Thinking basketball podcast. My name is Ben. Welcome to the 2025 NBA Finals between the Oklahoma

City Thunder and our Indiana Pacers. Can we adopt them yet? Have we taken them? Cody? It's here. We made it to the finals. I am so excited today. We're going to talk about this matchup. We're going to talk about our, we're going to get our all playoff teams on the record through this conference finals round. And we'll break down the matchup. We'll tell you exactly who's going to win by how many points and all that fun, nerdy stuff at the end of the show.

I have to say, like you make the joke about us adopting the Pacers.

And I think a lot about how I wish, how I wish I was ahead of the curve.

Like, I will admit, being on the show with you week after week, you called this Pacers run like before the regular

season ended. You were all over this. I was a little bit more skeptical. I was slow. I think like,

or during the second round, I started being like, this team's actually awesome. And I think that's when

I texted you. Like they might end up in the finals. But I feel like a slow adopter. So I can't,

I can't in good conscience sit here and be like my Pacers because I think I started

catching on when other NBA analysts did.

But I very much enjoy the Pacers considerably from an aesthetic and an analytical standpoint, Ben.

Yeah, we should have gone harder on the, we did an episode about dangerous teams and

things like that.

And all this time in the back of

my head i was all excited about the pacer's and i think in that episode we just we did not discuss

them we had their inner circle teams and we had some denver and lakers talk and things like that but

what i want to start with today about the pacer's is more about just the brand of basketball

that they play and how exciting they are.

And right before we recorded, we were talking about how, you know, a podcast that you're listening to with Matt.

Matt Bellany, is that his name?

The town.

Yeah, of the studio fame.

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