OKLAHOMA CITY — When the newest NBA champions reached their locker room Sunday night and found a tub of Champagne bottles waiting, the team that had all the answers all season long was finally stumped.
How, Oklahoma City Thunder players wondered, did one open a bottle of Champagne?
Isaiah Hartenstein, a backup center, was one of the few on the second-youngest roster ever to make an NBA Finals to have celebrated a title before. But that championship had come in a Lithuanian league, and all that team had done was drink tequila from the bottle, he said.
So the team turned for guidance to Alex Caruso, a 30-year-old backup guard and the only Thunder player to have previously won an NBA championship — in 2020 with the Los Angeles Lakers. Soon, bottles were opened and bubbles were spraying to celebrate not only the Thunder's 103-91 win in Game 7 of the NBA Finals over Indiana but also the conclusion of a historically great NBA season.
It was a scene that should worry the rest of the NBA.
This is the most inexperienced this iteration of the Thunder will be. Yet, they are quick learners, and because of it they’ve won a championship — and could be back in the finals again soon.
“Through the learning experience of taking the foil off, undoing the metal, having the cork ready, there’s three or four guys that popped their corks,” Caruso said. “Then it happened again. We’re like, all right, we went through the process a couple times, and eventually we got everybody on the same page."
“It was a good first try," he said. "We’ll get some rest, reset, try to go again next year and see if we can do it again. We’ll be better. We’ll be better next year.”
For the first time in NBA history, a different champion has been crowned in seven consecutive seasons, a run of parity exemplified best by the Thunder’s opponent, Indiana.
Unlike the Thunder, who had rolled through the regular season for 68 wins and the best scoring differential in the league’s history, Indiana was the Eastern Conference’s fourth seed when the playoffs began two months ago, seemingly a championship nonfactor in a conference dominated by Cleveland and Boston.
Yet, they Pacers pulled off at least one shocking victory in three consecutive rounds to reach their first finals in 25 years, and as recently as last week they were one quarter away from holding a 3-1 series lead over the top-seeded Thunder.
The Thunder had never been stress-tested under such pressure before. Beating Indiana to even the series in Game 4 on the road, then holding their composure to win Game 7 at home, would be harder than opening a bottle of Champagne.
That Oklahoma City — despite its dearth of big-game experience — pulled it off, and given that its core of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams, Chet Holmgren and Lu Dort all are under contract and all under 27 years old, there is evidence to suggest it could be the team that ends the NBA’s parity era.
“We definitely still have room to grow,” said Gilgeous-Alexander, who joined Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal as the only players in NBA history to win a championship in the same year they also won a scoring title and the Most Valuable Player award.
“That’s the fun part of this. So many of us can still get better," he said. "There’s not very many of us on the team that are ‘in our prime’ or even close to it.”
Indiana’s path back, meanwhile, appears extraordinarily difficult, and not only because its improbable run to the finals is an extremely difficult blueprint to replicate. When Pacers players trudged off the court where a celebratory stage was being hastily assembled after Game 7, it felt like more than a potential championship had been lost.
Star point guard Tyrese Haliburton, who had played during the series with a strained calf, slipped and fell eight minutes into the first quarter and did not get up until a teammate and a coach put him onto their shoulders and walked him to the locker room. He did not return, and his father later told ESPN that he had injured his Achilles tendon, an injury that could lead to his missing most, if not all, of next season.
“All of our hearts dropped,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said.
Outside the locker room after the game, Pacers icon Reggie Miller, who brought Indiana to its last NBA Finals a quarter-century ago, hugged a crying T.J. McConnell. Haliburton waited a few feet away, his weight supported by a crutch under each arm.
Haliburton’s injury followed a torn Achilles to another all-NBA-caliber superstar, Boston’s Jayson Tatum, in the second round, and another marquee face of the league, Golden State’s Stephen Curry, was not healthy enough to finish his second-round series. The absences could not be seen as anything but damaging for a league built on star power, but before these finals began, league commissioner Adam Silver said they were not sufficient data points alone to consider whether to shorten the 82-game season.
“I don’t really see the benefit to reducing the number of games,” Silver said June 5. “People used to say you should reduce the number of games because it will lead to a reduction in a number of injuries. We have absolutely no data to suggest that. If that were the case, you would think you have more injuries in April than October. We don’t see that. Or you would think you’d see more injuries in the playoffs than you do in the regular season. We don’t see that, either.”
Silver acknowledged that an "economic reduction" plays a factor in the reluctance to reduce the number of games, but he also said he did not see an "overall benefit" to doing so, either.
"I don’t think keeping the start and end of the season at the same points, reducing the number of games and adding some rest is enough of a reason, I would just say it that way, to start reducing the number of games," he said.
Eighteen days later, an NBA season pushed to its absolute maximum number of games had ended.
More than two hours before Game 7 began, a worker leaned over a humming ice maker in Paycom Center’s back hallway, a scoop in her right hand. With an audible crunch, each plunge of the scoop delivered an icy layer to a waiting bucket below, where inside rested eight bottles of Champagne.
When the tub was filled, it was wheeled down a hallway toward a holding area. One year from now, if the Thunder are back, they will not need instructions.
