Stiles Points: OKC Thunder Can't Panic After No Show Game 6

There is no sugar coating it. The Oklahoma City Thunder "Sucked tonight," according to superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander following Game 6 of the 2025 NBA Finals against the Indiana Pacers. That is a fair, and honest, assessment for what the NBA world watched on Thursday night.

Oklahoma City has never been this close to a Championship. its only other Finals appearance coming in the 2012 postseason where the upstart Thunder fell in five games to a desperate Miami Heat ball club led by LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. The Bricktown Ballers had 48 minutes between them and a coronation but outright failed to show up.

After a 10-2 spurt in the first four minutes of the contest, the Pacers rattled off a 22-7 run in response to gain the lead and salt the game away. Indiana cruised to a 108-91 win in Game 6, protecting home court and living to se a Game 7. 48 minutes for all the marbles.

This is undoubtably disappointing. The Thunder's title dreams put on pause after a few days of fantastication and Oklahoma City has no one to blame but itself. What they did on Thursday was not championship level effort.

The Bricktown ballers lapsed too often defensively and its offense was dead on arrival. Being forced to play in the half court after not stacking stops which bogged down OKC's attack as turnovers were plenty and made shots were few.

Indiana deserves a ton of credit for how its defense worked on Thursday. The Pacers played on a string to the tune of relentless closeouts, jumping in passing lanes to disrupt the Thunder's offense which eventually led the ball handlers to seeing ghost and getting away from making passes at all.

"It just got sticky, I feel like. Our defense wasn't very good. When you're constantly taking the ball out and you're playing against a set defense over and over again, that's part of it. Other part, we didn't do a good job trusting each other to make the next play like we did Game 5. We'll look at some things. Obviously they made a couple adjustments. We'll look at that, too," All-Star Jalen Williams said following Game 6. "A lot of it was, yeah, just not trusting each other to make the plays. That starts with me being better, figuring out different ways to get my teammates involved, stuff like that. Good news is we have another game to figure it out."

The Thunder can't run from how bad Game 6 was. What an opportunity they wasted. They can't excuse the poor outing. Oklahoma City also can't cry over spilled milk. They still have a chance to win this series in Game 7 and wash away this bad feeling.

"Just trying to cut the emotion out of it. Obviously that's frustrating. It's not fun. Nobody is happy right now. But you can't let the emotions kind of sidetrack you from what we need to do leading up to and during the game coming up. We've had wins and losses throughout the Playoffs, so it's kind of a similar mentality: turn the page, don't forget just what happened, but see where you can be better and try to apply it going forward," Rising star Chet Holmgren said following Game 6.

Oklahoma City is still 48 minutes from immortality, closer than they've ever been. Sunday is for all the marbles, with one of these two teams set to win its first championship in club history. The Thunder have to learn from this loss but not panic entering Game 7.

Song of the Day: Life is a Highway by Rascal Flatts