Barnstorming: Paul George is in uncharted territory
By Ian Levy
Paul George has been in big moments before. He’s just 25-years-old, wrapping up his sixth season in the NBA, and yet the Indiana Pacers’ 98-87 Game 2 loss to the Toronto Raptors was his 56th career playoff game. George has taken clutch playoff shots, led comebacks, shut down dynamic scorers, even played LeBron James to a stalemate and lived to tell the tale. Yet, for all that accumulated experience of carrying an offense and leading a defense when the stakes matter most, this series against the Raptors is something new for him.
George has been masterful in the two games against Toronto. He carried the Pacers to victory in the second half of Game 1 and followed that up with a hyper-efficient 28 points in Game 2. His defense has completely stifled DeMar DeRozan. The jumper is falling and he’s been able to get to the rim at will. George’s athleticism is not quite as visceral or violent as it was before the broken leg that cost him most of last season, but he has clearly compensated with smooth control. In terms of skill and its implementation, what we’re seeing from George in this series is pretty much the full range of possibility.
One of the best two-way players in the league scraping his ceiling has only been good enough for the Pacers to earn a split in the first two games of the series. George has been the best player in the series, by far. But the Raptors are clearly the better team — they earned their No. 2 seed — and they’ve used a deeper and more versatile roster to their advantage. This playoff run is new for George because it’s the first since Indiana’s dramatic transformation of personnel and style. Roy Hibbert, Lance Stephenson, and David West are gone. The conservative defensive scheme and deliberate, grinding offense meant to complement it have both been abandoned.
George is still Indiana’s foundational player but what he’s supporting has changed and that means different responsibilities. There is no more accommodating of shots, touches, and mischief from Lance Stephenson. There is no more driving into the lane and running into an extra defender, either because Roy Hibbert is standing right next to the basket or because his defender is smart enough to know that Hibbert is not a threat unless he is. Ian Mahinmi and Myles Turner have done an admirable job protecting the rim this season, but neither is as effective as Hibbert was in this department. Instead of defending opposing scorers by inviting them into the soft middle of the defense for contested mid-range jumpers, George now has to be more of a barrier himself.
In the past, George was asked push his skills back to another era. The Pacers played a grinding game on defense which inevitably bled into their offense. They were straight out of the late 90s and early 2000s and George was tasked with being their Kobe Bryant, their Tracy McGrady, their Vince Carter. The job was to score through a defense, instead of over or around it. The Pacers were eventually forced to confront the ceiling on that style of play and the team was rebuilt to reflect George and the modernism in his gifts, although Larry Bird and Kevin Pritchard probably wouldn’t have explained it that way.
George’s brilliance in this series hasn’t been able to completely mask the places where the Pacers are butting up against their own limitations — the residual memories of doing things differently, the places where their roster doesn’t have quite enough talent to be what they’d like to be, learning how to really inhabit these new basketball values they’ve pledged allegiance to. It’s frustrating because it feels so close. After last night’s loss, George shared that frustration with Candace Buckner of The Indianapolis Star, saying, “I’m upset about this one. You usually feel good walking away from a road trip with the series tied at one but I’m upset about this one because a lot of stuff that we gave up tonight was preventable. I thought our focus was lost and we gave up some plays that we shouldn’t have.”
The issues George is alluding to are team failings but it his job to serve as band-aid for what ails them. For the first time, the Pacers are George’s team — not just by shot attempts or offensive responsibility, because they’ve been that for a long time. They aren’t his team by abdication or by default to the greatest talent. They are his team because they have been built for him. The Pacers are, in theory, a flexible, up-tempo, pace-and-space monster. This team has been made to elevate his talents, to extend them, to leverage them. Transition play, spacious driving lines, pockets of open space behind the three-point line, these are where George has the advantage.
George has done everything you could ask so far. His true shooting percentage and usage rate are in Stephen Curry territory. His assist, steal, and offensive rebound rates are all playoff career highs. George has done his part as power source, but the machine is still sputtering to some degree. A Herculean individual effort was enough to steal Game 1. Running it back in Game 2 was not nearly enough and that formula is not going to win a playoff series.
Other than maintaining efficiency while upping his volume, it’s hard to see how George could play much better than he has so far. The Pacers, collectively, need to be better if they’re going to keep pushing Toronto. Somehow, George needs to figure out how to make that happen, beyond just scoring more points or grabbing more rebounds. He has to figure out how turn this new modern system that’s working for him into an advantage that lifts everyone. The Pacers aren’t just George’s team, they are Paul George.
That’s a big load to carry.