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With the conference finals drawing to a close, we now know which two teams will contest the 2025 NBA Finals: the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers. It will be quite the basketball occasion, and here is everything you need to know about the titanic clash from a crypto betting perspective.
Once the regular season for the NBA had drawn to a close, it was time for the stakes to get a bit higher – with games and events leading all the way up to the NBA Finals 2025 between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers. Here’s how it all went down this season.
The 2025 NBA Finals format is identical to that of the previous years’, and it is much like the way the Conference Finals have just played out. The teams play a best-of-seven series with alternating home and away games until one of them reaches four wins in total. This means the 2025 NBA Finals will have a minimum of four and a maximum of seven matches for you to enjoy.
With the Thunder having closed out their series a game earlier than the Pacers, they will have a longer break heading into the championship match – the jury is still out on whether that is a blessing or a disguise for the 2025 NBA Finals.
The individual matches’ broadcast times for the NBA Finals in 2025 look like as follows:
If further games are required to determine the winner (meaning the series is not a 4-0 sweep in either direction), they are scheduled for the following dates and times:
Since the 2025 NBA Finals is presented by YouTube TV in a sponsorship deal, you may think that the event is available to watch on the platform. So, how come ABC (the American Broadcasting Corporation) is the exclusive broadcaster of the 2025 NBA Finals?
Let us square the circle for you because this can get pretty confusing, especially if you are not from the US of A: if you can access a streaming service – either via a free trial or a paid subscription – that carries ABC (like DIRECTV STREAM, Hulu + Live TV, fuboTV, and, yes, YouTube TV itself, to quote a list from Fox Sports), you will be able to follow the big games – but regional restrictions may still apply.
The 2024 NBA Finals match was contested between the Boston Celtics and the Dallas Mavericks, with the Celtics scoring first blood in a 106-86 home victory and never looking back after the Dallas-based side’s equalizer game, winning three on the trot to lift themselves atop the summit of the NBA. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was crowned as the season’s well-deserved MVP. Now, he’s back again, albeit as part of a different outfit, and he is the odds-on frontrunner for yet another MVP designation.
Neither team has made it back to the conference finals this time around, making room for fresh contenders to battle it out for the glory. For the Celtics, Jaysun Tatum’s Achilles injury pretty much marked the end of the road in terms of playoff contention – as for the Mavericks, their tenth-place finish in the Western Conference tells you everything you need to know about how their 2025 season went down.
The Thunder boast the youngest team in the NBA, and they have roared through the season, establishing themselves as a frontrunner in the Western Conference from the outset and going on to score 68 wins in the regular season and a record points differential throughout their campaign, securing their playoff berth as early as March 12 and clinching the division title a week later.
Their month-by-month breakdown for the regular season reads:
The Thunder’s playoff campaign began with a 4-0 landside win over the Memphis Grizzlies. It was followed by a close-fought 4-3 triumph over the Denver Nuggets – where the Nuggets completed an incredible comeback win in the opening game and stole home-court advantage along the way, with the teams going neck and neck until the one-sided decider in game 7 – and an ultimately straightforward 4-1 win in the Western Conference finals against Minnesota, which featured plenty of blowouts along the way – including the Oklahoma side’s sole defeat in Game 3, a 143-101 scoreline.
The Thunder have a chance to break dynastic records with their imperious campaign should they go all the way in the NBA Finals 2025, potentially matching the 1997 Chicago Bulls team with 84 total wins in their season – another metric showcasing their incredible strengths in 2024-25. (The ’96 vintage of the team made it all the way to 87 so that record is safe for at least another year.)
It’s been a banner year for the Pacers, and a true Cinderella run to reach the top of the Eastern Conference, a far cry from the playoffs sweep they suffered at the hands of Boston the last season.
Their month-by-month breakdown for the regular season in 2025 reads as such:
The Pacers’ playoff campaign began against the Indiana Bucks, but while the ultimate 4-1 scoreline may make the series seem like a super straightforward affair in retrospect, game six’s spectacular conclusion should serve as a reminder of what could have been: the Bucks were leading by four points with sixty seconds left in the fourth quarter, and by seven points heading into the final 45 seconds of overtime, ultimately losing 119-118.
It was the 4-1 series win against the top seed Cavaliers in the semifinals that showed NBA fans that the Indiana Pacers are the real deal in 2025 despite their youth and relative inexperience, storming to a 2-0 win and surviving a Donovan Mitchell-inspired comeback attempt by the Cavs, relying on their offense in games four and five to secure a back-to-back Conference Final appearance for the first time since 2013 and 2014, delivering three home defeats in the playoff series to the Cavs for the first time in their history.
Then, it was a grudge match against the New York Knicks and an eventual 4-2 series win, starting off with yet another incredible comeback, overturning a 14-point deficit with less than three minutes of play remaining and ultimately securing a 138-135 win in overtime. Close-fought games followed throughout, with the Knicks staying in touching distance across the series but never managing to even up the score, with a dominant 125-108 win in game six securing their spot in the NBA Finals 2025 match.
In NBA history, the eventual title winners either entered the playoffs as a top three seed or as the defending champions – the Pacers would do something really special if they could make the final step here in 2025.
While these two teams have ended up taking very different pathways to the NBA Finals 2025 match, we have some key statistics and tangible comparisons to make that can help determine the likelihood of each becoming the ultimate winner.
To start with the most straightforward metric, the two meetings between the teams in the regular season ended with a 2-0 score to the Thunder. First, they met in Indiana in December, where the future Western Conference winners put an end to the Pacers’ five-match win streak in spectacular style, courtesy of a 120-114 comeback win. Their other meeting in Oklahoma was a much more straightforward affair once March rolled around, a 132-11 game. By that point, the Thunder established themselves as an NBA frontrunner for the season, being in the middle of an eight-game win streak and fifteen Ws out of the last sixteen played. Ultimately, it was a harbinger of things to come.
The matchup itself is shaping up to be a battle of a great offense against a fantastic defense – and on occasions like this, it’s the lesser-celebrated aspects of the teams that come to the forefront as they get put under the ultimate stress test. The Thunder have a Great Wall-like defense to rely on, while the Pacers’ pacey play served as a strong foundation for an incredible offense throughout their campaign, outscoring their opponents by an average of 8.5 points per game in transition plays. While this will be the headline comparison for the series, watch the Western Conference winners’ offense and how the Indiana Pacers will perform in defense – it could very well be where this matchup will ultimately get decided between the two best NBA teams of the season.
In terms of individual players, keep an eye on Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith for the Pacers, and watch Lu Dort and Isaiah Hartenstein on the OKC side. Of course, you can’t forget about Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, either. If anything, this just goes to highlight how the depth of Oklahoma City will serve as an added lynchpin in their NBA Finals 2025 strategy. Odds-wise, the Golden State Warriors’ 2018 against the Cavaliers were the only bigger underdogs of the past two decades, per ESPN – then again, we know how that series turned out.
No matter whether the Thunder or the Pacers will win the NBA Finals 2025, basketball history will be made. Either, as most fans and pundits expect, the Thunder wrap up an impressive and imperious season with dynastic levels of performances and wins, establishing themselves as an all-time great team with a potential for repeated victories, or the Pacers will be the first team in NBA history to go all the way in the playoffs without a top three seeding or being the defending champions.
Spearheaded by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Isaiah Hartenstein, Oklahoma boasts incredible depth in their squad and one of the strongest defenses in the league. Meanwhile, the Pacers will rely on the likes of Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith and their rapid offense and great transition play in search of one last upset, the biggest of them all.
With both teams preferring fast play and producing high-scoring games this season, an exciting series is all but guaranteed. Experts and oddsmakers are in agreement that the Thunder are a heavy, if not overwhelming, favorite for the NBA Finals 2025, but the beauty of high-stakes basketball is that anything is possible in a high-stakes best-of-seven series.
The first game tipoff is scheduled for June 5, 8:30 pm ET (June 6, 2:30 am CEST), with the Thunder having home-court advantage and playing the first two games of the series in the Paycom Center. It’s going to be some truly must-watch action for basketball fans all around the world.
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