The Indiana Pacers are different, not better

Two nights ago, the Indiana Pacers were absolutely shellacked by the Charlotte Hornets. The Hornets came out early and buried the Pacers defense under a pile of 3-pointers, tying a franchise record with 75 points scored in the first half. Indiana very clearly never stood a chance after the opening minutes of the game.

The Pacers came into this season with the goal of being a different team. One that plays fast and is skilled offensively, but are is the team they created really the one they wanted? Does the process match the plan?

Indiana is in a horrendous situation defensively. They’re giving up 109.3 points per 100 possessions and getting outscored by 5.5 per 100 possesions. Obviously, these numbers are still in the small sample size category, but they don’t look like something that’s going to balance themselves out as the season progresses. Indiana’s defense looks broken, and the reason for that could be as simple as personnel.

This summer the Pacers removed plus defensive players such as George Hill, Ian Mahinimi and Solomon Hill, replacing them with minuses on that end such as Al Jefferson and Aaron Brooks. They created and backcourt heavy on overlap with Jeff Teague and Monta Ellis on the floor together, and perhaps the death nail in all of this was not renewing Frank Vogel’s contract in favor of hiring Nate McMillan. The reason for all of this? To modernize the team. It’s not working.

Last season, the Pacers finished the year near the bottom of the league on offense, scoring 102.4 points per 100 possessions, but defensively they were in the top third of the league, only giving up 100.2 per 100. This was a team with a real identity that despite their struggling offense was able to keep themselves in games with a strong defense. The Pacers’ front office wanted a stronger offensive team and they seemed to believe that Vogel was a part of why they couldn’t perform better on that end.

On top of this, the Pacers wanted to increase the pace and really move the ball. Except they were already a pretty fast team to begin with. Indiana finished last season top 10 in the NBA in pace, and through the first seven games of this year they’re only slightly faster. So as far as speed goes Indiana is playing around the same, but they’re a far worse team on defense. All that pace hasn’t helped the offense enough to account for the difference.

Indiana is scoring 103.8 points per 100 possessions with a 54.9 true shooting percentage, which are both improvements over last season. Indiana is also showing to be a better jump shooting team this year hitting 38 percent from 3-point range. Those are small changes though and whether they are actually a better shooting team remains to be seen. Although they might not continue to be a catastrophically bad defensive the changes there seem big enough to point to as a legitimate problem. Maybe they’re slightly better on offense but the players that are now gone were strong defenders, so now they’re bad on defense. This isn’t team building, or problem solving, it’s just changing parts. The fixes have just led to new problems and those problems seem far more dire than the old ones, at least for now.

All of this would be forgivable if there was a sign of a plan of some kind. If Indiana was burning down the old system and just going through growing pains as they established a new one that would be fine, but their roster moves don’t suggest that. This isn’t a young a team, and most of their recently signed contracts are veterans well past the point of changing their games. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of hope for change with the roster as it’s currently constructed.

The Pacers are finally playing the way they wanted to, but the results are definitely not what they wanted.

Home/NBA