Thunder vs. Pacers: How OKC’s collective team effort gave Shai Gilgeous-Alexander the juice to close out Game 4

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INDIANAPOLIS — Shai Gilgeous-Alexander told anyone who would listen earlier in these 2025 NBA Finals: Yes, he’s the one with the Most Valuable Player trophy and the matinee idol billing, but the Thunder are far from a solo act.

“No one-man show achieves what I’m trying to achieve with this game … those guys are the reason why we’re as good of a team as we are,” he said following Oklahoma City’s series-leveling Game 2 win. “I just add to it.”

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Gilgeous-Alexander added plenty on Friday: a game-high 35 points, headlined by an all-time-clutch, postseason-career-high 15-point fourth quarter, to propel the Thunder past the Pacers to a series-evening — and possibly season-saving — 111-104 win at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

But surviving a physical, nasty, fever-pitched Game 4 to send this best-of-seven series back to Oklahoma City all knotted up at two games apiece took much, much more than just a handful of final-frame buckets by the MVP.

“We had a lot of guys make winning plays that can kind of be invisible to the untrained eye,” said Thunder big man Chet Holmgren, who scored 14 points and pulled down 15 rebounds in 37 hard-fought minutes. “It’s not showing up necessarily in the stat sheet. It’s not like a highlight that’s going to be played over and over. It’s not one single instance.”

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It didn’t take one single instance; it took everything that everyone had to offer. And two nights after Indiana’s bench tilted the series in its favor, Oklahoma City reminded the basketball-watching world that it’s got a hell of a lot to offer.

Jalen Williams certainly felt like he had a lot more to offer. He scored a team-high 26 points in OKC’s Game 3 loss, but point totals don’t necessarily tell the whole story of a performance.

“I don’t think Dub played his best game last game,” ace reserve Alex Caruso said. “I don’t think he would say that either. I kind of just expected him to come out and answer the call.”

He did:

With Gilgeous-Alexander once again wearing Pacers stopper Andrew Nembhard all over the court like an ill-fitting orange or blue tuxedo, Williams carried the OKC offense early, scoring 12 points in 11 first-quarter minutes. He brought the ball up the court more often in Game 4 than he had all series — a ploy by Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault aimed at saving SGA some of the hard-driven miles of advancing the ball with Nembhard stationed squarely in his shadow the full 94 feet, as he was in Game 3. When the Pacers pushed their lead to double digits late in the third quarter, Williams got to the free-throw line for a pair and hit a tough closing-seconds fadeaway to get OKC back within seven heading into the fourth — a more manageable distance from which to mount a comeback effort to save their season.

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“There’s a reason he’s an All-NBA player, an All-Star, at just, I think he’s 23, if that’s correct,” said Caruso. (Just turned 24 in April, Alex. Probably want to get him a belated birthday card.) “I mean, he’s a phenomenal talent.”

A versatile one, too. Williams battled on the defensive end, jousting with Pascal Siakam and doing his damnedest to keep the Pacers’ ascendant demigod from snatching the series in his two bare hands. (Siakam finished with 20 points, eight rebounds, five assists, five steals and a block in 35 massive minutes, but went scoreless in the deciding fourth quarter.) He competed on the glass, grabbing seven rebounds, including a pair of big defensive boards late.

And with Indiana leading in crunch time, it was Williams who paired with Gilgeous-Alexander in the two-man game, with the MVP trotting up to set ball screens knowing Indiana would switch the action, resulting in Nembhard shifting over to Williams while Aaron Nesmith guarded SGA — a matchup he clearly felt much more comfortable attacking. The result, as Daigneault said, was “kind of our best rhythm of the night” — and a game-sealing 12-1 run.

“We’ve worked on that over the course of the last couple years,” Gilgeous-Alexander said after the win. “Both of us can do multiple things with the basketball: shoot, pass, handle. We try to just play off our instincts and play off each other, be aggressive, make the right basketball play. If we do so, we usually end up with a pretty good shot, because of the players we are.”

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The player Williams is, as Gilgeous-Alexander noted, is one capable of doing “so many things … on a basketball court.” And after a monster Game 4 — 27 points on 8-for-18 shooting, seven rebounds, three assists in 36 minutes spent running point and guarding an All-Star staring down an existential deficit in the NBA Finals — we now know Williams is capable of coming up with precisely what his team needs, precisely when the Thunder need it.

“I think my biggest thing is just stepping into the moment, success or fail, just kind of living with the results,” Williams said. “I put a lot of work into my game, so I just go out there and play. I just don’t want to ever play a game and look back where I wasn’t aggressive, afraid to do a move, whatever the case may be.”

“Aggressive and unafraid” pretty well encapsulates the way Luguentz Dort approaches every single possession he plays, especially on the defensive end.

“Lu and all the other guys climbing up in the ball, really playing some hard-nosed defense, not only sets the tone for us and all the other guys guarding, but it also kind of sets the tone for the other team,” Holmgren said. “Just making things tough. That was huge for us tonight.”

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As Daigneault saw it, the defensive pace the All-Defensive first-teamer set in the fourth quarter “was kind of contagious” for the rest of the Thunder, who held the Pacers to 5-for-18 shooting in the fourth with three turnovers, thanks in no small part to both Dort’s overwhelming physicality and the knock-on effects of watching him deploy it.

“Yeah, he was himself,” Gilgeous-Alexander said of Dort, who finished with six points, three rebounds and a steal in 33 minutes, a box score that dramatically undervalues his contributions to the comeback effort. “He was pressuring. He was making life difficult for them to get into offense. He was physical on-ball. He was disruptive. He was who he’s been all season.

“I think that’s the biggest thing: The more … we can be who we’ve been all season, our identity, the better off we’ll be.”

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Who Caruso has been — not only this season, but throughout his career — is, as Daigneault put it, “a competitive monster, clearly.” What makes him so perfect for this Thunder team, though, is his ability to channel that competitive energy into specific, bespoke solutions at any given time.

“What makes Alex very good is that he’s able to figure out what we need, and be that,” Williams said. “Makes big shots, and obviously, the defense speaks for itself. He’s just really smart. He’s kind of like our fill-in: He does a really good job of seeing what the game needs and then doing it at 100%.

“Which is hard to do, since he’s, like, a hundred.”

After OKC lost Game 3 with Nembhard, Nesmith and Ben Sheppard working overtime to run Gilgeous-Alexander ragged and leave him spent, Caruso felt like he, in particular, had come up short — hadn’t done his job to help SGA, Daigneault and the rest of the crew solve the puzzle that Indiana had presented them.

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“The way that Indiana is playing, it’s leaving opportunities for supplemental offense for other guys … I don’t think I was aggressive enough,” he said Friday. “I think I made a couple bad reads on the perimeter. I don’t think I tested the paint enough. I just didn’t feel like I was doing the same amount of work that I did in Game 1 and 2, where I found success and we found success as a team.”

In Game 4, Caruso redoubled his efforts to find the magic in that work. In addition to his standard über-caffeinated on- and off-ball defense, he brought the ball up the floor to ease some of the offensive initiation burden for Gilgeous-Alexander and Williams, seized opportunities to make hard downhill drives to the paint and try to either create offense for himself or others, made timely off-ball cuts behind the Pacers defense and, when the ball found him on the perimeter, shot it with confidence and without a conscience.

“A lot of times during my career, [my role has] been guard the best guy, spot up on the wing, or set pick-and-rolls and get to the dunker,” Caruso said. “This series — this playoffs, really — teams are forcing me to try and score the ball … I knew this was going to be the scout: take away the best players on the team and make the other guys beat you. So, just being confident in myself and being confident in the work I’m putting in and recognizing opportunities.”

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That confidence, it turns out, was well-founded. Caruso made seven of his nine shots from the field, finishing with 20 points for the second time in three games — after not cracking 20 all season before the Finals. Not bad for a 100-year-old.

“I want to win,” Caruso said. “I don’t care if it’s pickup in September before training camp, I don’t care if it’s Game 45, 50, before the All-Star break, if it’s the Finals and you’re down 2-1. I want to win. That’s what I’m focused on … I wanted to make sure that I came out here and I made sure I had a concentrated effort to play as hard as I could, and to make as many plays to help the team win.

“That just comes down to really wanting to win — being super competitive. That’s why my career is the way it is. That’s why I’ve had success. That’s why I’m still in the NBA. That’s why I’m here talking to you right now.”

Holmgren’s in the NBA because he’s 7-foot-1 with the ability to run the floor like a gazelle, handle the ball like a guard, shoot 37% from 3-point range (though not necessarily on hang pulls, which would be odee) and protect the rim at a level few big men on the planet can match. It’s what the Gonzaga product did in space in the fourth quarter, though, that opened an awful lot of eyes — and helped keep the Thunder from being pushed to the brink.

On four critical possessions in the final three minutes of Game 4, Tyrese Haliburton and Nembhard tried the 23-year-old — put him under pressure, dragged him out into deep water, made him prove it. And on all four possessions — a Nembhard drive to the rim, followed by three different isolations up top — Holmgren stood his ground, held his own when switched onto Indiana’s quicksilver guards and prevented them from producing points.

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“He held up great,” Daigneault said. “We don’t do that a ton with him, because he’s just so impactful at the rim. But he can really switch. It’s funny: When he was coming out of the draft, that was one of the things that they really recognized with him, is that he’s very switchable. He’s got great feet. We just found ourselves behind the ball in a lot of plays tonight. The switching was able to get that under control late. We can’t do that unless he can do that.”

The Thunder had to keep the Pacers coming up empty, had to keep stacking stops. They did, because Holmgren — on the biggest stage of his life — can do that.

“Special player,” Williams said. “Special players do special things. He’s really good. Me and him have always talked about, like, coming into the NBA together, it’s just always been, find something that you can do to impact the game. That makes you more of a special player.

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“We try not to be one-dimensional. Shots fluctuate. Everybody is going to shoot bad; from Steph Curry to me, you name it, you’re going to have bad shooting nights. But there’s so many things you can do in a basketball game to affect the game. He understands that.”

He also understands that every possession you experience is one that you can build on and, hopefully, improve upon.

“I mean, I had just given up two drives right before that,” Holmgren said. “Just kind of trying to learn from those and play them better in those instances. I feel like I got a good contest. [Haliburton] was still able to get it off. He shoots a high-arcing shot; the whole time it’s in the air, a lot’s going through your mind.”

One thing that never went through the minds of any Thunder players, though? Being on the wrong side of the scoreboard when the clock hit triple zero.

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“We never wavered — never thought we might lose this game,” Caruso said. “We were concentrating on trying to win it, on trying to solve the puzzle, figure out a way to make plays down the stretch to win the game. That’s just been our focus throughout the whole playoffs. It started from the whole season — just an extreme belief in each other to make plays and find a way to win.”

With their season on the line, they did it. It took everything — a fourth-quarter masterclass from Gilgeous-Alexander, Williams displaying his entire skill-set, Dort’s tone-setting, Caruso proving he’s more than just an agent of chaos, Holmgren proving he’s more than just a rim protector, and so much more — but they did it.

And now, they go back to Oklahoma City tied up, with home-court advantage restored, to try to do it again.

“No matter what happens — good or bad, pretty or ugly — we’re always going to stick together,” Holmgren said. “We’re going to win together, we’re going to lose together, we’re going to have great moments together, we’re going to fail together. No matter what happens, we’re going to do it together. I don’t really see that changing. Ever.”

“That’s what makes us a good team,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “It’s more than just me. Way more than just me.”

This news was originally published on this post .