For 17 days last June, all that separated Oklahoma City and Indiana over seven games of the NBA Finals was 19 points and a ruptured Achilles tendon.
Five months later, as the title celebration rolls on for the Thunder and the Pacers endure the painful aftereffects of star guard Tyrese Haliburton’s devastating injury, those same teams have begun strikingly divergent seasons — separated by the largest gap in the entire NBA, by record.
Even without all-NBA wing Jalen Williams, Oklahoma City’s second-best player who is recovering from offseason surgery to repair a wrist and has yet to make his season debut, the Thunder have started 14-1. Since 2000, only six other teams had a record as good or better through a season’s first 15 games.
What might be scariest about Oklahoma City is its apparent lack of complacency coming off last season’s championship.
“Honestly speaking, I didn’t like the way we won, if that makes sense,” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Thunder guard who earned most valuable player honors during the regular season and Finals, told The Athletic this month. “I didn’t think we won an NBA championship playing our best basketball. That was the first time we’d been that far in the playoffs, so it was a learning experience for us.”
Oklahoma City isn’t just winning, but dominating — outscoring opponents by an average of 15.5 points per game, the NBA’s widest margin by a significant degree. Their opportunity to repeat as champions appears enormous.
Indiana’s 1-13 start, meanwhile, is a reminder of how quickly the window for championship contention can shut. And the Pacers aren’t just getting beat, but blown out by an average of 14.5 points, the league’s second-largest deficit.
It stood as the NBA’s worst winning percentage through Monday, with little optimism of a turnaround in the near future, because although Indiana immediately grasped in June that Haliburton’s injury recovery could last the entire 2025-26 season, and plummet the team toward the fringes of playoff contention, the bottom has fallen out in ways few could have predicted immediately after Game 7.
Myles Turner, a center integral to last season’s playoff run, signed with a division rival, Milwaukee, in free agency over the summer. Then key role players counted on to keep Indiana afloat as Haliburton recovered began getting hurt themselves. A hamstring sidelined point guard T.J. McConnell the first 10 games. Sixteen minutes into the Oct. 23 season opener, guard Andrew Nembhard injured a shoulder that kept him out the next seven games. In their second game, Bennedict Mathurin, a quick-scoring option, hurt a toe. In their third, forward Obi Toppin injured a foot that could keep him out for three months.
All-Star wing Pascal Siakam, one of the few Pacers to remain healthy, acknowledged recently that although “we have injuries every single day (and) guys are in situations that they’re not supposed to be … we can’t find it as an excuse.”
“I’ve never really been a part of something like this. This is not who I want to be,” Siakam added. “I think we all got to decide that this is not who we want to be. This is not the Pacers; this is not Indiana basketball. No matter who’s out there, I don’t really care, we got to be better.”
The list of the wounded was just getting started. Last week, Indiana lost shooter Aaron Nesmith to a knee injury for what head coach Rick Carlisle said was at least four weeks, which he considered “very, very good news” considering the potential for an even longer absence.
The silver lining for Indiana is that last June, five days before Game 7, the Pacers executed a trade that netted the team its own first-round pick in the 2026 draft. At the time, it was a footnote amid the Finals. After Haliburton’s injury, and their free fall to begin this season, it could yield a high pick in a draft considered especially stocked with talent.
At times, a 15-man Pacers roster has included nine players on the injury report. All those new faces in unfamiliar roles could lead the team to overthink, Nembhard said recently.
“Any more mistakes aren’t going to cost us any more losses at this point,” he said, “so we might as well play fearless.”
As Indiana has struggled, the rest of the league has borrowed from their playbook of playing fast and pressing beyond half-court that helped propel them to the Finals. The Pacers averaged 99.9 possessions per 48 minutes last season, a figure that ranked seventh-best in the league. This season, that same average would rank only 19th.
In stark contrast, the Thunder appear to be deeper than ever. One of the few hurdles facing Oklahoma City this season was how it would fare without Williams and 20-year-old former first-round pick Nikola Topić, who was diagnosed during the preseason with testicular cancer. Afforded nearly 30 minutes a night of playing time because of those absences, all that Ajay Mitchell, a bit player last postseason as a rookie, has done is become the front-runner for the the league’s best reserve while averaging 16.3 points.
Gilgeous-Alexander has described the Thunder as “definitely a better team now than we were a year ago.”
Even after Haliburton ruptured his Achilles in the first quarter of Game 7 five months ago, Indiana stayed within only a few points until the final quarter. It ended a remarkably even series, but started the franchises down two very different paths.
Asked during an online chat with Philadelphia 76ers star Tyrese Maxey last week whether the Thunder were better this year, Haliburton said it was “hard to say without everybody healthy, but I mean they (are going to) have the best record again easily.” And asked whether he thought the Thunder could challenge the 2016 Warriors’ league record of 73 wins, Haliburton said, “Maybe, if fully healthy probably.”
The rich could get richer yet. The Thunder own a first-round pick in next June’s NBA draft belonging to the Los Angeles Clippers that could become a valuable, high pick should the Clippers continue their slide following a 4-10 start.
“I’m aware of how lucky I am to coach a team like this,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said after an 8-0 start set a franchise record. “The day-to-day quality of life is unbelievable for everybody, and like I said, it puts pressure on you to bring your best.
“I think it does that with the players. It creates a contagiousness about everybody trying to bring their best. But we got a lot of season left.”