This is why you play the games, as the old adage goes. In recent years, the later rounds of the NBA playoffs – and the finals in particular – have felt rote. They’ve gone chalk. The drama was minimal, even under the brightest lights of the league’s biggest stage. This year has been different: a playoffs filled with suspense, tension and plot twists galore. But at the start of the finals, the scene was set for a regression to the intrigue-less mean. Every roundtable pundit, basketball expert and barbershop patron outside of Indiana state lines had Oklahoma City – basketball’s best team from wire to wire – winning the series easily.
But Tyrese Haliburton, the instigator of several of this postseason’s most jaw-dropping twists, knows a thing or two about drama. It oozes out of his pores. And he and his Indiana Pacers had other plans.
