2024-25 NBA Finals

Result

Games

Finals MVP

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Gilgeous-Alexander won Finals MVP after also being named regular-season MVP the same season.

Series context

The 2024-25 NBA Finals featured the top-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder, who posted a league-best 68-14 regular season record, against the Indiana Pacers, who finished 50-32 and reached the Finals after an underdog Eastern Conference run. The series carried a notable subplot: both franchises' rosters were shaped by the same trade, having each dealt Paul George in separate transactions that ultimately yielded their respective franchise cornerstones, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for Oklahoma City and Tyrese Haliburton for Indiana. The series opened with a stunner in Game 1, as Haliburton drilled a go-ahead jumper with under a second left to complete a comeback from well behind, giving Indiana a 111-110 win. Oklahoma City responded in Game 2, riding a big halftime lead and a huge scoring night from Gilgeous-Alexander to a 123-107 win, tying the series. Indiana regained the edge in Game 3, getting a huge bench-scoring advantage led by Bennedict Mathurin, winning 116-107. The Thunder fought back in Game 4, with Gilgeous-Alexander scoring heavily down the stretch in a narrow win to even the series at 2-2. Jalen Williams exploded in Game 5 as Oklahoma City forced a high turnover count in a 120-109 win, moving one game from the title. Indiana forced a Game 7 with a dominant Game 6, building a large halftime lead, their largest of the Finals, in a 108-91 win. The decisive Game 7 was overshadowed by tragedy for Indiana: Haliburton suffered a torn Achilles tendon early in the first quarter, severely hampering the Pacers, and Oklahoma City closed out the title with a 103-91 win. The championship was the Thunder franchise's second overall (following the 1979 Seattle SuperSonics title, before the franchise relocated to Oklahoma City in 2008) and the first for the Oklahoma City era of the franchise, capping a rebuild built through years of accumulated draft capital following the Russell Westbrook and Paul George trade eras. Gilgeous-Alexander's dual regular-season MVP and Finals MVP campaign placed him among a small group of players to win both awards in the same season. For Indiana, the loss, compounded by Haliburton's severe injury, represented a heartbreaking end to a Cinderella run that had included upsets of higher-seeded teams throughout the playoffs. The series went the full seven games with several games decided by extremely narrow margins. Indiana's underdog run had its own dramatic arc: the Pacers began the season 10-15 in mid-December before going 52-21 the rest of the way, then eliminated Milwaukee and upset the 64-win Cavaliers, both in five games, en route to the Finals. Oklahoma City's 68-14 regular season carried a scoring differential of roughly plus-12.9 points per game that broke the single-season NBA record previously held by the 1971-72 Lakers, and the Thunder finished the year with a double-digit-game cushion over the second-seeded Houston Rockets, among the largest gaps ever between a league's top two seeds. Gilgeous-Alexander's Finals MVP made him just the second player, after LeBron James in 2013, to win regular-season MVP and Finals MVP in the same season, and he did so while also winning the scoring title, a combination last achieved by Shaquille O'Neal in 2000. Nationally, Game 7's audience was the largest for any NBA game since 2019, even though the series overall drew some of the lowest Finals ratings in recent years, reflecting the two teams' small-market profiles.

Sources

• Wikipedia - 2025 NBA Finals
• Basketball-Reference - 2025 NBA Finals
• Sportico - Thunder, Pacers Roar to 6-Year NBA Finals High With 16.4M Viewers
• ESPN - Thunder break NBA record for scoring differential in a season
• CBS Sports - 2025 NBA playoff bracket: Pacers knock out Cavaliers, advance to East finals