The NBA Finals and the matchups are set. The top-seed and overwhelming favorites, the Oklahoma City Thunder, will take on the No. 4 seed in the Eastern Conference, the Indiana Pacers.
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The Thunder enter this match as the favorites and by a large margin. Oklahoma City opened as -750 favorites over the Indiana Pacers in the Finals at ESPN BET. The Pacers opened as +525 underdogs.
The Thunder have the talent and home-court advantage on their side. As for the Pacers, they have all the momentum, toughness, grit, and attitude they need to pull off the impossible.
On the basketball side of things, this series is set not to disappoint. The Thunder will look to avoid disappointing their fans, as they are on the verge of history.
The Thunder, who won 68 games in the regular season, are four wins away from putting themselves among the likes of the historic 1995-96 Chicago Bulls.
“On the other side, Oklahoma City also would rank toward the extreme end of a historical leaderboard if it were to win the Finals. The Thunder went 68-14 in the regular season and with four more wins would reach 84 total wins for the season; the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls, who went 72-10 before cruising through the playoffs, are the only champions in NBA history with more total victories,” wrote Zach Krama and Kevin Pelton of ESPN.
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The 1995-96 Bulls won 15 games in the playoffs, as was the case before, with the first-round series being a best-of-five series. Ultimately, the Bulls ended that season with 87 wins.
As for the Thunder, if they were to collect four more wins, they’d end their historic season with 84 wins, three shy of Michael Jordan‘s Bulls.
Oklahoma City has all the tools to get the job done, led by their MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The MVP of the league and his team are poised for history.
They are coming off a historic regular season led by a young, rising star-studded core and a unique approach to team building. For the second consecutive season, they finished as the No. 1 seed in the loaded Western Conference.
The Thunder could go down as one of the best teams to ever win a title. While that may not be the case right off the bat (if they win), in the long run, the statistics and data will support that claim.
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