OKLAHOMA CITY — When the Oklahoma City Thunder get hit, they tend to hit back. Immediately, too.
Everybody knows what probably is coming in Game 2 of the NBA Finals on Sunday night. The Thunder, down 1-0 in the best-of-seven series with the Indiana Pacers, will be raring to go.
That’s been their way all season; the Thunder are 17-2, including the NBA Cup final loss, in the next game after a defeat, with those 17 wins coming by an average of 17.5 points.
The thing is, the Thunder say that’s the way they play after wins as well.
“That’s the trick,” coach Mark Daigneault said Saturday. “You don’t want to be reactive to the last game because then you can be too high after wins, you can be too low after losses. We just get ourselves to neutral. Understand every game is different, every game is unwritten. You go out there, the ball goes up in the air, and the team that competes better on that night wins.”
As such, Oklahoma City will try to be better Sunday. And so will Indiana.
There was much for both teams to clean up after Game 1. For the Pacers, it was too many turnovers. For the Thunder, it was not closing out a game that it led by 15 with less than 10 minutes remaining on the clock Thursday night.
“Look, everybody’s pattern after a loss is to come more aggressively. … Their whole team is going to be even more aggressive defensively,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “The challenge for us is to be able to match that.”
Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — who led all scorers with 38 points in Game 1, his NBA Finals debut — said he doesn’t hang on to games for too long, even that one. He watches film, learns the lessons and moves on.
He doesn’t expect to deviate from that plan for Game 2.
“I take what I need to take from it, and we do it as a group,” said Gilgeous-Alexander, a former prep standout for Chattanooga’s Hamilton Heights who won the NBA MVP award this season for the first time. “After that, I let it go because the lessons are learned. There’s nothing else you can do.”
The Pacers have an opportunity at something very rare: going up 2-0 in the title round by taking the first two games on the road.
It’s happened only twice in NBA Finals history. The Chicago Bulls did it in 1993 against the Phoenix Suns, and the Houston Rockets did it in 1995 against the Seattle SuperSonics (the franchise that moved to Oklahoma City in 2008 and became the Thunder). Both teams that built those 2-0 leads on the road went on to win the NBA title in those seasons, with that the third in a row for the Bulls and the second straight for the Rockets.
“I think winning on the road is hard,” said Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton, who hit the winning shot in Game 1 with 0.3 second left. “Winning an NBA game is hard, and especially a playoff game, and let alone a Finals game, right? It’s not easy. You’re just trying to be as present as you can.”
The Thunder know their odds of winning this title take a serious dive if they lose Game 2 and head to Indianapolis trailing the series 2-0. So, technically, Sunday isn’t a must-win game. There’s a Game 3 on Wednesday no matter what and a Game 4 next Friday no matter what.
Nobody needs to tell the Thunder the stakes right now, though.
“Game 1 was a must-win, and we didn’t win. Now we flip to Game 2 and it’s a must-win again,” Thunder forward Chet Holmgren said. “We’ve been in must-win situations in this playoff run, and honestly in the playoffs, every game feels like a must-win. You’re not saving anything in the tank for any games down the line.”