The unsinkable Pacers don’t need the lead. They just need the last word | Claire de Lune

This is why you play the games, as the old adage goes. In recent years, the later rounds of the NBA playoffs – and the finals in particular – have felt rote. They’ve gone chalk. The drama was minimal, even under the brightest lights of the league’s biggest stage. This year has been different: a playoffs filled with suspense, tension and plot twists galore. But at the start of the finals, the scene was set for a regression to the intrigue-less mean. Every roundtable pundit, basketball expert and barbershop patron outside of Indiana state lines had Oklahoma City – basketball’s best team from wire to wire – winning the series easily.

But Tyrese Haliburton, the instigator of several of this postseason’s most jaw-dropping twists, knows a thing or two about drama. It oozes out of his pores. And he and his Indiana Pacers had other plans.

The Pacers did not lead for 47 minutes and 59.7 seconds of Game 1 on Thursday in Oklahoma City. On a night when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the regular-season MVP, scored 38 points and no Indiana player topped 19, it should have been a wrap. The Thunder’s suffocating defense, among the league’s best, forced a famously ball-conscious Indiana team – one that averages just 12 turnovers a game – into coughing it up 19 times in the first half alone. That’s hardly a recipe for success. Yet somehow, the Pacers came out victorious, against the odds, against the physics, against conventional basketball logic. Because that’s what they do. You can’t beat the Pacers by playing 47 minutes and 59.7 seconds of winning basketball. They demand all 48.

This was the fifth comeback victory of 15 or more points for the Pacers this postseason alone, the most by any NBA team in the play-by-play era. Haliburton has hit a game-winning shot in all four rounds of these playoffs, each feeling more improbable than the last: his Pacers have been underdogs in each of those series and never more so than they were when they entered the Paycom Center on Thursday. For all the talk heading into the series about how Indiana had never seen a defense like the Oklahoma City’s, we seem to have forgotten, as a general basketball viewing populace, about another key factor: Oklahoma City have never seen a team like Indiana in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter.

“They have a lot of belief,” Oklahoma City head coach Mark Daignault said, after his team’s dispiriting loss, of his ballsy Indiana opponent. “They never think they’re out of it. So they play with great belief, even when their backs are against the wall.” That belief – unwavering, unshakable – is Indiana’s secret sauce. And with every impossible comeback, it compounds on itself. The more they pull off, the less impossible it all feels.

After Thursday’s win, Haliburton reflected on where that belief started: last year’s humiliating sweep in the Eastern Conference finals. “After you have a run like last year but end up getting swept – and all the conversation is about how you didn’t belong there, how you lucked out, how it was a fluke – guys are gonna spend the summer pissed off,” he said. “Then you come into this year, and after an unsuccessful first couple of months, it’s easy for everybody to clown you. I think, as a group, we take everything personal.”

Indiana’s Tyrese Haliburton rises up for his game-winning shot on Thursday night in Oklahoma City. Photograph: Nathaniel S Butler/NBAE/Getty Images

On the character of his team, which has left opposing crowds stunned at every turn this postseason, he sums it up simply: “We don’t give up until it’s zero on the clock.”

Haliburton says being the underdog, proving people wrong, has become part of the team’s identity. “It’s fun,” he says, to win when you’re not supposed to. And this win, like all of Indiana’s wins have been , was a true team effort – even if Haliburton’s flair for the dramatic grabs most of the headlines. It was a true win by committee, whether it was Aaron Nesmith muscling his way to a critical rebound on a bad ankle, Andrew Nembhard coming up with late-game heroics on both ends (including a huge stop on Gilgeous-Alexander), or Obi Toppin scoring 11 of his 17 points in the second half off the bench. All five Pacers starters scored in double figures – so did Toppin – but none cracked 20.

It’s probably not the platonic ideal for a basketball team to rely on procuring its biggest wins in such white-knuckle fashion, but the Pacers sure are good at it, and it makes for a hell of an entertainment product. And in the highly competitive and intense NBA postseason, where wins become harder and harder to come by, teams will take them however they can, messy and chaotic as they may be. After Thursday’s instant classic, Haliburton summed up the Indiana ethos succinctly: “Come May and June, it doesn’t matter how you get ‘em. Just get ‘em.”