The Architect, The Dagger, And The Pain: The 2025 NBA Finals Game 7
After the fire is gone...
Thoughts in the aftermath of the end of the 2024-25 NBA season and the new NBA Champion, the Oklahoma City Thunder.
THE ARCHITECT
I want you to imagine an architect.
This architect loves designing structures. It’s what he’s passionate about. He throws himself into it, and he learns every detail you can learn under some of the best minds in architecture design.
While he’s learning from those legends, he’s learning more important things about how to build an architecture company. How to find the right people to work with. How to instill the right company values and keep them consistently at a high level. How to develop people so they can grow into better roles and love their jobs more, which only makes the work better.
He learns how important people are.
And one day, he gets the chance to start his own firm. It’s a startup that has moved its operations to a new city. And he builds everything from scratch. He knows how to liquidate assets they have to create more funding for projects. He’s lucky enough to get the chance to design a tower that might be the tallest in the city. It has three shining spires and could be a beacon of pride for everyone within eyesight of it.
And he builds it meticulously, but just as it’s supposed to finish the last stages of construction, problems start—infighting with key personnel, the departure of important talent, accidents that delay construction. Still, plagued by the same problems that have plagued so many projects, they press on and are almost there. They’re going to complete the tower.
And then a natural disaster strikes, reducing it to rubble.1
The architect presses on, but knows the tower will never be what it could have been. And eventually, he’s forced to tear it down, but he’s given the chance to build something else on the land.
Not a spire this time.
A fortress.
And this time, this time, the architect leaves nothing to chance. He reaches for the youngest and hungriest designers. He builds in thousands of redundancies to projects. He finds the right project leader as someone who understands what the company is about.
The fortress is tall, and strong, impenetrable. It’s not a blight on the cityscape; it’s a testament to the city’s strength.
It took so long, with so much misfortune and so many things he would have done differently, but he’s done it.
The architect has his masterpiece.
That’s Sam Presti.
You have to understand how much Presti loves the work. I don’t think Presti will be a lifer in the NBA. There are a lot of fields where he would be incredibly successful. He loves basketball, but the NBA takes its toll on people.
However, Presti has always loved the work of finding the best way to do things.
Something that has always stuck out to me is that you’ll never find a negative word or leak about former players from Presti’s organization.
James Harden left because he wanted his own team and knew what he was capable of achieving. The Thunder were — wrongfully— killed over that trade even as evidence is starting come out about the reality of it. The Thunder just took the hits.
Kevin Durant destroyed the franchise and its fans. In the wake of Durant’s decision in 2016, the Thunder released a statement thanking Durant for everything he’d given the organization. That was it.
Paul George wanted to go home to LA. Presti made it happen. Yes, they got back a future MVP that no one — Presti included, by his own admission — knew would be one and all the picks, because it made sense for both sides. The Thunder have never gloated about that trade, or the Westbrook trade to Houston.
The NBA has so many ways to build great teams. The Celtics made shrewd trades like the one for Tatum, Jrue, and Porzingis. The Heat have always gambled for superstars under Riley, using beaches and championship clout with a disciplined supporting structure.2 The Nuggets and Bucks found transcendent talents in unlikely draft positions.
All championships feel great and rewarding, and all involve so much luck. But for the Thunder, it’s the culmination of so much collective praxis: the work for work’s sake, and finally getting to taste the fruit of the labor.
THE DAGGER
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander does not slice you down in one swing. It’s a thousand cuts, deep into your torso, splitting veins, spilling organs, turning you into meat.
Shai is the first player since LeBron to win MVP and Finals MVP. The real MVP of OKC is the defense, and they and everyone else know it. But you have to score the points to outscore the opponent, no matter what you hold them to.
He’s also only starting to touch his highest potential. He’s going to get better. He’ll shape the game. His passing will improve. He’s survived all the gameplans and exhaustion and came out with Finals MVP.
It’s one of the best individual seasons we’ll ever see. Many will balk at that because Shai rarely amazes. He’s not launching threes from 35 feet because he can; he wasn’t gifted with Steph’s god-like powers. He’s not powering through four defenders for dunks.
There’s greatness in consistency and efficiency. That sounds boring, like terms for a chain of convenience stores. But they’re terms for things you know matter in a game.
If Shai weren’t as consistent, they’d be the Magic. If Shai weren’t as efficient, they’d be the Rockets. Those are two really good teams, but not championship caliber, and not teams with the best point differential ever.
Measure it this way: think of what Shai gives and takes. He gives you 30 and 6. Every night. Clockwork. You never have to worry how to score if Shai has 20. You never have to worry about SGA taking up all the oxygen in the offense, because he doesn’t waste possessions.
SGA is ball-dominant; he has the highest usage rate of any NBA champion in history, slipping past Jordan’s ‘93 season. But you never feel like he takes anything away from his teammates.
SGA had legendary stretches in these series. His composure and shot making in the fourth quarter of Game 4 in a moment that would have broken a lot of players will stand out as his Moment.
What will be fascinating is to see if he can combine the million cuts with broader swipes and a way to control the game over the next few years.
THE PAIN
I’m never going to get that image of Haliburton screaming “No!” as he pounded the floor out of my head.
The numbness afterward that I think most fans felt drifted in, like blindness. There’s so much awfulness, all the time, right now, and sports are meant to be, are designed to be, are paid to be an escape from the wretchedness.
But there will be no shelter here. A professional athlete guaranteed millions suffering an injury is no tragedy next to…
/gestures broadly
But it’s just one more thing that shows we can’t have nice things.
The most unlikely, exciting, unpredictable run in NBA history ends like this? Not just with an injury in Game 7, but one that removes Haliburton after everything he gave us this postseason for a full season and will reshape the rest of his career?
That’s what we get?
This Pacers team answers so many challenges that were supposed to be beyond them, time after time? And this is how it ends?
Haliburton rises to the moment and plays the right way, always, and this is what he gets?
Pacers fans stick with this team through decades and decades and decades, never without a title, they finally get another shot at it and a Game 7 and this is what they get?
The hollowness that Haliburton’s injury left is an ache and one that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
I’m heartboken for him, for the rehab ahead of him which is the part no one ever wants to think or talk about. It’s painful. It’s exhausting. It’s depressing.
I’m heartbroken because the Pacers will somehow be competitive next season again but never able to be what they could be, a lost season no matter what.
I’m heartbroken because we’ll always wonder about that Game 7, and that doesn’t just take away from the Pacers, but OKC as well. Thunder fans have earned the right not to care and just to soak in their joy, but the rest of us have to grapple with the cruelty of this pain.
And that, my friends, is 2025.
What a season, what an offseason ahead. So much to cover. I hope you’ll join me here for all of it. Cheers.
Call it “Hurricane Game 6 Klay.”
That is cracking and decaying because nothing gold can stay, a reminder for the future of Thunder basketball, eventually
Awesome read!
Excellent piece. You do justice to everything great about the series, on both sides. A fitting coda to a magnificent series.