The Pacers’ Game 1 NBA Finals heist can only be captured by 5 perfect stats

Tyrese Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers have pulled off some crazy comebacks during the 2025 playoffs, but their latest rally to win Game 1 of the NBA Finals might have been their wildest yet.

The odds were against the Pacers winning this game from the outset, but they seemed especially long when the Oklahoma City Thunder pushed their lead to as much as 17 in the fourth quarter. But then the Pacers did what they’ve done all postseason — went on a magnet-ball shotmaking run.

Indiana outscored the Thunder the rest of the way, with Haliburton’s leaning, improbable game-winner swishing through the net with just 0.3 seconds left, thus securing Indiana’s first lead of the entire game:

According to Josh Dubow of the Associated Press, that means that Indiana attempted something that 121 teams had tried before them in the NBA Finals... and were the first team to ever complete such a rally:

Not only does that mean the Pacers are now an insane 5-3 this postseason when they go down by 15 or more points, but according to NBA stats maven Keerthika Uthayakumar, it also means that they are now just the fourth team in the last nearly three decades to win a playoff game despite having the lead for less than 30 seconds of game time:

The win also continued to solidify Haliburton’s near-bulletproof crunch-time reputation, and it’s possible we’ve never seen a playoff run where a player was this clutch, with this level of regularity:

For context, that means Tyrese Haliburton, in the highest stakes games possible with defenses more keyed in on him than ever, is shooting a higher percentage than any player who took more than two total shots did from the field during the entire NBA regular season.

It remains to be seen if the Pacers can pull off the most stunning upset of all — winning the NBA Finals — but it’s safe to say they can never, ever be counted out again until the final buzzer sounds.