The Pacers are halfway to winning the unlikeliest championship in recorded NBA history

At this point, we’re beyond there being no historical precedent for what the Indiana Pacers are doing. We’re into full-on fantasy land. And yet the prospect of the Pacers winning what would not only be their first championship as an NBA franchise, but also probably the unlikeliest championship in recorded NBA history, has never felt more real after a 116-107 win over the Thunder in Game 3 to take a 2-1 Finals lead. 

Get this: The Pacers were a 66-1 preseason long shot to win the title this year, per Bet MGM. That would make them by far the unlikeliest champion in recorded NBA history if they are able to finish this deal, with the 2014-15 Warriors, at 28-1, the only team even in the vicinity. 

As you can see, all these teams that started off as super long shots saw their odds of winning get better, with a season’s worth of evidence, by the time the postseason arrived. The Pacers, on the other hand, started off long and got even longer. 

Speaking to the preseason odds, to find the most recent longer-shot champion you have to go outside the NBA back to the 2003 Florida Marlins, who were 75-1 to start the season and wound up winning the World Series. In all of recorded history, in fact, only three championship teams across any of the four major American sports have ever started with longer preseason odds.

As for Indiana’s 80-1 odds at the start of the postseason, there is no NBA champion in recorded history that started the playoffs even close to that number. At present, the 2011 Mavericks and the 1995 Rockets, at 18-1, are the longest-shot NBA champions on record. Outside the NBA, the 2007 San Francisco Giants come closest at 50-1, still a far cry from Indiana’s number. 

Simply put, you are in the middle of watching something that has never even come close to happening before, which, to be honest, is starting to be the case for just about every Pacers game. Let’s run through the list:  

• On Wednesday, Indiana trailed 89-84 entering the fourth quarter. That makes them the first team in NBA history to win two of the first three Finals games after trailing by at least five points after three quarters.
• In Game 1 the Pacers were down nine heading into the fourth and trailed by as many as 15 before becoming the first team in Finals history to erase a nine-point deficit inside the final three minutes (1-182) and tying the record for largest fourth-quarter Finals comeback. 
• All of this on the back of already being the first team in history to win multiple playoff games in which they trailed by at least seven points inside the final minute. Teams were 1-1,640 in such games entering this postseason and Indiana has done it three times. 
• The Pacers are also working on their fifth playoff series win as the lower seed over the past two years. They are already the only team to win four such series over a two-season span.

They are basically the LeBron James of comebacks. They already own all the records. Now they’re just messing around adding to them. 

But here’s where historical precedent might get a little dicey for these Pacers, who, based on these numbers and outcomes we’ve just outlined, might actually prefer to have the odds against them. Over the course of NBA history, teams that win Game 3 in a 1-1 best-of-seven series go on to win the series over 80% of the time. 

Suddenly, the odds are on Indiana’s side. And yet, even with a 2-1 series lead that historically holds up eight out of 10 times, the Pacers are listed as a +190 underdog against OKC’s -230 to win the championship according to Caesars Sportsbook. 

“That’s the story of my life,” Rodney Dangerfield once said. “No respect.”

It’s no secret why the masses are still as hesitant to accept the Pacers as a championship caliber team, even in the face of such obvious evidence. They were the No. 4 seed in the NBA’s JV conference. The no-defense stain on their casual perception has been tough to wash out, even, again, with ample evidence to the contrary. It’s an ongoing debate whether Tyrese Haliburton is even a superstar, as increasingly stupid as any claim on the “con” side sounds. 

Most of all, however, it’s fair to question how long the Pacers can keep pulling off these wins that have never been pulled off before. 

Well, they only need two more. Of any variety. And the trophy is theirs. Chances are they’re not going to blow the Thunder out in any game moving forward, so winning these fourth quarters remains an essential ingredient for the Pacers. On Wednesday, they were plus-14 in the fourth quarter, in which the Thunder managed just 18 points — by far their lowest single-quarter output in this series. 

The Thunder didn’t have to do a lot of fourth-quarter work this season. With the best point differential in history, they had a lot of games wrapped up early. Including the first three rounds of these playoffs, OKC came into the Finals with a 60-3 record when leading by at least five points entering the fourth quarter, and they had a plus-10.8 net rating in playoff fourth quarters entering this series. 

Now the Pacers, who are now 9-1 in clutch games this postseason, have turned that 60-3 OKC record into 1-2 in these Finals, and they have outscored the Thunder by 27 points in three fourth quarters. There’s your story. 

I hesitate to say that, because after Indiana’s Game 2 win I declared that the story of this series, and Indiana’s lone chance of winning it, lied in their ability to win the 3-point battle, probably by an appreciable margin. But Oklahoma City made 10 3s to Indiana’s nine in Game 3, T.J. McConnell became the first bench player in Finals history to record at least 10 points, five assists and five steals in a single game, and Bennedict Mathurin — who outscored the entire Thunder bench by himself, 27-18 — is now the first player to score at least 25 points in under 23 minutes in a Finals game. So who the hell knows anything anymore. 

None of these numbers make sense at the moment. But for the Pacers, they don’t have to. For the Pacers, the only number that matters is two. As in, two more wins for the first NBA championship in franchise history.