The 2025 NBA Playoffs have progressed to the ultimate round as the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers will face off in the NBA Finals to determine who will lift the championship trophy.
Most of the questions we get in the Blazer’s Edge Mailbag revolve around the Portland Trail Blazers. But we’ve gotten a few timely ones surrounding the playoffs. Before that moment passes, let’s take a look at the good and bad of this year’s postseason run. Hopefully this omnibus post will take care of the bulk of inquiries. If we miss something critical, you can always ask in the comments section or by emailing blazersub@gmail.com.
My overwhelming impression is that the Thunder-Pacers matchup is good for basketball. These teams are the perfect blend of shining stardom mixed with excellent supporting cast. Contrast these two squads with the Los Angeles Lakers or Denver Nuggets. Both of the latter franchises feature world-class superstars and compelling storylines. But basketball-wise, they’re incomplete.
The Pacers feature Tyrese Haliburton, the Thunder MVP Shai Gilgegous-Alexander. Both young players have come out of relative obscurity. Each was traded to their current team, Gilgeous-Alexander from the Los Angeles Clippers, Haliburton from the Sacramento Kings. From those beginnings and restarts, they’ve grown to two of the most versatile, potent forces in the league. They didn’t silver-spoon it. They earned it.
The common link for both is good coaching. Rick Carlisle and Mark Daigneault aren’t just X’s and O’s guys. They have a knack for putting their players in positions to succeed, starting with the stars. This begins with freedom to handle the ball and play in a natural style, but continues with matchup and stylistic changes to take advantage of opponent weaknesses. NBA mythology says that the proper course of action with a superstar is simply let them dominate, then get everybody else to fill in around them. Stars are supposedly disconnected from the game, in their own universe. These coaches have shown that connecting the best players to the game pays dividends. Adjusting style of play has been huge for Indiana and Haliburton. Even mighty Oklahoma City has vacillated between crushing defense and riding Gilgeous-Alexander, depending on night and need. Versatility has played more of a role in these playoffs—even for superstars—than in any I can remember.
Obviously versatility and connection extend to the supporting casts of each roster. Oklahoma City is downright intimidating. Indiana has been maximizing the resources they have. In both cases defense has made a strong resurgence. All of the final four participants in these playoffs were good defensively, at least in their own ways. Teams simply didn’t advance without it. Gone are the days of hiding a non-defender in the corner while an offense-only superstar dribbles the orange off of the ball up top. That may still work on offense, but once the ball goes the other way, those teams are cooked. You’re watching more players make more contributions than we’ve seen since the 1970’s.
This Finals series should be good for basketball. If you want a matchup to showcase the breadth and intricacy of the sport, this was the one to root for. You will probably be able to sit friends and family members in front of the TV and teach a course.
Whether it turns out well for the NBA itself remains to be seen. Neither team features a household name. The league hasn’t developed the NFL’s knack of making any franchise that plays for a championship seem important. Indianapolis versus Oklahoma City isn’t big-time. This may be the best series played in recent memory that nobody watches. It’ll be even worse if, as I half-suspect, the Thunder blow out the Pacers without much of a contest.
The playoffs have featured a couple of prominent blemishes as well, at least to my eye.
As far as the Conference Finals—certainly in the rounds before—effort seemed inconsistent, particularly for the squads who lost. Certain stretches were hard-fought. But I can’t remember seeing so many players, for lack of a better word, give up. Sometimes this happened in the macro sense; the Minnesota Timberwolves and Miami Heat appeared to abandon entire games. More often it came in micro-plays where defenses seemed to cede that they were beat long before they actually were.
I remember the days when, if a driver went to the basket during an important contest, a defender would do his best to knock him out of the sky. This year we saw defensive players slow to a jog and drop their hands to the side as opponents soared for unopposed dunks.
I wonder if some of this is generational. The asteroid-disaster movie Deep Impact featured Robert DuVall playing Spurgeon Tanner, a 60’s-era astronaut pressed into duty during a new-millennium crisis. When asked for his reflections on the experience, Tanner praised the skills of his younger colleagues, but then offered something along the lines of, “They’ve been trained in ways I’ll never understand. We were afraid of messing up. They’re afraid of looking bad on TV.”
This generation of NBA defenders might reflect that quote. When they’re beat, they stop. They’re not going to get in the poster frame and get embarrassed. They’ll let the dunk go instead. Granted, 95% of the time they’re probably right, but that 5% where they actually interfered—even if it’s just with a hard foul—could change the game. It’s still a culture shock to me to see high-level playoffs series where teams are, in essence, giving each other Mulligans instead of making them actually finish the putt and put the ball in the cup. I can’t help but think that Dennis Rodman would have left the dunker with two points, but a nasty bruise the next morning as well. Poster THAT. Today’s players don’t have to go that far, but changing the play instead of just anticipating defeat would help.
Obviously the league is refereed differently now than it was back then. This contributes as well. And darned if I can understand it, even after several years of watching this new system. Officiating was far from perfect back in the day. It may have even been corrupt. But I could usually tell what was a foul and what wasn’t because refs were, for the most part, consistent. Now we’re lucky if calls are the same half-to-half, let alone game-to-game. Most of the time when the whistle blows, I have no idea what’s going to happen. I don’t think that’s good for the sport or for observers, especially casual ones.
Injuries remain a chronic issue as well. I don’t know for the life of me how they’re going to solve that one, but I wish they could. Watching major players go down is no fun. If it was just the geriatric set, that’d be one thing. We’ve mentioned before that these playoffs signal a changing of the guard in the NBA, a passing of the superstars we’ve known for the last 20 years, the advent of a new wave. But that new wave is coming up with the same hamstring injuries and knee problems as Steph Curry and company. I suppose one could argue that having a deep team is necessary for winning nowadays. It’s not satisfying at all to think that the healthiest teams are going to be the ones passing forward, almost by default.
Overall I’d say these playoffs indicate that the state of the game is good, maybe better than it’s been in a while. The actual NBA still has issues to fix. I’ve been pleased with, and intrigued by, the postseason this year. For those who wonder, I think the Blazers have a better chance of ascending based on models like Indiana and Oklahoma City than Golden State, San Antonio, or the Lakers in years of yore. So all that’s good. Let’s see if the Finals lives up to the promise before we all hold back the gagging in our mouth as the Dallas Mavericks select Cooper Flagg in the upcoming NBA Draft.