Pacers stun Thunder: OKC’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Mark Daigneault explain what went wrong in Game 1 collapse

The Oklahoma City Thunder led the Indiana Pacers by as many as 15 points in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Thursday night. But Indiana never went away. During the final 2:38 of regulation, the Pacers used a 12-2 run to pull off a stunning 111-110 comeback win after Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton knocked down a go-ahead jumper with 0.3 seconds remaining.

Haliburton’s latest clutch shot left the Oklahoma City faithful stunned and the Thunder players and coaches wondering what just transpired. 

“It happened so fast,” Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said on the final sequence. “I feel like we got matched. He got down going right and pulled up from middy and knocked down the shot. I don’t know, it didn’t feel like anything crazy. He just made a play with the time winding down.”

The Pacers have been no stranger to dramatic comeback wins during the 2025 postseason. The win over Oklahoma City marked the fifth time during this year’s playoffs that the Pacers overcame a deficit of at least 15 points to win — the most in the play-by-play era.

“They’ve had so many games like that that have seemed improbable,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “They just play with a great spirit, they keep coming, they made plays, made shots. They deserved to win by a point. We got to learn from it. Obviously a lot of things we can clean up. Credit them, they went and got that game.”

Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA’s MVP, finished with 38 points, five rebounds, three assists and three steals in his finals debut. The 38-point outburst was the third-highest-scoring finals debut by a player in NBA history. Gilgeous-Alexander now has 12 games this postseason with at least 30 points, but he and his team find themselves in an early series hole following Thursday night’s stunner. 

“We just got to focus on being better,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “The series isn’t first to one, it’s first to four. We have four more games to get, they have three. It’s that simple. It’s not rocket science. We lost Game 1. We have to be better.”

OKC’s puzzling collapse came despite winning the turnover battle 25-7. The Pacers became the first team since the 1977 Portland Trail Blazers in 1977 to win an NBA Finals while committing 25 turnovers. Nineteen of those 25 turnovers came in the first half — the most of any team in the regular season or postseason in the last 25 years.

Daigneault said his team didn’t capitalize enough off of those turnovers.

“I thought our conversion on the turnovers in the first half hurt us a little bit,” Daigneault said. “Like, we didn’t get the kind of juice for that squeeze that we normally do when we turn teams over. I thought offensively for us, we hit the paint like crazy. We took 50-something shots in the paint for only 40-something points. We have to finish stronger.”

This is the second time the Thunder have dropped Game 1 of a series during the 2025 playoffs. After losing the opening game of the West semifinals to the Denver Nuggets 121-119, they responded with a 43-point win the next game. 

Daigneault is looking for a similar response in Game 2 on Sunday. 

“You have to tip your hat to them. They got us tonight. They played really well. They deserved to win. But we got to learn from it, we got to improve like we would if we had won the game and get ourselves ready for Game 2,” Daigneault said. “They made plays. They’ve done it all Playoffs. This is part of their identity. They have a lot of belief. They never think they’re out of it, so they play with great confidence even when their back’s against the wall. They proved that tonight. 

“To me, that’s a game that they went and got. It’s a game that we can look at and improve in a lot of different areas. That’s our challenge right now as we head into Game 2.”