Basketball is a great television sport. As with football, the optimal viewing angle is inhabited by the camera; you can sit at this angle in person, too, but it's prohibitively expensive, especially for the most important games. There are annoying things that production crews do which blunt this perfect perspective—like "hero shot" cutaways after notable baskets, or in-game interview segments that needlessly double-screen your monitor, shrinking the action. But for the most part, you're seeing everything you need to see in this sport, clearly and fully, from the couch. It's not like baseball: a sport with dimensions and trajectories that your TV is fundamentally incapable of capturing.

The 2024-25 Oklahoma City Thunder are one team that has challenged this notion for me. I had the pleasure of watching one of their playoff games live and in person; I went with a friend in Denver to witness them lose a tough battle against the Nuggets in Game 6. I was rooting for the home team but came away with my mind blown by the loser of the contest. That's because television cannot really depict what their defense is like. Regular Nuggets viewers are used to seeing Nikola Jokic and Co. take advantage of defensive missteps of any kind, beating coverage down the floor for easy buckets that accumulate into the kind of steady advantage that has made their franchise one of the cornerstones of the 2020s NBA.

Not against the Thunder, though. It is hard to be hyperbolic about how quickly their offense turns into defense. Every time Jokic grabbed a defensive rebound with one hand, his signature turn-and-hurl maneuver met a concrete edifice. It was as if OKC had teleported back to the other end, or had never actually attempted to score in the half-court. In basketball, a team's "transition game" almost always means how they turn defense into offense. The Thunder do that better than anyone, but with them it's the reverse that's even more striking. Even the very best offenses of the era feel trapped by them, clawing for any semblance of an opening, all 48 minutes, every night.

The camera captures this pretty well, but I promise you, there is more happening than can fit in the frame. Watching them eliminate fastbreak opportunities so systematically is something like taking a walk around your neighborhood, only to find out that every square of the sidewalk has been transformed into a wall. A great defense forces opponents to ask the question: "How do we score?" The Thunder's defense makes them wonder: "How do we move?"

Now they head to the 2025 NBA Finals against a team that moves better than any other: the Indiana Pacers. Choreographed offensive chaos, their attack is like if Jokic's open-court vision were divided into several fast, sharp-shooting minions. Their leader, Tyrese Haliburton, has authored a style of basketball inspired equally by Steve Nash and Reggie Miller, in which the ball is always flying deftly away from resistance and toward a body that's been running a knowing marathon all night long in anticipation of it. If anyone can challenge the Thunder's endless trapping, it's them.

And so we have a championship series that's a bit of a basketball science experiment. Both teams are pure elements: undiluted, fully potent versions of what they are. Everyone knows that when you mix oil and water, you can shake and stir the two together all you want, but oil will still float to the top and push the water beneath. But this was not common knowledge before oil and water had been put together formally and repeatedly, proving the matter for all to see. And no one will know which of these two basketball teams is oil until one's boundary-pushing style overtakes the other. Get out your goggles and beakers.

That being said, the Thunder are strong favorites because they've barely lost all season. Combine regular season and playoffs, and they're an eye-popping 80-18 since October. Lack of experience still hasn't hurt the youngest roster in the NBA, who have found a rare way to turn that youth into an army. Imagine if all the kids at daycare really knew what they were doing and organized against the comparatively lethargic parents. The Pacers are the only team even sort of near the Thunder at doing this in the past few months, but they're still a ways off from OKC's level of weaponized adolescence. Indiana's goal, in this series, is to change that and discover something these wild playoffs still haven't shown us.