In the 17th century, the Flemish painter Cornelis Schut won a competition to decide a new altarpiece for the Antwerp Cathedral. A product of the Baroque era, his submission was naturally imbued with a dark, intense religious fervor, with deep, atmospheric interplays of light and shadow, adhering to the tenets of tenebrism. He called it The Martyrdom of Saint George—a depiction of legend in a style befitting the times.
On Thursday, we’ll all bear witness to the start of a new work, one that eschews the dramatic motif of red for blue (and yellow and orange, depending on the side). One that couldn’t have materialized without Paul George, who serves as an unwitting patron saint to both the Indiana Pacers and the Oklahoma City Thunder.
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The fateful 2019 trade that sent George to the Los Angeles Clippers gave OKC its franchise savior in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and all the resources to build what could become a dynasty; nearly three years later, the Pacers acquired their franchise savior in Tyrese Haliburton by trading away Domantas Sabonis, one of the centerpieces of the trade that brought George from Indiana to Oklahoma in the first place back in 2017. On Thursday, The Martyrdom of Saint George will, too, be updated in a style befitting the times: a frenetic clash between advanced offense and pioneering defense in one of the most unexpected NBA Finals matchups of the 21st century.
It’s funny how things line up just so. The auspices of PG may have set these Finals into motion, but the symmetry of the Pacers and Thunder run much deeper. The two teams left standing are here because they each channeled their faith into a 21-year-old with untapped potential and reoriented themselves to best complement their new focal point. These are the celestial alignments that turn ordinary front-office lifers—burning the midnight oil at their desks, double-fisting iPhones, planting seeds for some kind of franchise-saving miracle—into prophets. Neither player was a sure bet; each had his own quirks worth working through and building up. Both Gilgeous-Alexander and Haliburton have reached and surpassed even the most optimistic projections for their careers. They are miracles in and of themselves, but it takes no time for outliers to normalize in the NBA. “Consider it a new phylum of NBA star,” I wrote back in 2021. “Players whose on-court advantages aren’t immediately apparent until they’re all you can think about.” At this point, it’s become difficult to imagine basketball without them.
SGA was drafted no. 11 overall in 2018; Haliburton was selected no. 12 overall in 2020. Each displayed uncommon talent from the onset, but were seen more as cogs in the machine by their original teams. It took a bit more imagination to conceive of how these two late-lottery guards might become championship catalysts one day. This is a Finals matchup defined by patience and vision—and the clarity that ripples from that foundation.
“I think where Shai is today is not close to where ultimately he’s going to be,” Thunder executive vice president and GM Sam Presti said back in 2019. “But we have to be really patient with that process. But he’s got great tools, and he’ll have to follow the same track that a lot of these other players have, but we think he has a bright future.” It wasn’t until the following year, when OKC ran a three-week minicamp in the lead-up to the resumption of play in the NBA bubble, when Shai led his own scrimmage teams against the likes of Chris Paul and Dennis Schröder, that Thunder coach Mark Daigneault realized just how much he’d grown as a creator. “He really showed glimpses there where you were like, ‘OK, this guy has another gear with the ball in his hands that maybe we haven’t seen because of the other guys on the team,’” Daigneault told Sportsnet’s Michael Grange earlier this year. “You knew he was really good, but I think the only person that can honestly say that they saw him being this good was Shai.” SGA was a tall, wiry guard with odd shooting mechanics who, through his increasingly legendary drive and discipline, fashioned himself into the greatest scorer of his generation, while also displaying an ethic and versatility on the other end that would soon power one of the NBA’s greatest defenses.
“It’s an exciting trade and it changes the landscape significantly,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said of acquiring Haliburton in 2022. “Finding a franchise-caliber point guard at age 21 is extremely difficult to do.” Haliburton, too, was a tall, wiry guard with odd shooting mechanics who, once given the freedom to explore the boundaries of offensive execution, found himself on a spectrum alongside Steve Nash and Steph Curry, seamlessly marrying 3-point shooting, pace of play, and insistent off-ball movement to shepherd a unique expression of basketball. “That’s something that Tyrese realizes and a lot of guys don’t,” Carlisle told our own Rob Mahoney in 2023. “They like having the ball and like controlling things. But he sees the connection with lightning-fast ball movement, teammate engagement, and the positive impact of getting the ball back live.”
Gilgeous-Alexander and Haliburton almost immediately became guiding principles for their respective franchises, and it’s hard not to think that’s how it ought to feel when rebuilding a roster. Like a jigsaw with magnetized pieces, pulling toward its rightful place. “Well, if you have the right player to build around, it can happen much faster than you think,” Carlisle said after Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals. “Getting Tyrese made it very clear what our identity as a team needed to be. We needed to be a fast-paced team with shooting, and we had some good shooting at the time. The [Pascal] Siakam trade took things to another level.”
Though SGA’s unrelenting improvement as a go-to scorer often takes center stage, he has always used his length and instincts to contribute on the defensive end, with strong steal and block rates. Having your alpha also be a committed defensive playmaker made it easier to devise a defensive blueprint: stack as many of the same playmaking advantages across players of different builds and athletic profiles—Lu Dort, Jalen Williams, Aaron Wiggins, Cason Wallace. Not to reduce the Thunder’s team-building philosophy to a meme, but Presti must’ve felt like Thanos when he landed Chet Holmgren in 2022, and added Alex Caruso and Isaiah Hartenstein this past offseason.
For all of the consternation both real and imagined about a truly small-market Finals, Pacers-Thunder is incredibly compelling tactically—what happens when a perpetual-motion device on offense clashes with a perpetual-motion device on defense? And, from a narrative perspective, it also best represents the NBA’s new epoch—what happens if you build for depth and team chemistry rather than trying to achieve nuclear fusion among superstars? Styles make fights, and these two teams exemplify just how intricate any given possession can be on either offense or defense. The Pacers create an unyielding symbiosis that is more than the sum of their parts. The Thunder dominate teams by hammering home just how overwhelming the sum of their parts has become.
There is an impulse to valorize suffering in sports fandom, to carry it with you even in the good times. This season is dedicated to Gabe Deck and Poku, says the Sooner. If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my Travis Best, says the Hoosier. Suffering, of course, comes in many forms. Less than four seasons ago, the Thunder lost a game by 73 points. Ten years ago, the Pacers lost to the Charlotte Hornets, 80-71, in an overtime bout that might have been the worst NBA game ever played, adjusted for era. The Thunder had some down years, but its time as a franchise has largely been gilded by the presence of Hall of Fame–level talent. Where OKC has experienced nearly every high and low imaginable over the past 18 years, Indiana has famously remained competitive for what feels like time immemorial, a steadfast refusal to tank that occasionally worked against the team’s best interest. The Pacers have made the conference finals in each of the past four decades: the ’90s, the 2000s, the 2010s, the 2020s—only the Lakers, Heat, and Suns can make the same claim. But the Pacers haven’t won a league championship since before the NBA-ABA merger. Perhaps the impulse to hold the dukkha of fandom close to one’s chest is less a display of how much any team deserves the championship, and more a show of respect to the arc of history. A shield against the allure of recency bias.
Because however these Finals go, Gilgeous-Alexander and Haliburton have already forced their way into the pantheon of their respective franchises. Now, it’s just a matter of whether they deserve the top spot. Haliburton has supplanted George, having led the Pacers to the Finals for the first time in a quarter century, but if he wins the whole damn thing, how close does Hali get to Reggie Miller, if he doesn’t outright usurp him? If SGA sticks the landing on winning MVP, Finals MVP, and the championship, would his eminence hold more weight than the team’s original legend of Kevin Durant? How will we remember this moment decades down the line?
For a longtime Pacers fan, I imagine the Miller Time Pacers are a core memory (whereas the Hibbert’s Law of Verticality-era Pacers are more of a free radical—ephemeral in the grander scheme). And I imagine the narrative arc of Miller’s career has something to do with that. Reggie made himself a star by being a complete pain in the ass to every legend that blocked his path: Cheryl, his sister who will always be known as the greatest basketball player in his family; the New York Knicks, his archnemesis; Michael Jordan, the monolith he could never become or overcome. He became an icon in spite of his circumstances, in an era not made for him. He fought against the current. You get a sense that things are different for these Pacers. Haliburton doesn’t fight the current. As the lead orchestrator of a free-flowing march toward chaos, he might well be the current.
Haliburton’s punching up at a ghost, a wall of stats from a player who’s been out of the league for two decades. The player who stands in the way of SGA being Oklahoma City’s most iconic player still walks among us. It’s hard to forget just how dominant Durant was in his 2014 MVP season because, more than 10 years later, he still plays with the same ease and efficiency that makes him the most talented scorer in NBA history. Durant stands as a testament to longevity and consistency—values that Shai preaches and reiterates with every postgame interview. Proclamations will be made after the series, at the speed of Stephen A. Smith. That’s just how the culture moves. Such distinctions hold value. They assert what we choose to remember and how. Some memories are anchors that set the foundation for how we make sense of sports history, of the passage of time itself.
For the seventh season in a row, a new NBA champion will be crowned. And the eventual winner will be awarded its first championship since the ’70s. These are unprecedented times for the league. What better time than now to lean into the chaos and uncertainty? The Thunder and Pacers got to this stage by making massive bets on unlikely, unorthodox talents. And in their conviction, they’ve become models for how to construct the future. The battle for the present is soon to come.
