When the Indiana Pacers host Game 3 of the NBA Finals Wednesday night, it will mark Indianapolis’ first Finals game in 25 years. But here’s the crazy part: this Pacers Finals upset might be the most shocking in modern NBA history.
ESPN Research found that only two Finals teams in the past 40 years had worse preseason title odds than Indiana’s 50-1 longshot status—the 2020 Miami Heat (75-1) and 2002 New Jersey Nets (60-1). The 2022 Boston Celtics also started at 50-1, making the Pacers part of an extremely exclusive club of Finals underdogs.
The skeptics had good reason to doubt. Despite reaching the Eastern Conference finals last spring as a No. 6 seed, Indiana needed everything to break right just to get back there. They had to knock off a 64-win Cleveland Cavaliers team, then beat the New York Knicks without home-court advantage. Most experts figured last year’s run was a fluke fueled by injuries to opponents.
Turns out the experts were wrong—spectacularly wrong.
History says Finals underdogs don’t repeat success
The brutal truth about surprise conference finalists is they usually disappear as quickly as they arrived. Since 2003, five teams reached the conference finals with preseason title odds of 50-1 or worse. Before Indiana, every single one crashed back to earth the following season.
Three of those five teams lost in the first round the next year. The 2018-19 Portland Trail Blazers and 2020-21 Atlanta Hawks both hoped their conference finals runs would launch sustained success. Instead, it marked their peak—neither has won a playoff series since.
Only the 2018 Boston Celtics managed to build on their unlikely run, eventually reaching the 2022 Finals with mostly different players and a new coach. The Pacers just became the first team to not only return to the conference finals, but advance even further to the Finals.
Age was on Indiana’s side. Unlike previous surprise teams built around aging cores, the Pacers have 25-year-old Tyrese Haliburton leading a young roster with room to grow. That youth might explain why this Pacers Finals upset has staying power when others faded.
The Cleveland upset that changed everything
Indiana’s path required pulling off one of the decade’s biggest upsets—knocking out a Cleveland team that won 64 games, tied for the third-most wins by a team that failed to reach the conference finals. The Cavaliers looked unstoppable until the Pacers applied their trademark chaos.
After a typical comeback win in Game 2 (with Cleveland stars Darius Garland and Evan Mobley sitting out injured), Indiana got blown out by 22 in Game 3. Most figured the magic was over. Instead, the Pacers responded with a 20-point victory and closed out the series on the road in five games, stunning the basketball world.
Based on pre-series odds, Indiana’s upset ranks among the 10 most unlikely since 2000. Of all the major upsets in recent playoff history, only the Pacers and 2023 Heat have parlayed their shocking wins into Finals appearances.
The numbers behind the miracle
Even entering the playoffs, Indiana remained a massive longshot at plus-6,600 odds. Only two Finals teams since 1973 were bigger underdogs: the 2023 Heat at plus-12,500 and the legendary 1981 Houston Rockets at plus-10,000.
Those 1981 Rockets probably represent the single most shocking Finals team since the ABA-NBA merger. Houston had gone 40-42 in the regular season but somehow knocked off the defending champion Lakers and a 52-win Spurs team to reach the Finals against Boston.
If Indiana wins the championship, they’d shatter all records for Finals underdogs. The least likely champions in recent history—the 1995 Rockets and 2011 Mavericks—both started the playoffs at plus-1,800, making them more than three times more likely than this Pacers team.
Should anyone have predicted this chaos?
Advanced statistics didn’t secretly forecast this Pacers Finals upset. Indiana’s plus-2.1 net rating ranked just 13th in the NBA, barely ahead of first-round opponent Milwaukee. Their 49 wins actually exceeded what their underlying numbers suggested they should have achieved.
Looking deeper, there were subtle signs of Indiana’s potential. The Pacers started 9-14 but finished 41-18, essentially playing at a 57-win pace over the final two-thirds of the season. Much of their early struggles came when Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith were injured—once healthy, Indiana looked like a different team.
Full-strength projections told a different story. When Dan Feldman of the Dunc’d On Basketball newsletter analyzed teams using only projected healthy lineups, the Pacers ranked second in the Eastern Conference—ahead of Boston. But even that analysis couldn’t have predicted Indiana’s ability to upset Cleveland without home-court advantage.
The reality is that any analysis predicting Indiana’s rise would probably have led us astray elsewhere. The LA Clippers had the best projected full-strength rating of any team, then lost in the first round to Denver. Basketball’s beautiful chaos makes these Pacers Finals upset stories possible precisely because they’re so unpredictable.
Finals performance shows why they’re here
Through two Finals games, Indiana has played completely differently than the team that got them here. The Pacers averaged 30.0 made 2-pointers per game all season but just 22.0 in the Finals. They’re taking 48% of their shots from 3-point range compared to 40% previously, partly due to trailing in both games.
Their turnover rate has skyrocketed to 18% of possessions compared to 11.9% all season, with Oklahoma City’s defense forcing the kind of chaos that usually works in Indiana’s favor. The Thunder are averaging 12.0 steals per game compared to the 7.3 the Pacers typically allow.
But here’s the thing about this Pacers Finals upset—they’ve overcome adversity all season long. From their terrible start to key injuries to being massive underdogs in every series, Indiana keeps finding ways to win when logic suggests they shouldn’t. Wednesday night in Indianapolis, they get another chance to prove that sometimes the most unlikely stories make the best endings.
