Bennedict Mathurin had a huge game off the bench in the Indiana Pacers' Game 3 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder on Wednesday night. Mathurin was the leading scorer in the game with 27 points in just 22 minutes.

Credit where credit is due, The Ringer's Bill Simmons called this. During his podcast after Game 1 of the NBA Finals he said that Mathurin looked comfortable in the series and he suggested he might have a game where he scored 27 points in 22 minutes, which it turns out is as impressive a stat line as it is a prediction.

"I thought Mathurin seemed athletically comfortable in this game," Simmons told Zach Lowe. "And I'm intrigued by what his upside is for them because OKC is so fast and so athletic and they're just at warp speed and I just thought that he looked comfortable in the chaos. In a way that I'm wondering are we going to hear from him in this series with one of those games... You know when Mathurin will have one of those games where he's like Mathruin scored 27 points in 22 minutes. I feel like he's going to have one of those."

Twenty-seven points in 22 minutes sounds both impressive and completely reasonable all at once. Twenty-seven points? That's not so much! Twenty-two minutes? A reasonable workload for an NBA rotation player coming off the bench.

But 27 points in 22 minutes? That's actually really rare. According to Stathead, only 14 guys have ever had exactly 27 points in 22 minutes. (Freeman Williams of the San Diego Clippers somehow did it twice in January of 1980.) And Mathurin is the only player to ever put up that line in a playoff game. There are only 98 cases of a player scoring 27 or more points in 22 or fewer minutes in history.

If Simmons's goal here was to throw out a unique and impressive stat line, he nailed it. The only thing more impressive was Mathurin going out there and doing it in the NBA Finals.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Bill Simmons Absolutely Nailed Bennedict Mathurin’s Wild Stat Line in Game 3.

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