It’s one thing for an analyst to sound the alarm on a team in crisis. It’s something else entirely when the team’s star player admits he’s the one who lit the fuse. That’s the exact situation the Oklahoma City Thunder find themselves in. They were supposed to be the dominant ones in these NBA Finals, but after getting run off the floor by the Indiana Pacers in a 116-107 Game 3 loss, they’re staring at a 2-1 series deficit. The vibe has officially shifted from a coronation to a full-blown crisis, and ESPN analyst Iman Shumpert is pointing to a fatal flaw in their approach.

Speaking on “Brian Windhorst & The Hoop Collective,” he laid out the Thunder’s fatal flaw with brutal clarity: they’re the “better team” on paper, but they keep letting the Pacers drag them into a back-alley brawl. “If they continue to do this thing where, you know, you miss a conversion on a breakaway, and now they’re pushing it back… you’re playing into their hands,” Shumpert warned, before anointing Tyrese Haliburton with the ultimate praise: “He is Peyton Manning in the two-minute drill. This is… yeah, this is crazy.”

Shumpert’s diagnosis was clear: “it’s gotta be red alert.” He specifically called on Jalen Williams to be the adult in the room—the one who recognizes the chaos and slams the brakes by getting to the free-throw line. The wild part? Jalen Williams seems to know he’s right. After the game, the Thunder star didn’t make excuses. He pointed to a specific, gut-wrenching moment in the fourth quarter where he personally fueled the Pacers’ run.

“I missed a shot and then I fouled, and they’re right back in the game,” Williams confessed, explaining how quickly things can unravel. “This team makes big runs, and those little unforced errors… a foul, give up an and-one — now they’re back within two, and that shot kind of means nothing, you know what I mean?”

It was a striking moment of self-awareness. He knows every “unforced error” is fuel for the Pacers’ fire, because, as he said, “they capitalize on them because they’re a good team.” It was a perfect echo: the analyst diagnosing the fatal flaw from the broadcast booth, and the player living its painful consequences on the court.

After dominating the fourth quarter 32-18, the Pacers have all the momentum, and the Thunder are on the ropes. As Brian Windhorst put it on the same podcast, the situation is dire. “They better freaking win on Friday,” Windhorst said of the must-win Game 4. “They go down 3–1… that’s big problems.” The red alert has been sounded. Now we get to see if Jalen Williams and the Thunder can answer the call.

The J-Dub effect: Is Jalen Williams the key to everything?

So, if the Thunder are in so much trouble, how do they fix it? While all eyes are on the league MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, a fascinating theory has been bubbling up that might just explain everything: What if SGA is the Thunder’s best player, but Jalen Williams is their most important? What if “J-Dub” is the real bellwether for this team?

It sounds like a classic hot take, but the evidence is getting harder to ignore. Think of SGA as the engine—he’s always going to run. But J-Dub is the transmission. He’s the “release valve,” as he’s called it himself; the guy who has to make a play when defenses inevitably trap the MVP. He’s the one who takes on the toughest defensive assignments, allowing the Thunder to play bigger and meaner than they are. And he’s the connective tissue. And when that tissue gets strained, the whole team seems to fall apart.

Look at the receipts from this series. In the Game 1 loss, J-Dub was inefficient, shooting just 6-for-19. Then, in the Game 2 win, he was aggressive, impactful, and got to the line nine times. In the Game 3 loss? He scored 26, but his costly mistakes were the ones he lamented after the game. It’s a pattern: as Jalen Williams goes, so go the Thunder.

It’s a massive responsibility for a third-year player, but Williams embraces it. “Pressure is a privilege,” he said earlier in the playoffs, a mentality that shows he understands his role. Even his MVP teammate gets it. After a previous playoff game where Williams bounced back from a poor performance, SGA was direct: he said that J-Dub, when he’s locked in, is “the reason why we’re as good of a team as we are.”

The Thunder don’t need Jalen Williams to be their best player—they have an MVP for that. But they absolutely need him to be their most important one. They need his efficiency, his defense, and his smart playmaking to elevate them from a great team to a championship one. If that J-Dub shows up for the rest of the Finals, the five-alarm fire might just be put out. If not, this dream season is about to go up in smoke.