If the NBA is indeed as rigged as the Jim Garrisons of Reddit would have us believe, then the people in charge of covertly cooking up a league-friendly championship matchup really botched the job Saturday night. By clinching the Eastern Conference title with a 125-108 win over the New York Knicks, the Indiana Pacers buried the hopes of fans in the nation’s biggest media market—and thereby any chance of a strong TV turnout for the Finals.
In sending Karl-Anthony Towns and Jalen Brunson packing, the Pacers broke poor Timothée Chalamet’s heart and [presumably] dimmed the lights in a good chunk of New York’s 7.49 million TV households. While there’s something to be said for the deathless appeal of hate-watching—diehard Knicks fans would likely take no small measure of solace in seeing Tyrese Haliburton & Co. go down in flames to the Oklahoma City Thunder, should that sort of thing be in the cards—the elimination of Gotham’s bandwagon hoppers will put a sizable ding in ABC’s ratings.
With a base of 1.23 million TV homes, Indianapolis may not move the ratings needle in the same way that the big coastal markets do, but the Pacers’ stomping grounds are a bustling media metropolis compared to the OKC DMA. The Thunder represent one of professional sports’ smallest home markets, serving 762,700 TV households, or nearly one-tenth the reach of NYC. Without the Knicks on hand to sort-of balance the scales, the NBA is faced with one of the most niche Finals pairings in recent memory, and a short series would all but guarantee a modest TV turnout.
To be fair, just about everything the Thunder have accomplished this season indicates that the Pacers are probably heading for a quick exit. Over the course of the 2024-25 campaign, OKC set an NBA record with up an average margin of victory of 12.9 points per game, a differential that got even more out of whack during the postseason. The Thunder tipped off their playoff run with a 51-point blowout of the Bucks before going on to crush Denver by 43 in Game 2 of the second round. In the Western Conference Finals, OKC bested Minnesota by 26 points, 15 points and 42 points, before closing out the series with a 30-point beatdown.
All told, the Thunder notched an average margin of victory of 23.2 points per game across their first 12 playoff wins. As one might expect, the one-sided nature of OKC’s postseason run wreaked havoc with the TV ratings; per Nielsen, its May 28 undoing of the Timberwolves averaged just 4.62 million viewers on ESPN, making it the least-watched Game 5 of a WCF in 18 years.
As much as the NBA would have preferred to see the Knicks contend for their first title since 1973, it’s also fair to say that there’s not a lot riding on the final series in what amounts to a lame duck season. The league’s new $77 billion rights deal officially kicks in this October, and that windfall should go a long way toward ameliorating any discomfort associated with a low-rated closeout.
Not that a tepid turnout is 100% guaranteed. If the Finals grind on for the full seven games, the deliveries will help offset any unspectacular early TV numbers. In this century, only four series have required a seventh frame, with the average audiences ranging from 19 million for the Spurs-Pistons decider in 2005 to 31 million for the second Cavs-Warriors series in 2016.
If nothing else, the exposure Indiana gained during its six-game showdown with the Knicks and their star-studded fan base has made the team a much more familiar entity than was the case at the beginning of the playoffs. While the Pacers were all but invisible in the first round, with no fewer than three of their games against the Bucks airing on the low-octane cable network NBA TV (average draw: 608,000 viewers), the ECF series put up strong numbers throughout, averaging 6.74 million viewers through Game 5. If just a few weeks ago you only knew Halliburton as the son of that guy who was spied jawing with Giannis Antetokounmpo after Game 5 of the Pacers-Bucks series, the point guard’s performance against the Knicks (and his meme-worthy callback to the Reggie Miller era) has since dispelled much of the attendant small-market anonymity.
For all that, the odds are stacked in OKC’s favor. Vegas books have listed the Thunder as -700 favorites to win the title, while the Pacers are expected to open the series at +500. In the last 50 years, 10 teams have been booked at -600 or better on the eve of the NBA Finals, and only one of those favorites (the 2004 Lakers) wound up succumbing in the championship round. With that in mind, the Thunder are listed as nine-point favorites for Thursday night’s home opener.
As is always the case in a best-of-seven series, ABC’s cleanest shot at closing out the Finals in the win column is a full slate of games. If the Thunder and Pacers are still playing basketball on Sunday, June 22, those Game 7 impressions will all but erase the inevitable make-good obligations brought on by any under-deliveries in the early broadcasts. That’s a tall order, given how OKC tends to put the hurt on its opponents, but sometimes the touts get it wrong. Sometimes. Thunder in 5.
