OKLAHOMA CITY — The Indiana Pacers, waiting for absolution from a bunch of TV screens in a big room in Secaucus, N.J., talked about what they’d do on offense when they got the basketball back from the Oklahoma City Thunder, whether they were down by just one point or down three.
They didn’t talk about how they planned to stop Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA’s MVP, who had 38 points at the moment in his first NBA Finals game. Perhaps they didn’t have to.
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Ultimately, the NBA’s Replay Center denied Indiana’s challenge that the ball either went out of bounds off Oklahoma City or that Thunder guard Cason Wallace fouled the Pacers’ Pascal Siakam before the ball went out of bounds. Yet, the Pacers were still cool about keeping Gilgeous-Alexander from the basket.
Drew had him.
Andrew Nembhard, for those of you who don’t talk Pacer.
“I’ve got the utmost confidence in him,” Haliburton said of Nembhard after the Pacers’ latest great escape, 111-110, Indiana’s seventh road win in nine postseason games this season. To be sure, Haliburton’s game-winner with 0.3 seconds left — his fourth basket so far in these playoffs with less than two seconds to go — won Game 1. But Nembhard saved it, like when a great goalie in the Stanley Cup playoffs stands on his head.
Nembhard personifies this team. No one cares who scores or when or how. Some nights, Aaron Nesmith goes thermonuclear in Madison Square Garden. Some nights, Siakam looks like one of the 10 best players in the league. And Haliburton, right now, is the best closer on Earth. The ball finds whoever’s open and in rhythm.
They care greatly, though, about who defends. And Nembhard has been one of the league’s best on-ball defenders for most of the last two seasons.
“He’s our guy,” Haliburton said. “He’s our guy. He’s been our guy all year. If there wasn’t the 65-game rule, he’s an All-Defensive guy, plain and simple. We have the most trust in him. Shai is the hardest guard in the NBA. He’s the hardest guy to cover one-on-one in the NBA. So there’s no one look we can give him that is going to work every time. We trust Drew in those situations. We’re showing help as much as we can, but he’s doing a lot of the dirty work. He’s done a lot of the dirty work for years now. That’s his calling card in this league. And he’s an elite defender.”
SGA saw a lot of different guys Thursday, as is custom for someone of his prodigious skills. He got some Nesmith and some Haliburton and some Siakam. But with the game on the line — improbably, as Indiana had kicked the ball all over creation for 47-plus minutes, racking up 24 turnovers — Rick Carlisle went with Nembhard, his 25-year-old guard, as his chosen stopper, just as he has since the day after Christmas in 2023, when he put Nembhard and Nesmith in the starting lineup alongside Haliburton and Myles Turner. (The fifth starter that day was Jalen Smith; that changed for good after the Pacers got Siakam from the Toronto Raptors a couple of weeks later.)
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There was no double-teaming. Indiana didn’t double Gilgeous-Alexander most of the night. Much of the time, there was just Nembhard, SGA’s teammate on the Canadian national basketball team. Yes, they’ve known and played against each other since they were kids.
But … not with the Larry in the balance.
Nesmith set up at the nail, ready if SGA tried to go to his right. But he wasn’t attacking him. Nembhard was on his own.
Gilgeous-Alexander went left, trying to blow by Nembhard. But Nembhard took the contact in his chest and stood SGA straight up. Gilgeous-Alexander spun right, the way he has all season, when he’s been able to draw fouls and get to the free-throw line with very little trouble. But Nembhard stoned him again and swiped at the ball as SGA tried a 15-foot fadeaway. He makes that shot a lot. Thursday, he missed. Nesmith held off OKC’s Lu Dort, who had killed Indiana all night on the offensive boards, and got the rebound.
Less than 10 seconds later, the Springtime Killer, Haliburton, made his fourth game-winning shot of the playoffs with less than two seconds left on the clock. He got almost all of the attention afterward, with much of the media waiting a half hour for him to do his postgame news conference.
By contrast, Nembhard was out of the Pacers’ locker room in about three minutes, having answered just a few questions.
“I don’t know what the deficit was, but we felt like we (were) just right there, honestly,” he told reporters afterward.
No matter. His play spoke multitudes.
“If there’s a guy that we want guarding the last possession, it’s Drew,” Pacers guard T.J. McConnell said.
It was the last play in a sublime night for Nembhard, who also scored eight of his 14 points in the fourth quarter, including a monster stepback 3-pointer over Gilgeous-Alexander with 1:59 left to bring Indiana back within three, 108-105. He had the ball in his hands as much as Haliburton down the stretch, assisting Turner on an excuse-me 3 midway through the fourth. He was one of the biggest reasons Indiana was able to rally from a 15-point fourth-quarter deficit.
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“He made big plays at both ends,” Carlisle said. “The one stop on Shai at the end was a big play, and then we got the rebound. There was the stepback 3, which was a big momentum play. … a lot of big plays. You’ve got to have playmakers against Oklahoma City. They just make it so difficult defensively.”
The Pacers are on the kind of roll that — well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The Thunder went 68-14 in the regular season, which tied the 1972-73 Boston Celtics for the sixth-best regular-season record in NBA history. Four of the five teams that had better regular-season records than OKC and Boston went on to win the championship; of course, the all-time best single-season team, the 73-9 Golden State Warriors of 2015-16, didn’t, losing to Cleveland in seven games in the 2016 finals. OKC was the overwhelming favorite coming into these finals for a reason. This was Game 1 of seven.
But Indiana never seems to care about things like that. The Pacers didn’t flinch even though they played terribly in the first half. The sellout crowd at Paycom Center was painfully loud all night. The Thunder defense was as good as it’s been all season, when it was one of the best in NBA history. And the Pacers didn’t stop Gilgeous-Alexander. He still scored 38 points. But he had to take 30 shots to do it. He missed some open ones. But he also had fewer open ones than he normally does, after he breaks out his seemingly endless bag of moves.
And, with the game on the line, Drew had him. The Pacers were good.
(Top photo of Andrew Nembhard: Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE via Getty Images)
