OKLAHOMA CITY — The 2025 NBA Finals is, in many ways, a celebration of the point guard.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA’s Most Valuable Player and the Oklahoma City Thunder superstar, and Tyrese Haliburton, the pass-first point guard with a penchant in the clutch, are each franchise’s hope to win the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
Though they likely won’t match up directly all the time, the responsibility of guarding the other likely falling to more specialized defenders, Gilgeous-Alexander and Haliburton are reshaping the image of the point guard in the modern NBA.
Here’s a close look at each player and the matchup that will define the 2025 NBA Finals:
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
Gilgeous-Alexander, 26, is a refreshing throwback.
He dominates without taking a lot of 3-pointers and is not constantly complaining to the referees.
“He just has an ‘I’m going to get it done’ mentality,” Thunder All-Star Jalen Williams said. “That’s kind of rubbed off on the rest of the team. You can always see, he doesn’t make excuses. That bleeds over into the team.”
That mentality has put the Thunder in great position to win their first title since relocating from Seattle in 2008. The SuperSonics won the NBA championship in 1979.
Gilgeous-Alexander’s rise from All-Star to MVP has been one of the league’s best stories. Thunder executive vice president and general manager Sam Presti saw Gilgeous-Alexander’s potential when he traded for him after Gilgeous-Alexander’s rookie season with the Los Angeles Clippers in 2019.
While you could see Gilgeous-Alexander’s improvement season over season, he jumped from 24.5 points a game in 2021-22 to 31.4 points per game in 2022-23. He made his first All-NBA team that season and was fifth in MVP voting.
Last season, he averaged 30.1 points, was All-NBA again and finished second in MVP voting.
This season, he took his game to another level, averaging career-highs in points (32.7) and assists (6.4) per game while shooting 51.9% from the field, 37.5% on 3s and 89.8% on free throws. He also averaged 1.7 steals and 1.0 block.
His is the score-first point guard but his playmaking has improved as the talent around him has improved. With Jalen Williams and Lu Dort as teammates, Gilgeous-Alexander is not the team’s premier defender, but he is a two-way star. He’s not allergic to defending.
“What he’s been able to do this (season) has been amazing,” Haliburton said. “He’s an amazing player – MVP of our league, rightfully so, for a reason. We’re looking forward to the challenge of competing against him.”
Gilgeous-Alexander does much of his damage inside the 3-point line, taking just 5.7 3s per game during the regular season. On 2-point attempts, he shot above the league average, making 57.1%. He uses speed and balance to create space and gets to the foul line 8.8 times per game.
His MVP season coincided with a franchise-record 68 victories, and he has powered this run to the Finals. He has scored at least 30 points in 11 of 16 playoff games. He has scored at least 30 in seven of his past eight games and scored 40 against Minnesota in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals, giving the Thunder a 3-1 series lead. In the Game 5 series-clincher, he had 34 points, eight assists and seven rebounds.
“To win a title on top of everything that happened this year would be special,” Alexander said. ‘I said this so many times, I don’t play for the individual stuff, I don’t play for anything else besides winning. I never have in my whole life.
“When I was 9 years old I played to win a OBA (Ontario Basketball Association) championship. When I was 20 years old, I played to win the SEC Championship. Now I’m 26, I want to win the NBA championship. It’s always about winning for me.”
Tyrese Haliburton
Though there are some similarities in Haliburton’s game to Gilgeous-Alexander’s, these are wildly different players. They both play point guard, and they both thrive when the ball is in their hands. That’s more or less where it ends. Whereas Gilgeous-Alexander is a steady, 30-point machine, Haliburton is a pass-first point motor who dictates the speed and pace of Indiana’s offense. The other players on the floor take his lead, waiting for his cues to sprint up the floor, trying to get open looks in transition.
Haliburton, 25, is averaging 9.8 assists per game in the playoffs, most of any player, and is carrying an absurd 35.1 assist-to-turnover ratio. The lack of giveaways marks his efficiency and impact — how he’s able to assess risk and thread passes into tight windows without turning it over.
“He’s doing this within the system,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said after Haliburton’s historic triple-double in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals. “There isn’t a lot of freelance stuff where they’re just kind of outside-the-box gambles. That’s real growth.”
But while the Pacers thrive on Haliburton’s distribution, they also struggle when he fails to assert himself. There are some games when Haliburton becomes too passive, too deferential, allowing defenses to dictate the volume and types of shots he generates. Across Indiana’s 16 playoff games, Haliburton is averaging 21.3 points per game in 12 victories, compared to just 11.5 in four losses. On average, he attempts nearly six field goals fewer in defeats. When expanded to regular season games, the same pattern is evident.
Perhaps these low-scoring games are where the “overrated” label came from, as Haliburton was voted by his peers as the most overrated player in the NBA in an anonymous poll conducted by the Athletic. Haliburton drew 13 of the 90 votes (14.4%).
Yet, look at the closing minutes of clutch games, when Haliburton has been exceptional. During the regular season and playoffs this year, Haliburton is an astonishing 12-of-14 (85.7%) on attempts to tie the score or take a lead inside the final two minutes (including overtime).
It gets even more impressive. Half of those made shots have been 3-pointers, meaning — across those 14 attempts — he has scored 30 points. That averages out to 2.14 points per shot attempt to tie or take a lead inside the closing two minutes. When converting that into effective field goal percentage, which adjusts to account for the added value of 3s, Haliburton is shooting a preposterous 107.1% in those clutch situations.
And that doesn’t even factor in a pair of and-1s, with resulting made free throws actually giving him 32 points on those 14 attempts.
Overrated? Anything but.
