OKLAHOMA CITY – Shai Gilgeous-Alexander had allowed for the possibility and planned for the probability.

After a statistically delicious Game 1 – 38 points in his NBA Finals debut was the third highest Game 1 total for a Finals first-timer– the Oklahoma City Thunder star wasn’t basking in his accomplishment. Instead, the Canadian very much left the door open that he would go in a different direction after putting up 30 shots, a career playoff high.

Getting beat at the buzzer by the Indiana Pacers required some reflection.

“I never predetermine it. I always just let the game tell me what to do,” he said before Game 2.  “So I guess last game, I felt more often than not, I had a shot or a play that I could attack on more than in the past, and that’s just the way it went.

“So the same thing will happen in Game 2. I will read the defence, and I will play off my feeling and my instincts, and if it’s calling for me to shoot or if it’s calling me to pass, (that) is what I will decide to do.”

Whether it was spontaneous and in the moment or the product of 48 hours of deliberation between games, the NBA’s leading scorer – regular season and playoffs – read the floor in Game 2 and trusted his teammates to secure a game they absolutely needed to have.

There has a never been a team lose the first two games of the NBA Finals at home and come back to win and teams that far behind 2-0 in any context are 5-29 in their efforts to come back and take the title, according to WhoWins.com.

History isn’t destiny, but there was no upside in the Thunder putting their 68-win regular season on the line just to see if they could buck odds and be the rare team to come back from a 2-0 hole.

In situations like this, the action hero script calls for the main character to take things into his own hands. It’s called ‘being heroic’ or relying on what seems like a sure thing.

Instead, Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA MVP and the single player most likely to wear it if things go south for OKC, did the opposite. He put the ball in his teammates’ hands and trusted them to do the right thing with it.

His choices paid off as OKC shook off a shaky Game 1 performance with a dominant 123-107 win Sunday as the series gets set to shift to Indianapolis for Game 3 on Wednesday night.

At first glance, Gilgeous-Alexander was his usual scoring-machine self. His 34 points led all scorers and combined with his 38-point outburst in Game 1 made the Thunder star the most prolific scorer through his first two games of his Finals career in league history, surpassing former Philadelphia 76ers star Allen Iverson, who had 71 points in Games 1 and 2 of the 2001 NBA Finals.

But his eight assists (not to mention his four steals) are more indicative of where his head was going into Game 2 and the level of faith he has in his teammates.

“I mean, it just shows his willingness to create for other guys,” said Aaron Wiggins, who came off the bench and hit five of eight threes, with Gilgeous-Alexander finding him for a triple in the third quarter that put the Thunder up by 19.  “Obviously, everybody sees the points and how easy it may be for him to go out there and get 30, 40 points. But when he’s out there sharing the ball and getting other guys involved, that’s when our team is, you know, at our best. So credit to him just going out there and playing the game the right way and continuing to just help put us in good positions.”

In Game 1 on Thursday, Gilgeous-Alexander took 12 shots in the first quarter. In Game 2, he didn’t take his first shot until nearly four minutes had passed. There didn’t seem to be any discernable deviation in the Pacers’ coverage. Canadian Olympic teammate Andrew Nembhard remained the first option defensively for Indiana, and it wasn’t like the Pacers were blanketing Gilgeous-Alexander with traps and double teams.

He was still attacking, still getting two feet in the paint, but instead of using his slithery superpower get shots up at will, he was weaponizing the gravitational pull his dribble drives have on a defence by getting off the ball quickly, finding open teammates and trusting they would execute.

“We were a little bit sticky last game, but you have games like that,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “Sucks (for it) to be on this stage … but it is what it is, we are where we are, right? It’s where our feet are. All you can do is try to be better for the next game.”

Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder were better. They shot 48.8 per cent from the floor and 14-of-36 from three and shot 33 free throws, improvements in each category. But perhaps most tellingly they had 25 assists as a team – compared to 13 in Game 1.

Gilgeous-Alexander was at the centre of it. He hit his Olympic team pal Lu Dort for an early three and kept it up. By the end of the first quarter, Gilgeous-Alexander had four assists, setting up three teammates for threes. By the end of the third quarter, he had connected with six teammates for threes and the game was essentially decided.

For good measure, the Thunder bench demonstrated its ability to thrive independent of Gilgeous-Alexander by going on a 16-7 run to start the second quarter. OKC opened up a double-digit lead that swelled to 23 points with 4:48 left in the second quarter on a Gilgeous-Alexander drive and was never less than 13 points the rest of the game.

There were a number of Thunder players who had strong games as Alex Caruso (20), Jalen Williams (19), Wiggins (18) and Chet Holmgren (15) joined Gilgeous-Alexander in double figures, but all of them were on the receiving end of his passes. Typically, he collapsed the defense with a paint touch.

The Thunder were upset in the second-round of the playoffs last season by the Dallas Mavericks and while Gilgeous-Alexander was consistent, not many of his young teammates could say the same. Empowering them and giving them opportunities to grow into roles where they could play with confidence in a must-win playoff game was part of a season-long learning curve for Gilgeous-Alexander and his teammates.

“The way I see it, I have no choice,” he said Sunday night when I asked him about his willingness to trust his teammates in such a critical moment. “No one-man-show can achieve what I’m trying to achieve in this game. All the stats and the numbers, they’re fun, but I don’t have as much space as much as I do without having them out there. I don’t get open as much as I do without having the screeners out there …  like those guys are the reason why we’re as good of a team as we are, and I just add to it.

“So the way I see that, I had no choice. They were ready for the moment as I knew they would be, and they performed.”

• Bennedict Mathurin had a bigger role in Game 2. The third-year wing from Montreal has seen his role fluctuate during the Pacers’ playoff run, but he got 22 minutes in Game 2 – tied for his high during the post-season – and delivered 14 points on 4-of-7 shooting while getting to the free-throw line seven times. He also spent a good deal of time guarding Gilgeous-Alexander.

• The Pacers’ other Canadian, Nembhard, finished with 11 points, four assists and three steals in 34 minutes. His brother Ryan, a senior point guard out of Gonzaga, is expected to be having a pre-draft workout with the Toronto Raptors on Monday.

• The Thunder held the Pacers’ Pascal Siakam and Tyrese Haliburton largely in check. Siakam had 15 points on 3-of-11 shooting while Haliburton had 17 points and six assists, but also five turnovers.

“Yeah they were super aggressive, which is what they do,” said Siakam. “They are a disruptive kind of team. I think we’ve got to watch the film and just find ways to no matter what, still be us. We’ve got to figure it out. I don’t have the answers right now. But yeah, we’ve got to watch it and find a way to get to the paint or spray off threes. Whatever our game is, you know, we’ve got to find a way to do that.”