How the Thunder and Pacers Are Proving the Limits of Heliocentric Basketball

I can’t say exactly when it happened, but basketball commentators have all started to sound like Copernicus. If you’re like me and avidly consume basketball podcasts, read The Athletic newsletters before the real news of the day every morning, or simply spend a lot of time talking about the sport with strangers, you’ve probably seen the word “heliocentric” more frequently than you have since high school. The term, along with other pseudo-scientific phrases like “player gravity” and “shot diet,” has been a defining NBA buzzword of the last half-decade, the same way talk of “verticality” dominated NBA discourse in the early 2010s. Scientific pretensions aside, heliocentric basketball describes a real phenomenon, where a team of largely interchangeable role players revolves around the singular talent and usage of a superstar. All buzzwords ring hollow eventually. When verticality’s poster player, Roy Hibbert, came up short against Chris Bosh’s ability to stretch the floor for the Miami Heat on their path to the NBA Finals in 2013 and 2014, the term fell into disuse. Now, the sun may finally be setting on heliocentric basketball, thanks to what might be the most indie rock NBA Finals of all time. While the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers are both led by star ball handlers in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Tyrese Haliburton, their success in the postseason demonstrates the limits of so-called helio-ball.

It’s important to clarify that not any team featuring a star player qualifies as helio-ball. The term typically attaches itself to players tasked with and capable of providing scoring, playmaking, and high-usage ball handling for the majority of the game. If helio-ball has a big bang moment, it’s the 2015 NBA Finals, when, following injuries to Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving, LeBron James dragged the remaining Cleveland Cavaliers to a 2-1 lead before eventually losing in six to the small-ball Golden State Warriors. Without his second and third in command, James became a one-man offense, handling the ball, using his exceptional size and skill to create mismatches, and then scoring or spraying the ball out to his teammates beyond the three-point line for open shots. While the Cavs may not have triumphed, this formula worked just well enough against the Splash Brothers juggernaut that the rest of the league gave it a go. Over the next few years, we saw Russell Westbrook and James Harden trade MVP seasons where both took LeBron’s Finals performance as a regular-season standard. Westbrook at his peak averaged triple-doubles for seasons at a time on Thunder squads where his teammates would box out to ensure that Westbrook rebounded and controlled the ball for the full court so that he could either sprint for a jam at the rim or pass to an open three-point shooter. Harden’s Rockets worked the same way but at Houston’s chopped-and-screwed pace. Harden would methodically torture individual defenders until they either fouled him or swarmed him with double teams, leaving open a wealth of options beyond the three-point arc. Even Chris Paul, the Point God himself, was subjugated to the cold, efficient logic of this style. It wasn’t long before teams started drafting with helio-ball in mind. At the 2018 NBA Draft, Dallas and Atlanta swapped picks to acquire the next generation of helio-ball all-stars. Luka Dončić and Trae Young both took Harden’s “I am the system” ethos as a baseline. Give them the ball, let everyone else act as spokes of the wheel. With the right supportive parts, you could fuck around and make the Finals, or at least make New Yorkers very, very angry for several years running.

You’ll notice that all of this talk of heliocentrism only focuses on offense. Heliocentric superstars are often assumed to be defensive liabilities. The light they shine on one side of the court becomes a flashing weak point on the other. This is, to some extent, a forgivable result of exertion; when a player expends so much energy generating the whole of the offense, it’s only natural that they’d need a breather on the other end. If there were ever such a thing as a heliocentric defense, it exists mostly as a thing of the past. Back in the 20th century, when the NBA was ruled by rim-protecting centers and the three-point shot was little more than a gimmick, guys like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Walton, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, along with '90s titans like Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing, used sheer size to rule both sides of the game. Maybe Victor Wembanyama can bring this model back with his Shaolin arts. Heliocentrism also plays a major role off the court. This version of basketball is a marketer’s dream. Instead of worrying about how to make viewers care about the role players filling out the bench, it’s much easier to say that “Trae Young is the Hawks” or “Luka was the Mavericks.”

In this respect, the league’s marketing arms have embraced the same truism that’s animated the music industry in the 21st century: it is far easier to sell an individual than a group. The difference between music and basketball is that what makes for the best marketing doesn’t necessarily succeed when the leather meets the wood. Luka and the Mavs were buried under the Satanic math of the Boston Celtics’ combined shooting in the 2024 Finals. Trae, one miracle run to the conference finals aside, has spent most of his career wandering Play-In Tournament Samsara. LeBron has aged out of carrying teams made up of scarecrows and crash-test dummies to the NBA Finals with perennial consistency. Harden’s system has yet to disprove its reputation of sputtering to a halt at the first sign of postseason adversity. Nikola Jokić is a champ and a usage-percentage king, but the Denver Nuggets fare best when his teammates help him shoulder the weight—a lesson even former helio-ball supernova Russell Westbrook has had to learn in his latter-day role-player career. Instead, the Thunder and Pacers are presenting us with a vision of anthropocentric basketball.

The Thunder, who entered the Finals as presumptive favorites, have flummoxed the league’s publicity apparatus with the same tenacity that their defense has flummoxed the other 29 teams all season. They are the youngest team in the league and thus the most unfamiliar to casual fans. Their best player is an aloof fashionista with a flair for Instagram captions. Their second-best player, Jalen Williams, is so anonymous that he shares his name with another player on the team. Chet Holmgren, the third banana, is a beanstalk center who speaks in Gen Z gibberish, only reads picture books, and plays an outside-in game infuriating to old-school post-up purists. Their most decorated role player, one-time NBA champion Alex Caruso, has spent most of the decade playing incredible basketball on a Chicago Bulls team too inept to make the most of his outrageous skill set. The rest are a horde of defensive geniuses that squeeze their opponents until turnovers and fast breaks pop out. Gilgeous-Alexander himself is no slouch on defense, with long arms and quick-twitch shiftiness that make up for his lack of single-minded man-to-man tenacity. That alone separates him from the heliocentric generation. His offensive game also separates him from that crowd, despite generating similarly gaudy stat lines. With so much of an advantage generated by the Thunder’s defense, SGA’s immense one-on-one skills act as the killing blow. He is a difficult-shot specialist, punctuating his teammates' easy looks with backbreaking mid-range efficiency. Instead of a Swiss Army knife, SGA is a blowtorch, cooking to perfection any sorry defender put in his way.

The Pacers, on the other hand, have a prototypical helio-ball leading man in Tyrese Haliburton, an oversized point guard who puts up crazy assist stats with low turnovers, capable of pouring on the points and excelling in the clutch. Except Heartbreak Haliburton has no problem getting off the ball and letting his teammates share the playmaking duty. The Pacers have stunned their way to the Finals through speed in every aspect of the game. They run faster up the court, pass the ball quicker and more frequently, start defending their man as soon as possible, and maintain that tempo until the other team stumbles off beat. The ball being faster than any man, Haliburton never pounds the air out of it like his predecessors Harden and Westbrook, lest he slow down the Pacers’ vicious BPM. This means that even his best performances have a way of fading into the background. Haliburton’s running mate, Pascal Siakam, who has some experience taking down heavily favored superteams in the Finals from his chip with Toronto in 2019, routinely outscores him to the team’s benefit. Game-winner jumpers aside, Obi Toppin has the more exhilarating highlight package. As for the rest of the roster, the Pacers are a smudged reflection of the Thunder’s imposing depth. Like Gilgeous-Alexander, Haliburton is surrounded by a cast of versatile 3-and-D role players and a bench of supplemental playmakers. That roster depth has been essential to their success, with Rick Carlisle’s timely substitutions ensuring that no one player hogs all the possessions.

Despite the rad basketball that these two teams have played all postseason, the broader NBA culture has failed to make sense of what this Finals “means.” There’s none of the legacy heat, off-court extracurriculars, or flat-out name recognition that stoke interest in June basketball. The names that average fans are familiar with don’t come with the best connotations. Haliburton is regarded largely as a cornball. He dresses like a nerd. He gloats when he’s winning. When he celebrates, he isn’t above taking a bite out of fruits low enough to touch grass themselves. He generally comes across as a bit of a teacher’s pet. You almost never see him in advertisements, and his fellow players voted him “Most Overrated” in an Athletic poll. This is not the kind of star that commands the gravity of eyes untrained on the game’s finer details. And the Thunder? Well, you can’t say that their publicists haven’t tried. Tune in for a live broadcast of the playoffs in the last two years, and you’ll have seen plenty of SGA, J-Dub, and Chet during the commercial breaks. You’re probably sick of seeing them, in fact. Whether singing Christina Aguilera out of key or strutting together in bespoke Angus Young cosplay while “Thunderstruck” blares, the Thunder trio have been an on-camera buzzkill.

The ads may suck, but their shared focus on music gets something right about OKC. They aren’t a solo act; they’re a band. Each player has a particular role, and the beauty of their game comes from how those roles harmonize with each other. They are not an orchestra waiting for cues from a lone conductor. The Thunder’s charm comes from their camaraderie in action, whether that be diving to the floor for loose balls or bum-rushing the postgame interviews in droves. Watching those postgame dogpiles, I’m reminded of the way a band wraps their arms around each other at the end of an encore, basking in the collective glow of their audience, dripping in the hard-earned sweat of their performance. That they might look corny to someone outside of that room is beside the point. As long as they have each other, they can take on the world. The earth may revolve around a star, whether that be Haliburton or Gilgeous-Alexander, but it’s teamwork that makes the world go 'round.