Paul George still doesn't know who the Pacers are, or who they want to be
Three years ago, we knew exactly who and what the Indiana Pacers were. Head coach Frank Vogel preached smash-mouth two-way basketball built around length and toughness at every position, predicated on the presence of an immovable deterrent on one end of the floor and the ascent of a transcendent talent on the other. Their identity was clear, easy to understand, quickly communicated: you would not be able to score more on Indiana than Paul George (with some playmaking aid from George Hill, Lance Stephenson and David West) would be able to score on you.
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Those Pacers rarely bombed the kind of highlight-reel knockout punches thrown by starrier contemporary outfits like the Big Three Miami Heat or the KD-and-Russ Oklahoma City Thunder, but their relentless regimen of body blows proved brutally effective. A team that had spent seven years treading water between 32 and 44 wins topped a .600 win percentage in Vogel’s first three full seasons on the bench, an eye-opening six-game second-round slugfest with the Heat in the second round of the 2012 playoffs, a dynamite seven-game Eastern Conference Finals rematch with Miami in 2013, and a 33-7 rampage to start the 2013-14 season that had many wondering if that year’s Pacers were the best defensive team ever and the new Beasts of the East, the team that would knock LeBron, D-Wade, Bosh and company off the top of the conference’s mountain.
That, um, didn’t happen. The Pacers fell off a cliff in the spring of 2014, stumbling into the postseason in a shell-shocked offensive funk before barely surviving the sub-.500 Atlanta Hawks in Round 1, briefly steadying themselves to vanquish the Washington Wizards in Round 2, and finally sputtering to another conference finals defeat at the hands of the Heat more memorable for Lance’s trolling than the Pacers’ presence.
“Had we started the playoffs in November or December we’d probably be holding up a trophy,” George told the Los Angeles Daily News that summer. “We peaked too early.”
Three years later, they’ve yet to get anywhere near a return to that summit. Stephenson walked in free agency, George shattered his left leg in a Team USA scrimmage and, for the most part, that was that. One postseason near-miss and one just-shy upset bid later, only George remains from the rosters that took LeBron to the limit … and, just three weeks away from the start of the 2017 playoffs, Indy’s lone All-Star still isn’t sure what exactly the Pacers are, or what they might become.
From Zach Lowe of ESPN.com:
The Pacers are still finding their way back. They are 36-34, barely clinging to a playoff spot in the sad East, a mish-mash of parts that haven’t quite fit. They are a puzzling 11-24 on the road. George is 16 months from unrestricted free agency, and he can’t help but compare the present to the past.
“This season has been a reality check,” George told ESPN.com last week in New York. “You think you are gonna be in those playoff battles, playing alongside those guys forever. You have to try and recapture that moment. And that moment for us was having a strong chemistry and identity. We don’t have one now. I’ve never been on a team without an identity — without a toughness identity.” […]
“We ask ourselves all the time: What kind of team do we want to be?” George said.
“Sometimes we look like a playoff team,” Al Jefferson said. “And sometimes we look like a team that has no business being together.”
That duality — or, less charitably, inconsistency — has been on display, and weighing on George, all season long.
A campaign that George and team president Larry Bird expected to feature Indiana lighting up the scoreboard began with the Pacers hemorrhaging points and ranking among the NBA’s least potent offenses through the end of December. They’ve fluctuated on both ends considerably over the course of the year, putting up explosive offensive numbers in January and early February while continuing to struggle to get stops, before reversing course after the All-Star break; since mid-February, the Pacers have boasted the NBA’s fifth-stingiest defense while falling back to bottom-10 point production.
All of which is to say: Indiana has seemed stuck between stations all season. For two seasons, really, ever since Bird decided to move on from Hibbert in the summer of 2015.
That was very clearly the right call, as evidenced by Hibbert’s slide into virtual irrelevance over the past two seasons as a paint-bound big man who can neither defend out to the 3-point line nor stretch the floor with his shooting, but the Pacers have still yet to arrive at Bird’s hoped-for destination of a smaller, faster, more offensive-minded team built around young range-shooting rim-protector Myles Turner, George at power forward — an experiment that George didn’t much care for, that Vogel functionally dropped before New Year’s Day 2016, and that was all but shuttered when Bird traded for veteran four Thaddeus Young at the 2016 NBA draft (“Paul is not a [power forward], and we will not play him there,” head coach Nate McMillan told Lowe) — and speedier attacking guards, with Monta Ellis coming over two summers ago and Jeff Teague joining the fray last offseason.
And yet, as Lowe notes and as anyone who’s watched the Pacers has seen, Indy’s offense has remained light on penetration and 3-point bombing, heavy on midrange looks and, generally speaking, short on inspiration. As our Kelly Dwyer wrote last week, it’s not totally clear how much of the responsibility there should fall on first-year head man McMillan, who ran efficient but slowed-down and staid offensive attacks for a dozen years in Seattle and Portland, or on Bird, who’s been shuffling the deck for two years but hasn’t yet settled on a product that can produce much more than alternating wins and losses for a month.
What is clear, though, is that the Pacers stand as a fairly weird wild card entering both the postseason and, depending upon how things shake out there, the offseason.
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Again, the team’s been clamping down at a top-five rate over the past month. They’ve been whomping opponents when running out Ellis-free starting lineups that feature C.J. Miles or Glenn Robinson III on the wing. They enter Tuesday’s play at 36-34, one game behind the Atlanta Hawks for fifth place in the East and 1 1/2 games up on the seventh-place Milwaukee Bucks.
They’ve got losing records against the second-seeded Boston Celtics, third-seeded Wizards and fourth-seeded Toronto Raptors this season. But the version of Indy that features Teague dealing, Miles hitting shots, Turner protecting the basket and George carrying the load late — like, say, the one that beat the very good Utah Jazz on Monday night — would be a tough out for any of them, provided a bench led by Ellis and Jefferson can manage to produce enough points to keep the Pacers afloat when George needs a breather (which didn’t happen last postseason, as the Raptors advanced despite being outscored in the series because they dominated the roughly nine minutes per game that George rested).
Maybe the matchups work in their favor, George goes off and the Pacers advance to Round 2 with a chance to trade haymakers with top-of-the-conference opposition; suddenly, George might feel much better about the outlook in Indy, and more amenable to considering a long-term extension to stay put come the summer of 2018. Or, maybe this roughly .500 team’s consistent inconsistency bleeds over into mid-April, the Pacers quietly bow out amid a hail of going-nowhere offensive possessions and defensive miscues, and Bird feels compelled to revisit the trade market for his All-Star perimeter ace lest he wind up losing George to Hollywood for nothing. (One wonders whether Bird’s likely to see a better offer than the one Liberty Ballers reported Tuesday that that Philadelphia 76ers offered at the deadline — one of either Nerlens Noel or Jahlil Okafor, small forward Robert Covington, and at least two future first-round draft picks, likely those Philly has imported in prior trades from teams like the Los Angeles Lakers and Sacramento Kings — with George one year away from free agency.)
The only thing we know for sure is that nobody seems to know what the hell the Pacers are, or will be, including their president and leading star. While uncertainty and inconsistency are elements of an identity, they’re not the ones owner Herb Simon’s paying everybody to foster, which could make for an awful interesting next couple of months in the Hoosier State.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
