INDIANAPOLIS — Every time Indiana has lost a game in the last three months, it simply has come back to win the next one.
Even in the NBA Finals — against a huge favorite who the Pacers now have in some trouble.
Bennedict Mathurin scored 27 points off the bench, Tyrese Haliburton finished with 22 points, 11 assists and nine rebounds, and the Pacers retook the lead in the NBA Finals by beating the Oklahoma City Thunder 116-107 in Game 3 on Wednesday night.
“This is the kind of team that we are,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “We need everybody to be ready. It’s not always going to be exactly the same guys that are stepping up with scoring and stuff like that. But this is how we’ve got to do it.”
Pascal Siakam scored 21 for Indiana, which enjoyed a whopping 49-18 edge in bench points. The Pacers, who lost Game 2 in Oklahoma City, improved to 10-0 since mid-March in the game immediately following a loss.
“So many different guys chipped in,” Haliburton said.
Jalen Williams scored 26 points, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander added 24 and Chet Holmgren had 20 for the Thunder, who led by five going into the fourth.
Game 4 is back in Indiana on Friday night.
“We had a lot of good stretches of the game,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “But they had more good stretches than we did — and outplayed us over the course of 48 minutes.”
History says the Pacers are in control now; in the 41 previous NBA Finals that were tied at a game apiece, the Game 3 winner went on to hoist the trophy 33 times — an 80.5% clip.
Advantage, Pacers.
It was back-and-forth much of the way. There were 15 ties; to put that in perspective, there were 13 ties in the five-game entirety of last year’s finals between Boston and Dallas. The last time there was a finals game with more ties: Game 1 between Cleveland in Golden State in 2018, which was knotted 17 times.
TJ McConnell finished with 10 points, five assists and five steals for Indiana; since all those stats started being charted, nobody had ever come off the bench and done all that in an NBA Finals game.
“We just had guys make plays after plays,” Haliburton said. “Our bench was amazing.”
The Thunder were 61-2 when leading going into the fourth quarter in the regular season. They’re 1-2 when leading going into the fourth quarter in this series. Indiana — at home in an NBA Finals game for the first time in 25 years, with Caitlin Clark, Reggie Miller, Oscar Robertson and many other stars in the crowd — simply owned the final 12 minutes.
Indiana outscored OKC 32-18 in the fourth, holding the Thunder to 35% shooting with the game and control of the series on the line.
“There’s a lot of areas we can clean up,” Holmgren said. “Everybody who stepped out there can be better.”
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