Career backup T.J. McConnell has emerged as an unlikely game-changer for the Indiana Pacers in the NBA Finals.

Indianapolis

When Game 6 of the NBA Finals tipped off, things looked bleak for the Indiana Pacers.

They were playing one of the most dominant teams the NBA has ever seen. They were down three games to two. And their superstar point guard, Tyrese Haliburton, was hobbled with a calf strain that left it uncertain whether he’d even be able to suit up.

But with their season on the brink, the Pacers turned to an unlikely hero to put the team on his shoulders—a 6-foot-1 backup who started one game all season and hasn’t dunked a single time in his 10-year career.

By NBA standards, T.J. McConnell isn’t so much an average joe as an entirely forgettable one. But as the Pacers turned an early deficit against the Oklahoma City Thunder into a 17-point blowout on Thursday night, it was the shortest guy on the floor who flipped the game on its head.

McConnell tore from sideline to sideline for 12 points and 9 rebounds, and led the Pacers with 6 assists and 4 steals. It was a performance that his more accomplished teammate still can’t quite fathom.

“He’s unbelievable,” Haliburton said after the game. “He’s the Great White Hope.”

At 6-foot-1, T.J. McConnell is the shortest player on the floor in the NBA Finals. But he came up huge in Game 6.

McConnell’s performance on Thursday only added to a peculiar designation. With a winner-take-all Game 7 looming, he may already have turned in the greatest off-the-bench performance in the history of the NBA Finals.

Since the league began tracking starters and bench players in 1970, McConnell is the first player ever to tally 60 points, 25 assists and 15 rebounds—without ever hearing his name called before the opening tip.

“I’m just going out there and trying to change the game in a positive way,” McConnell said. “Get the crowd into it, and in turn, that gets us going.”

There was no doubt which player fired up the Indiana fans on Thursday. Every time McConnell checked in, the home arena exploded in a roar—and after McConnell dived for one loose ball, none other than Pacers legend Reggie Miller jumped out of his courtside seat to give him a high-five.

McConnell grew up as the son of a high-school basketball coach in Pennsylvania. But even after he’d completed a stellar college career at Arizona, there seemed to be little chance of this undersized guard making it in the NBA.

T.J. McConnell launches a shot during the NBA Finals, in which he has become the first player to record 60 points, 25 assists and 15 rebounds without starting a single game.

Then McConnell caught a lucky break in the form of one of the worst teams in basketball history. In 2015, the Philadelphia 76ers were in the midst of a plan that called for them to lose as often as possible in pursuit of draft picks. After McConnell went unselected in the NBA draft, the Sixers gladly scooped him up.

On a team that would win just 10 of 82 games, McConnell got a chance to show that he was elite at least one thing. Nobody would ever outwork him.

“Playing hard is a skill,” McConnell said on a podcast last month. “If it wasn’t, everyone would do it.”

As the Sixers improved, rising from the cellar of the league to third place in the Eastern Conference, McConnell remained a fixture—an unremarkable backup who had managed to stick in the league and earn an NBA paycheck.

But the remarkable thing about watching McConnell now isn’t that he still plays like the stereotype of a coach’s kid, hustling hard and crashing to the floor at the first opportunity.

It’s how well it works, even on basketball’s grandest stage.

On Thursday, McConnell repeatedly made his signature shot: a short-range jumper that looks like something out of an instruction manual from the 1950s. And throughout the series, he has pulled off a defense play that works only because he’s the rare player insanely competitive enough to try it.

Time and again, McConnell lurks in the backcourt as the Thunder bring the ball up. Time and again, he’s able to pop up at just the right moment to snag a slightly lazy pass, earning his team one extra possession.

“In a series like this, what’s so important is the margins,” Haliburton said after McConnell swiped five steals in Indiana’s Game 3 win. “He did a great job of consistently getting there, and making hustle play after hustle play.”

The Pacers will be underdogs on Sunday, with a championship on the line, on the road against a dominant Thunder team. But Indiana’s own underdog has a plan for how the Pacers can pull the upset—and it isn’t a complicated one.

“We played to exhaustion,” McConnell said. “We have to do it again.”