Early returns on Indiana Pacers playing small ball

This summer, everything for the Indiana Pacers was about a change in style — shaking off the old focus on size and strength and building a smaller, faster, more versatile rotation. Small ball has been the buzzword and Paul George, at the risk of alienation was named the team’s starting power forward. After two games, losses to the Toronto Raptors and Memphis Grizzlies, the returns on this new style have not been great.

The roughly 60/40 minute split between small and big lineups actually feels fairly conservative, given the nature of the rotation and the relative depth between the wing and big man positions. Although, this may have been skewed slightly by playing against the Grizzlies, whose bigs are particularly challenging for small ball lineups — one of the reasons Jordan Hill replaced C.J. Miles in the starting lineup for that game.

The problems are fairly obvious. Big lineups have defended extremely well but can’t score a lick. Small ones have scored reasonably well but been eviscerated defensively. Given the relative performance of each type of lineup, it feels fair to say that both have been problematic so far.

With big lineups, Indiana runs into the same spacing concerns that limited their offense the past few seasons, with regards to overall impact Ian Mahinmi is a reasonable facsimile of Roy Hibbert and neither Jordan Hill or Lavoy Allen offers anything close to the skill set of David West. When the Pacers have gone small they have predictably been pushed around. The Raptors and Grizzlies combined to shoot 52.1 percent from the field and 47.8 percent on three-pointers against the small lineups. Even more troubling is that Indiana’s defensive free throw rate for those lineups has been an astronomical 0.511 — highest in the league last season was the Denver Nuggets at 0.320.

Small sample sizes and all that, but these issues are troubling because they dovetail so perfectly with the assumed challenges Indiana would face in this transition. Figuring out how to defend inside, and without fouling, is problem number one for any undersized group. On the plus side, the uptempo attack is promising on offense and but for some poor shooting performances by Paul George and Monta Ellis, the offensive numbers might look even better.

In the grand scheme of things, Indiana is exactly where we should have expected them to be at this point — square one, trying to figure out how to make a dramatic change into an effective one.