My old newspaper pal, Barry Stanton, always used to laugh when he’d hear people waxing poetic and saying that “Game Seven” are the two best words in sports.
“No,” Barry would say, “actually the two best words in sports are ‘We win.’”
Either the Thunder or the Pacers will win Game 7 of these NBA Finals on Sunday night, the first Game 7 we’ve had in the NBA Finals since 2016. That was the night when LeBron and the Cavs finally came all the way back from being down 1-3 to the Warriors, and Kyrie Irving made the shot of his life, and LeBron made the block of his life when he chased down Andre Iguodala from somewhere around the Bay Bridge.
The Cavs won their first NBA title that night in Oakland, against a Warriors team that had won 73 regular season games. Now the Thunder have a chance to win their first NBA title in Oklahoma City (there was one in Seattle, in a previous basketball life for the franchise) and an old ABA powerhouse from Indy has a chance to win its first title in the NBA, after knocking on the door one other time, all the way back in 2000, when they once again defeated the Knicks on their way to losing the finals to the Lakers, 4-2.
So this is big stuff for these two cities. It is big stuff for the NBA, where there have been only four Game 7’s in the past four decades. And this is big stuff whether it is a great game Sunday night or not, and whether it does a big network ratings number or not. Judging important sports events, in any sport, by ratings is more over in this country than the idea that government still works for us.
What I hope for in this Game 7 is that we get a night to remember, a moment to remember, maybe even the kind of shot Tyrese Haliburton made against the Knicks in the first game of their Eastern Conference finals, the one that bounced off the back of the rim and as high as the 24-second clock and then finally fell through the net, almost out of exhaustion. The Pacers won that game, and were on their way to beating the Knicks, and now they have a chance to win a championship.
As great as Jalen Brunson was for the Knicks this spring, and we all know Brunson kept doing things we all had to see to believe, Haliburton is the one who carried his team to victory in that series, and Haliburton is the one who has the opportunity, even on just one good leg, to take the Pacers to the top of the mountain.
At a time when the Knicks nearly made it back to the Finals for the first time since 1999, when they almost made all that ball-pounding work for them, it is the Pacers who played a fast, beautiful game of basketball; who had those possessions where they did what coaches ask players to do all the way back to Rec Ball at the Y: Never let the ball touch the ground until it’s all the way through the basket.
The old Knicks moved the ball this way, and even they didn’t move it with the speed that the Pacers have since they started making this run around the first of the year. Around here Knicks fans are always going to hate Haliburton for what he did to them as much as they hated Reggie Miller once. But it’s awfully hard to root against the way this kid plays the game, and even plays it hurt, and the way his team plays.
For the other team, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — who didn’t show up for Game 6 the way his teammates didn’t show up and opened the door wide for the Pacers in the process — has a chance to be one of those MVP guys whose team also wins a championship. He plays a kind of mid-range game that Michael Jordan, the greatest of them all, once played. Now he has a chance to do a Michael double on Sunday night: Be an MVP whose team wins it all.
Rick Carlisle, the Pacers coach, tries to do something quite rare himself, become a coach to win NBA titles with different teams, having already won one with the Mavericks against LeBron and the Heat. Pascal Siakam? He tries to win his second title with his second team, having already done it with the Raptors.
Yeah, Game 7 Sunday night. Fans of the Thunder and fans of the Pacers get one of those rare gifts. You know the last time we had a Game 7 here for one of our teams with a championship on the line: 1994. We had two of them that year, in a month that will be remembered in the big city forever. Knicks eventually lost to the Rockets. Rangers beat the Canucks. It may never happen that way in New York ever again.
You know the last time we had a Game 7 for a New York team in the World Series? Yankees in 2001. Before that it was the Mets in 1986 and again against the A’s in 1973. And before that in New York? It was in 1964, when the Yankees and the Cardinals went seven in the ’64 World Series. Even when the Islanders were winning four Stanley Cups in a row, they never went the distance.
Guess who else never had to go the distance? Michael. Six NBA titles for him, 6-0 in the Finals, not a single Game 7. What the Thunder and Pacers really get Sunday night is a Super Bowl for their sport, one game for everything. And that happens to be very big stuff, whether these are small-market teams or not.
We got a blowout on Thursday night when the Thunder had a chance to win the championship; when the Larry O’Brien Trophy was in Gainbridge Fieldhouse. We will find out Sunday night what happens now to the best regular-season team in the league because of the way they let the Pacers not only get back up, but rolled the Thunder the way they did, and got the Pacers believing all over again that this is their year and nobody else’s.
Haliburton, hurt in Game 5, held without a basket, only played 23 minutes in Game 6, scoring 14 points with five assists. It just seemed like more. Once again when he was out there, he seemed to be everywhere at once.
“We’ve had such a special year. We have a special bond as a group,” he said when it was over. “I’d beat myself up if I didn’t give it a chance.”
One more chance for him on Sunday night. One last chance at redemption for the Thunder. They all get the chance to do something that will be remembered forever. Maybe one of them will be Clyde.
MORE HITS THAN MISSES FOR SOX, VOLPE’S GREAT EXPECTATIONS & GOOD JOB BY THE DODGERS …
Craig Breslow, who runs baseball ops for the Red Sox, is getting crushed on a daily basis because he traded Rafael Devers — someone who did everything except hire a skywriter to let people know he didn’t want to play in Boston any longer — to the Giants.
But Breslow is also the guy who signed Alex Bregman, the Red Sox best player this season (and that includes Devers) before Bregman went on the IL.
Breslow is the guy who brought Garrett Crochet, one of the sport’s true aces, to the Red Sox.
And, oh by the way, he also signed Aroldis Chapman to be his closer, and all Chapman has been is the best closer in the sport to this point in the season.
I’m starting to think that baserunning drills are optional down there in Tampa for the Yankees in the spring.
You have to give Devin Williams all the credit in the world for powering through the train-wreck way his Yankee career began this spring.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. keeps acting as if the greatest health menace in the whole, wide world is vaccines.
No.
No the greatest health menace in America is a wingnut like him.
It was amazing how quickly the beginning of June 2025 turned into May 2024 for our Mets.
Anybody who believes that James Dolan wasn’t profoundly involved in the firing of Tom Thibodeau is watching the wrong movie.
We’ve had fifty seasons of Jimmy in two sports.
Still no titles.
It sort of hasn’t happened in a vacuum.
Anthony Volpe is a nice player.
He was expected to be more than a nice player by the Yankees.
You know who the face of the Yankee farm system still is?
No. 99.
Mall cops would be better running the Department of Defense than Pete Hegseth.
You know how we’re always hearing in sports about two teams that don’t like each other?
The Dodgers and Padres really, really don’t like each other.
Coach Daboll says the Giants have “hit the ground running” in training camp and all I can say is, it had to happen sooner or later.
Has anybody done a wellness check on Timothee Chalamet and Ben Stiller?
Good for the Los Angeles Dodgers for telling those federal immigration officials that if they wanted to get inside Dodger Stadium, they needed to buy a ticket.
Rory McIlroy must already be wondering where all his friends in the media went.
The ratings for the Stanley Cup finals dropped, too, so is that the end of everything?
I can’t lie:
I’m not nearly as interested in where Kevin Durant wants to play basketball as I used to be.
The idea that Mark Walter paid the Buss family $10 billion for the Lakers that Jeanie Buss is still going to be the big boss of things is funnier than John Mulaney.
