OKLAHOMA CITY — The Oklahoma City Thunder finally had their moment of glory on Sunday night, defeating the Indiana Pacers 103-91 in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals to bring an end to a historic season of parity.
The Thunder, who had all the answers all season long, were finally stumped when they reached their locker room and found a tub of Champagne bottles waiting. How, they 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.
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 win in Game 7 but also the conclusion of a season that had seen parity at its finest.
This is the most inexperienced 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 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
