If the Indiana Pacers get into the playoffs, they’ll defeat the Atlanta Hawks. Book it, paste it, favorite it, or Instaface it. It’s going down.
The kicker to that statement is the “if” portion, as wild a juxtaposition from one year to the next in the NBA as you’ll ever see.
This time last season, the Pacers were scuffling around with the Eastern Conference’s best record, buoyed by a scorching start that bled into the second half of the year but were fighting off chemistry issues that were so awful, they manifested themselves visually on the court. In other words, they were in like Flynn but completely damaged from the neck up.
Fast forward one year, and the Pacers enter their final two games in control of their own fate as of the Chicago Bulls paddling the Brooklyn Nets just hoping to make the playoffs … with a losing record no less. The inexorable march of time affects us all at different rates, but for these Pacers it’s always a whirlwind.
Understand that a staggering three times in the last 20 years, this is a team that has had to rebuild its core only to do so and remake a championship team in a completely different image than the last group with different cultures and core players.
In 1999-2000, their championship build died of natural causes, specifically the aging process that saw the core group of Reggie Miller, Mark Jackson, Rik Smits, and the non-related Brothers Davis … Antonio and Dale … dissipate almost overnight.
The next group was built around the savvy finding of Jermaine O’Neal (at one point, arguably the best big man in the game not named Tim Duncan) for Portland mixed with mercurial Ron Artest, fiery Stephen Jackson, Jamaal Tinsley, and an aging Miller. All around the albatross contract of Austin Croshere.
The Malice at the Palace saw the roster effectively gutted in the midst of what was set up to be a team that could compete for titles for the next decade on an annual basis. In came the next rebuild, centered around a standout collegiate player named Danny Granger, coming into his own.
Granger was good, but wasn’t going to lead you to a title as your number one guy. He was a number two at best, but the Pacers had no choice but to overpay him to keep him around, eventually seeing his career shanked by injury. In the meantime, Larry Bird drafted a mostly unknown kid named Paul George from Fresno State.
Folks booed, because that’s what they do when they don’t know any better. George wasn’t the ultra popular Gordon Hayward of local fame, but it was Bird who famously said after that draft that they’d gotten the player they had wanted all along. Folks just didn’t know what Bird knew about George.
Granger’s subsequent injury forced George to grow up as a player sooner than maybe it was anticipated, and it went gloriously. Couple in a Roy Hibbert who looked the part defensively, George Hill, and just the right kind of crazy Lance Stephenson, and the Pacers once again had a core set to compete for the next decade, somehow. Other franchises go 30 years trying to find a way to build just one of these, yet the Pacers had done it thrice in 20 years.
When Paul George’s leg snapped in gruesome fashion this past summer during a USA Basketball game, Pacer fans had to be seeing deja vu. Once again, a team fully set to enter its prime was being cut down piece by piece, from injury to the departing of Stevenson following an end of the year where it just looked like guys didn’t like each other.
It was ugly. Hill was fighting with fans along social media. Stephenson was fighting with Evan Turner. Hibbert was fighting with himself, it seemed.
This year though, a stripped down expectation has yielded what appears to be a team very close knit entering into the end of the season. Not that it’s been particularly easy. The team started out okay, then saw a gradual reintegration of injured starters and some rough patches that left people wondering what the heck was going on.
Some of what the Pacers have done has been puzzling. Donald Sloan came out of nowhere to give some pretty good minutes, particularly offensively, early in the season but went back buried on the depth chart when Hill and more curiously, C.J. Watson came back.
For all the criticism Bird took for drafting Solomon Hill, he’s been very capable in trying to fill George’s shoes in part. And the other Hill … the one at odds with fans in his hometown of Indianapolis? He’s been amazing, and when Bird remarked at his hard work in the off season, maybe we all should have been paying attention.
Since PG13 has returned from his leg injury to play spot minutes, the Pacers have not lost. Granted, it’s an extremely small sample size of four games, one of which was against the Knicks … so three NBA games … but the value of George isn’t just the 10 points per game he’s averaging since being back, it’s the mentality.
The Pacers have the look of a team coming together in full circle, excited, as though George returning pumped a little life back into a waning season that was destined to be met with a shrug and, “well, they did all they could considering all things.”
The kicker is that Indiana has a roster full of guys who are used to making deep playoff runs, because in professional sports, it’s more typically a journey than figuring out how to do it all at once. There’s progression to becoming a champion and stumbling blocks along the way, not the rapid fire success sometimes seen in college sports.
And this has probably been Frank Vogel’s best job. The lineups are still rigid and seem as though they’re set in stone no matter what anyone is doing in those particular slots, but gone is the high ball screen heavy offense and limited movement away from the ball to the basket that the Pacers had a copyright on by the end of last year. Whether that’s always on a coach or not depends on the situation, but let’s be honest … players aren’t dying to high ball screen with five seconds left on the shot clock every possession.
More than anything though, it’s a coupling of scenarios that were far removed from the Pacers of last year, the ones who needed to win in Atlanta in Game 6 to not suffer the indignity of going out as a #1 seed in the first round.
1. They seem to actually like playing together and have unique chemistry this time around
2. The bench is much, much better, mostly because of Rodney Stuckey, who’s been a total shift from the last few years when the Pacers spent handsomely on proven bench talent only to watch it wither away and die on the Bankers Life Fieldhouse seats.
There’s no doubt that if you pass each contender in the East a bottle of truth serum and ask them which back end seeded team they’d like to avoid of the ones still harboring a chance of or being in the playoffs … Milwaukee, Boston, Indiana, Brooklyn, or Miami … they probably all point to the Pacers first as ones they’d least like to make acquaintance with.
You heard it here first: Beware the Pacers. If you send them an invite, odds are they’re coming early, drinking all your beer, eating all of your cupcakes, and then taking your lady to dinner while you watch it all happen on the couch. Whether they get the invite remains to be seen.
