Amazing talent bets led to unprecedented OKC-Indy Finals

SGA and Markkanen both ascended to All-Star status after trades to their Northwest Division homes. (Kyle Phillips via sltrib.com)

When the NBA Finals began on Thursday, we were officially in uncharted waters.

It’s not just that this is the first modern Finals involving two bottom-7 markets. It’s that there’s really no precedent for even a single small-market finalist built in exactly the same fashion as this year’s Thunder and Pacers.

Virtually every modern small-market NBA team to reach the Finals did so by acquiring a franchise cornerstone in the draft or by signing LeBron James to a free agent contract. Miami (a bottom-half market by size, but widely considered a glamor market for other reasons) also made a pair of Finals runs after acquiring an established All-Star in a trade. But that’s it. No team in the bottom half of the league by market size has ever reached the championship series any other way.

That streak ended when Game 1 tipped off, proving yet again that there is no singular path to the NBA’s mountaintop. The 2025 championship will eventually go home with a small-market team that got its best player by betting on the potential of a non-star youngster.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was acquired by the Thunder after a 10.8-ppg rookie season. There was obvious talent there, but few would have dared call him a future MVP at that point. He had been selected 11th in the previous draft, and he didn’t crack top 5 in Rookie of the Year voting. Twelve months in, he mostly looked and produced like a role player.

Similarly, Tyrese Haliburton was a late lottery selection (12th) who was moved midway through his second NBA season. He averaged 14.3 points at the time of the trade  He had displayed a knack for creation and made 41% of this threes in 109 games with the Kings, but was not considered a star. In fact, 45 Western Conference guards got more All-Star votes than him that season, including DJ Augustin, Facundo Campazzo and Talen Horton-Tucker.

In each case, the acquiring team bet on a young player’s ability to realize his best-case scenario. This NBA season will either end with SGA bringing a parade to the NBA’s third smallest market, or with Haliburton hoisting a trophy in the seventh smallest.

Twenty-four of the now 52 teams to make the Finals this century have come from bottom-half NBA markets. (Best player defined as player who led team in MVP voting shares that season.)

This is anomalous by definition, but also encouraging for a team like the Utah Jazz, in the NBA’s 25th ranked market. Lottery luck pushed the Jazz back to fifth in the draft, but there are hints the Jazz may be looking to return to competitiveness after making a front office addition.

A megastar-level free agent signing is unlikely in Utah. The club’s most prominent free agent deals ever are Carlos Boozer if we measure by eventual Jazz impact, or a past-his-prime Joe Johnon if we go by career résumé at the time of signing. Trading for an existing all-league player like Miami did with Jimmy Butler is also complicated since players at that level often exert some control over their situations.

So that realistically leaves a couple of templates: draft a franchise-changer or do what OKC and Indy did by acquiring a young non-star who can level up into a top-15 player.

The Jazz already achieved something similar when they brought Lauri Markkenen back in their 2022 rebuilding trades, although Markkanen hasn’t achieved the starpower of SGA or even Haliburton. The former is the literal league MVP this season, and the latter is a two-time All-NBA third team honoree. At Markkanen’s best he just missed out on All-NBA (17th in voting for 15 spots in his first Jazz season).

So unless the Finnish forward has another leap left ahead of him, Utah likely needs a player in the tier right above his to start to resemble a team with Finals-worthy firepower. Maybe such a player will arrive via the 2025 draft, where Utah is slated to pick fifth, 21st and twice in the second round. But it’s interesting at the very least to see a championship-caliber team acquire its alpha in a new way.

The hard part is finding someone who might have Haliburton- or even SGA-level upside and who is actually available.

The best players by 2024-25 wins added who have never made All-Star teams are Ivica Zubac, Derrick White and Austin Reaves, all important pieces on teams that won 50+ games. The best guys like that who are still on rookie deals are Christian Braun, Amen Thompson and new MIP Dyson Daniels. Some guys have flashed star potential but have artificially deflated impact metrics because of time missed (Jalen Suggs), team situation (Deni Avdija) or because they’re in someone else’s shadow (Haliburton’s own teammate, Andrew Nembhard). Maybe some combination of those criteria are a place to start looking for someone who has another level waiting to be unlocked.

But again — it’s not like win math would have pointed any of us to Gilgeous-Alexander at this point in 2019. If you’re hoping to replicate that gambit, you’re almost choosing someone in spite of the numbers and looking past the impact stats to something far more abstract and ethereal.

That’s why mining for stars is the hardest thing to do in this weird league. Maybe 2019 OKC and 2022 Indy just got wildly lucky, and perhaps there’s no lesson or replicable template here at all. But watching two absolute moonshots reach the Finals at the same time does tempt the imagination.