The Rust Belt Takes Center Stage in the NBA Finals this Year

Professional basketball in 2025 is overshadowed by the coasts.  Eastern Conference or Western, both sides standout at their periphery.  Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Miami, Boston – the teams in these cities dominate the national conversation.  There’s not much room for America’s interior in the basketball discourse.

Except, in this year’s NBA Finals, professional basketball has no other choice.  The Oklahoma City Thunder will play the Indiana Pacers this year.  It doesn’t get any more “Midwest” than that.  Farmland is taking center stage.

This is quite unprecedented.  Before 2025, the NBA Finals had featured at least one team from a coastal city in sixteen of the last seventeen seasons, only interrupted by a Phoenix-Milwaukee matchup in 2021 that felt like an incomplete version of the Flyover-state ideal.  Before that, San Antonio-Cleveland in 2007 was the best in Heartland basketball the NBA could provide, and before that, it was a back-to-back in ‘97 and ‘98 featuring the not-exactly-Midwestern Utah Jazz and the technically-Midwestern-but-definitely-too-cool-for-us Chicago Bulls.

It’s a travesty basketball hasn’t gone back to its roots more often.  Basketball was, admittedly, started in Massachusetts, but inventor James Naismith took his first coaching job at the University of Kansas.  One of Naismith’s colleagues C. O. Beamis piloted the first college basketball team in existence at a tiny school in Pittsburgh called Geneva College.  Teams like Indiana, Kentucky, and Kansas have all played a huge role in college basketball and pump out NBA talent with regularity despite playing in relative obscurity.

The NBA will gladly take all the talent it can stomach from the Corn Belt, but featuring more than one team from the likes of Indianapolis or Cleveland is an appalling thought to all the NBA’s TV partners.

Well, too bad!  It’s happening whether the TV big-wigs like it or not.  LA and NY?  Try OKC and IND.

The implications of this small-market showdown are making headlines.  More than likely, this will not be a windfall of a series for the NBA, its shareholders or its advertising partners.  A good story is one thing, but money moves the needle in professional sports.

Well, screw all that.  This NBA Finals is for us.

Look, odds are, this won’t happen again – at least, not anytime soon.  It took 77 years to have an NBA Finals featuring two Midwest teams.  This is basically the Haley’s Comet of professional basketball.

And that’s why we, as Midwesterners, have to come out in force.  We have to show up for the Oklahoma Cities and the Indianapolisises (is that how you spell that?) of the world.  This is for all the times a compelling sports story in Wisconsin was passed up in the NBA, NFL, MLB for pointless sports tabloid-fodder in California.  We’re sick and tired of the coasts soaking up all the attention.  The average human has only so much bandwidth for sports – this is an opportunity for everyone in football country to get their lifetime quota of basketball.

If, somehow, the Midwest can unite and make this the most-watched NBA Finals of all-time, just imagine the look on the faces of those TV executives.  They’ll be stunned!  And, well, they’ll be rich, too, and laughing all the way to the bank, but still!  This isn’t about logic – it’s about spite.  We’re going to watch the NBA Finals just to spite everyone who says we won’t.

An NBA Finals featuring the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers isn’t for the masses, except for the masses who like molasses, apologize for things that aren’t their fault, and smile and wave at strangers.  The Rust Belt is all cleaned up and back on top.  It was worth the wait.