City Thunder — the West’s No. 1 seed, and the top overall seed in the postseason bracket — will take on the Eastern Conference champion Indiana Pacers in the 2025 NBA Finals. It’s the first postseason meeting between the two franchises.

3 days ago | sports.yahoo.com | Dan Devine

Mere minutes after the end of the New York Knicks’ 2024-25 season, Tom Thibodeau laid out the path forward. “Like you would do after every season, you take a step back, I think, decompress,” Thibodeau said following the Pacers’ 125-108 win in Game 6 of the 2025 Eastern Conference finals on Saturday — a victory that sent Indiana to the NBA Finals for the first time in a quarter-century and sent New York into a summer of uncertainty.

6 days ago | sports.yahoo.com | Dan Devine

INDIANAPOLIS — The temptation, after Tyrese Haliburton scored just eight points on seven shots in a disappointing Game 5 loss, was to call for the Indiana Pacers to adjust the sliders for Game 6 by overindexing on the kind of aggression that’s easy to see in the box score — to counteract the New York Knicks’ stepped-up ball pressure with hunted shots and hero ball. That’s not what Indiana head coach Rick Carlisle called for, though.