Indiana has some things to figure out

INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Pacers simply couldn't wait to get home early Monday.

There's a slew of possible reasons for that. Maybe they just wanted to get out of Oklahoma City with their split of the first two games in the NBA Finals. Maybe they couldn't wait to see what finals fever will look like in Indianapolis after a 25-year wait to get back to the title round. Or maybe they just wanted to get back to work.

It's probably a little of everything — especially the last part.

Yes, the Pacers are tied with the Thunder 1-1 after two games of the NBA Finals. For the lower-seeded team, that's huge; the Pacers took home-court advantage away by winning Game 1. But they know that if they don't take care of their own business at home, starting with Game 3 on Wednesday night (Thursday morning, Beijing time), it'll be advantage Thunder again, just like that.

"We're going to have to be a lot better on Wednesday," Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said.

That might sound like coaching hyperbole, but really, it isn't. The Pacers have yet to have anyone score 20 points in a game in these finals. They've led for a total — a total! — of 1 minute, 54 seconds in this series, or just under 2 percent of the time. (That's a major improvement over the 0.0001 percent that they led Game 1 for, in a winning effort, somehow.) And in Game 2, the Thunder held the Pacers without a point in the paint for the entirety of the first quarter.

Points in the paint isn't a stat that tends to jump off the page. It's possible that a lot of people didn't even notice. But consider this: Before Sunday night, more than nine years had passed since the Pacers didn't manage a single paint point in the first quarter of a game.

"We have to do a better job of getting to the paint," Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton said. "It's a lot easier said than done. ... Our offense is built from the inside-out, and we have to do a better job getting downhill. They collapse and make plays from there. I thought we could improve a lot there. But yeah, man, they are flying around. They have got great point-of-attack defenders and great rim protectors."