We like to pretend that each, individual championship happens in a vacuum. They don't. What happens in one season feeds into the next, and that creates all manner of interesting hypotheticals here. If the Thunder had indeed lost at home to a healthy Haliburton, would that have shaken their confidence in tight playoff games next season? Are they theoretically better equipped to win now moving forward because they've gotten the first championship monkey off of their backs? They're certainly more experienced now. They'll enter next season as the favorites.The first championship is the launching pad championship. Generally speaking, that's the roster you move forward with. These are probably the Thunder moving forward, aside from the necessary salary-related moves they'll have to make moving forward. In a way, that's probably a bit better for the rest of the league. The last thing anyone wanted was a desperate, aggressive Sam Presti adding talent this offseason. They took a bizarre path to getting hurt, but the outcome is what we expected coming into the playoffs. The Thunder are the champions. They have their team. They have a real chance to win more of them moving forward. It's just a bummer that any of that happened with any sort of asterisk attached, even if it was a smaller one than most. We'll never quite know how the Thunder would have reacted to the healthy version of this game, both within it and beyond.How does the Eastern Conference respond here?After the second round, the Eastern Conference throne was seemingly vacant. Tatum's injury effectively closed Boston's short-term window, which subsequently opened several more. New York fired Tom Thibodeau out of fear of wasting the opportunity Boston's absence created. Orlando traded for Desmond Bane. But as the Finals progressed and it became clearer and clearer that Indiana's ascent was no fluke, the excitement over the wide-open Eastern Conference subsided. Maybe the Pacers had just picked up where the Celtics left off., They lost Tyrese Haliburton, the 25-year-old superstar who makes their entire playing style possible, to a lower leg injury that is was confirmed on Monday to be a torn Achilles., Star point guard Tyrese Haliburton suffered a torn right Achilles tendon in the first quarter of Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the team announced on Monday, June 23. It said surgery was.