After a miracle comeback in Game 1 and a sound beating in Game 2, the Indiana Pacers spent 48 minutes looking like they belong in the 2025 NBA Finals. And now, they’re two wins from their first NBA championship.

The Pacers defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder 116-107 in Game 3 on Wednesday to take a 2-1 lead in the Finals. Game 4, in which they can fully put OKC on its back foot, is scheduled for Friday at Gainbridge Fieldhouse (8:30 p.m. ET, ABC).

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Perhaps its a sign we’ve started to take the Pacers for granted that them erasing a nine-point deficit barely registers as a comeback these days, at least by their standards. That surge at the start of the second quarter was only the beginning of the most back-and-forth game of the series, with 13 ties and eight lead changes.

The game was knotted as late as midway through the fourth quarter, but then a Tyrese Haliburton-led run put the Pacers up eight with three minutes remaining, as a raucous Fieldhouse found another gear for noise.

The Pacers still haven’t lost back-to-back games since March 10, and the Thunder need to make them do that to win this series.

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Haliburton finished with 22 points, 11 assists and 9 rebounds, while Pascal Siakam had 21 points. Normally, it’s those two who decide what kind of night it’s going to be for the Pacers, but there was a different group of heroes for Indiana on Wednesday.

Pacers bench comes up huge

Both the Thunder and Pacers went deep into their benches, with a combined 21 players having entered the game by midway through the second quarter.

That might have been a reflection of the high-speed pace these two teams have played both this series and this postseason, but it was to the Pacers’ advantage in Game 3. The Pacers’ bench outscored the Thunder’s second unit 49-18, with particularly big performances from Bennedict Mathurin (27 points, the third-most off the bench in Finals history) and T.J. McConnell (10 points, 5 assists, 5 steals, the first such game off the bench in Finals history).

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The impact was most felt in the second quarter, which the Pacers entered down by eight. With Haliburton and Siakam out of the game, the Indiana bench hustled its way to the Pacers’ first lead of the game.

No player epitomized the Pacers’ drive like McConnell. Once a lightly pursued 5-foot-8 recruit and then an undrafted free agent, McConnell has carved out a role as the guy who keeps the Pacers offense running without Haliburton. The Pacers don’t win Game 3 without him, making him one of several success stories on a team that is two wins from over-achieving its way to an NBA title.

Too many mistakes add up for Thunder

A combined 70 points from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams sounds like a winning formula for OKC and its NBA-best defense, but Game 3 was lost on the margins.

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OKC committed 17 turnovers, against Indiana’s 13, with only 16 assists as a team. It missed 7-of-30 free-throw attempts, with Gilgeous-Alexander reaching the line only six times. Indiana won the fastbreak battle 17-10 and had a response after every OKC run in the second half.

The Thunder lost Game 1 because their offense went cold right as Haliburton went Super Saiyan. Given what we’ve seen in the playoffs this year, that’ll happen. Game 3 was the much more concerning loss, with a Pacers team many expected to be overmatched finding a winning formula.

OKC now has less than 48 hours to file its response.

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Condolences to Jay-Z

The Thunder still have four games left to win three games, something they are entirely capable of doing. So if there was a biggest loser on Wednesday, it might have been Jay-Z.

The rap mogul placed a $1 million bet on the Thunder to win in five games at the start of the series, which is now impossible. Had he hit that bet, it would have returned $3.3 million, more than some members of the actual Thunder roster are making this season.

Here’s everything that happened in Game 3 of the 2025 NBA Finals via Yahoo Sports: