The Boston Celtics and Oklahoma City Thunder won the only two Game 7s of the NBA’s second round on Saturday night, surviving the kind of grinding, possession-by-possession finishes that league officials had spent the week marketing and clearing the way for a conference finals matchup-set that several analysts called the most evenly seeded in nearly a decade.

Boston held off the Indiana Pacers 98-91 at TD Garden, leaning on a 26-point, 11-rebound performance from Jayson Tatum and a 23-point night from Jaylen Brown that included three corner threes in a six-minute stretch of the fourth quarter. The Celtics, who had been pushed to a deciding game by the No. 4-seeded Pacers after surrendering a 3-1 series lead, shot only 41 percent from the field but forced 19 Indiana turnovers and outrebounded the Pacers 51-37, with Kristaps Porzingis returning from a calf cramp that had limited him in Game 6 to record 14 points, 9 rebounds and 4 blocks in 32 minutes.

“We did not play our best basketball tonight, and we know that,” Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla said in his postgame remarks. “What we did was play the way you have to play in a Game 7, and that is to make every single trip down the floor cost the other team something. Twenty-six wins on the road this season, and the most important one of them was the one we did not have to take.”

Tyrese Haliburton, who had averaged 32 points and 11 assists across the previous three games of the series, finished with 17 points on 6-of-19 shooting and seven assists in 41 minutes, and was visibly grabbing at his right wrist during fourth-quarter timeouts. Pascal Siakam led the Pacers with 24 points and 10 rebounds, but Indiana shot 9 of 33 from beyond the arc and committed seven turnovers in the final twelve minutes. Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle, asked after the game whether Haliburton would require offseason surgery on the wrist injury that has been managed since the first round, said only that “we will let the doctors do their work in the coming days” and that the All-Star guard had “given this organization everything he had through eleven games we will never forget.”

Earlier Saturday at Paycom Center, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander scored a career-high 44 points and added eight assists in a 116-109 Thunder win over the top-seeded Minnesota Timberwolves, his second 40-point game of the series and his third of the postseason. Oklahoma City, the No. 4 seed in the West, trailed by as many as 13 in the second quarter before a 31-15 third-quarter run swung the game decisively. Chet Holmgren added 19 points, 12 rebounds and 5 blocks, including a chase-down on Anthony Edwards with 2:14 remaining that effectively ended Minnesota’s last serious push.

“You dream about a Game 7 at home, and then you have to go play it, and it is harder than the dream,” Gilgeous-Alexander told reporters in the postgame availability. “We were down thirteen and nobody on our bench looked surprised. That is the team I have, and that is why we are still here.”

Edwards led the Timberwolves with 31 points but shot 11 of 27 and committed six turnovers, his fifth straight game with at least five giveaways. Rudy Gobert, who had been limited by foul trouble through the second half of the series, fouled out with 1:38 remaining after grabbing nine rebounds in 26 minutes. Wolves head coach Chris Finch, in a brief postgame availability, said the loss “would stay with this group for a while” but that the team had “advanced further than any roster Minnesota has fielded since 2004” and that “every player in that locker room will come back hungrier.”

The two results lock in conference final matchups the league office had been preparing television windows around for most of the week. The Cleveland Cavaliers, who closed out the Milwaukee Bucks in five games on May 4 behind another 35-point performance from Donovan Mitchell, will host the Celtics at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse on Thursday, May 14, in an Eastern Conference final pairing the No. 1 and No. 4 seeds. The Denver Nuggets, the West’s No. 2 seed, will host the Thunder at Ball Arena on Saturday, May 16, after an eight-day layoff that several Denver players said had been used for a near-complete rest of starters Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon.

“Two No. 4 seeds in the conference finals, in the same year, is exactly the kind of bracket the league wanted when it expanded the play-in and tightened the seeding tiebreakers,” said Marcus Yi, a senior NBA analyst at StubHub. “You have not had this combination of star talent in the final four since 2018, and you have not had this kind of seed parity since 2007. The Finals tipoff on June 4 just became the highest-projected non-Game-7 broadcast window of the postseason.”

ESPN, TNT and ABC executives, on a Saturday evening conference call, said combined audiences for the two Game 7s were projected to set a non-Finals NBA viewership record for a single calendar day, with Pacers-Celtics drawing an estimated 11.4 million viewers on ABC and Thunder-Timberwolves drawing 9.1 million on TNT. The league’s media-rights negotiations, which entered their late-stage in April, have been carrying playoff ratings figures into the room each week, according to two people familiar with the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Around Major League Baseball, the Detroit Tigers extended their American League Central lead to seven games after a 6-1 win over the Houston Astros at Comerica Park on Saturday night, with right-hander Casey Mize allowing one run over seven innings. The Cincinnati Reds completed a three-game sweep of the Chicago Cubs at Great American Ball Park, their fourth sweep in the past three weeks, with shortstop Elly De La Cruz extending his hitting streak to 18 games. The New York Yankees, at 13-25 after dropping the first two games of a weekend series in Texas, recalled outfielder Spencer Jones from Triple-A Scranton-Wilkes-Barre and placed second baseman Gleyber Torres on the 10-day injured list with a left hamstring strain.

League officials said full conference final broadcast windows would be released Sunday evening, with the Cavaliers-Celtics opener tentatively set for an 8 p.m. Eastern tipoff on TNT and the Nuggets-Thunder opener scheduled for an Eastern Saturday afternoon window on ABC. Coaches in both conferences, asked in postgame availabilities whether the truncated rest between rounds would meaningfully affect either matchup, declined to discuss it publicly, though several said the players’ association would raise the issue in offseason scheduling talks.