by Wheat Hotchkiss
A year ago, Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle sat down with the front office to discuss the future of the franchise. They laid out a plan that included a goal of having Indiana back in the Eastern Conference Finals in three years.
Those plans were accelerated this season, as the Blue and Gold made a surprise run to the conference finals in the franchise’s first postseason appearance since 2020.
There’s no question that the Pacers are ahead of schedule. They head into the offseason with a significantly raised expectations.
“I’ve been very forthright about the fact that we’re a small-market franchise, but we have big dreams,” Carlisle said on Tuesday at the Ascension St. Vincent Center. “When we qualified for the playoffs after we beat Atlanta the last day of the season, I was very steadfast about what our attitude needed to be going into it, that we just weren’t simply happy to be there. It’s important to be vigilant about those feelings.”
This season was really about getting back into the playoffs, but the Pacers proved to be a resilient, tight-knit team that accomplished far more than even the most optimistic fan expected.
They had a historically great offensive season.
They won six straight games in the NBA’s inaugural In-Season Tournament, making a run to the Championship game.
They pulled off one of the biggest trades in franchise history, acquiring a two-time All-Star in Pascal Siakam.
They helped Indianapolis host NBA All-Star 2024, the first time the league’s signature weekend came to the Circle City in nearly 40 years.
They returned to the playoffs for the first time in four years.
They won a playoff series for the first time in 10 years.
They followed that up by winning another playoff series — this time, winning a Game 7 on the road with an all-time great performance — to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals for the ninth time in franchise history.
After seeing their season end in early April the past couple years, the Pacers played until Memorial Day this season, a surprise to pretty much anyone outside of the organization.
After Indiana acquired Siakam at the trade deadline, the veteran forward who won a championship with Toronto in 2019 kept talking about the things the team needed to do to be “playing our best basketball in April, May, and June.”
In January, February, and March, that phrased seemed simply aspirational, but in fact, the Pacers came within days of extending their season into June.
One of the biggest reasons for the Pacers being ahead of schedule is the emergence of Tyrese Haliburton as one of the league’s marquee stars.
In just his fourth NBA season, Haliburton was the engine behind the highest-scoring offense in the last 40 years. He averaged 20.1 points and led the league in assists at 10.9 per contest as the Pacers scored 123.3 points per game, the sixth-highest average in NBA history and the highest since the 1983-84 Nuggets. They also became the first team ever to surpass 10,000 points and 2,500 assists in the same season.
Haliburton was the catalyst behind the Pacers’ In-Season Tournament run and was named to the inaugural All-Tournament team. He was elected to start in the All-Star Game in Indianapolis, becoming just the fourth player in franchise history to earn that honor. And he was voted to the All-NBA third team, becoming just the sixth Pacer ever to earn an All-NBA selection.
He battled through adversity in the form of a midseason hamstring injury that sidelined him for 10 games and continued to impact him even after he returned. And he reached the playoffs for the first time and had great success, averaging 18.7 points and 8.2 assists over 15 games before injuring his hamstring again in Game 2 in Boston and being forced to watch the last two games from the bench as the Celtics closed out the series.
Haliburton said in his final media availability on Tuesday that he wanted to play through the pain in Games 3 and 4, but the organization and his agents came together and convinced him that it was best for his long-term health to sit out.
While he was disappointed with how the season ended, Haliburton said he was “really grateful, really thankful for everybody in my life and this organization and just the year we had.”
“It was the best season of my life, no question, up until this point,” he said. “I plan to have a lot more success in this uniform and this organization to have a lot more success.
“For me, it’s been an unbelievable year. This is a year that a lot of people are going to remember for a long time. But I don’t want this to be just a feel-good story. We don’t want this to be a one-year thing. We understand that we want this to be the standard. And we’ve got to prove that we can do that and uphold that.”
Jan. 17, 2024 may go down as one of the most important dates in franchise history. That’s the day the Pacers acquired Siakam from Toronto in exchange for Bruce Brown, Jordan Nwora, Kira Lewis Jr., and three first-round picks.
Trading for a player of Siakam’s caliber in the prime of his career was a nearly unprecedented move for the franchise. Siakam, who turned 30 on April 2, was tremendous over his four months in Indiana, averaging 21.3 points on 54.9 percent shooting, 7.8 rebounds, and 3.7 assists over 41 games in the regular season and 21.6 points on 54.1 percent shooting, 7.5 boards, and 3.8 assists in 17 games in the playoffs.
Siakam fit in seamlessly with Haliburton in Indiana’s up-tempo offensive attack and proved to be an ideal complement to floor-spacing center Myles Turner in the frontcourt.
The Pacers gave up so much for Siakam despite knowing that he would be a free agent because they were confident that they could convince him to re-sign this offseason. Ensuring Siakam returns is what Carlisle termed “the first very important step” for the franchise.
Carlisle admitted that the pitches for Siakam to stay have been ongoing since the day he first set foot in Indianapolis, but the recruiting effort truly began “in earnest” on Tuesday during Siakam’s exit interview.
In his final media availability on Monday night, Siakam didn’t want to talk about his pending free agency, but did have plenty of praise for the city and the organization. He admitted it was very difficult for him to be traded midseason from Toronto, the franchise that had drafted him and where he spent the first seven-and-a-half seasons of his career, but said that the Pacers helped him significantly through the transition
“All I can say is that it’s been a blessing,” Siakam said. “I’m really appreciative of everything. Coming from where I come from, it means a lot. The support that I’ve received here, it’s something that I was kind of missing. Having all that and seeing how a city just breathes basketball and just how much support they give to the team, just being here the home games, it’s incredible. How would you not be a part of that?”
Haliburton vowed to play a big part in recruiting Siakam to stay long-term.
“It’s a big deal to bring Pascal back,” he said. “Just a great addition to our team, an amazing, amazing player. He knows I’ll be texting him non-stop, calling him non-stop. We all would love to have Pascal back. That’s definitely the plan.
“I can’t speak for the man by any means, but I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that Pascal Siakam is in a Pacer uniform next year.”
Beyond Siakam, the Pacers are set to return largely the same roster next season barring an offseason trade. The only other pending free agents on the team are Obi Toppin, Doug McDermott, and James Johnson. Toppin was the only consistent rotation player out of those three and had a career year in his first season in Indiana, appearing in all 82 games and averaging 10.3 points on 57.9 percent shooting (40.3 percent from 3-point range) and 3.9 rebounds.
No matter what happens with Siakam and Toppin, the Pacers will bring back a strong core. Veteran center Turner just completed his ninth season in Indiana and became the franchise’s all-time blocks leader this season, but is still just 28 years old. Second-year guard Andrew Nembhard and fourth-year forward Aaron Nesmith (both 24 years old) have emerged as dependable starters who elevated their games even more in the playoffs. T.J. McConnell had a career year at 31 and is arguably the best backup point guard in the NBA. Rookie guard Ben Sheppard emerged as a rotation player in the playoffs, while fellow rookie Jarace Walker showed flashes and there is plenty of excitement about the 20-year-old’s upside.
“I think we all learned that we belong here,” Nesmith said. “I think we had a great season. We’re a great team. We know we can play at this level and we know there’s stuff we can learn and get better at. We’ll do that this summer and I think we all expect to make another deep run next year.”
Second-year guard Bennedict Mathurin also will be back in the fold after undergoing season-ending shoulder surgery to repair a torn right labrum.
After averaging 16.7 points primarily off the bench as a rookie, Mathurin was tasked with becoming a more efficient scorer and a better playmaker his sophomore season. He averaged 14.5 points in 59 games (19 starts), but his shooting percentages improved (from 43.4 percent from the field and 32.3 percent from 3-point range as a rookie to 44.6 percent and 37.4 percent as a sophomore), his assists increased from 1.5 per game to 2.0 and his turnovers dropped from 1.9 to 1.6 per contest.
While the hyper-competitive Mathurin admitted it was difficult to watch the playoffs from the sidelines, he was thrilled for his teammates’ success and learned a lot about the intensity needed to win in the postseason.
“I feel it definitely puts a fire in me heading into next season,” Mathurin said.
His rehab is ahead of schedule to a degree that Carlisle called “freakish.” He is already shooting and should be fully cleared for training camp in the fall. Mathurin said that Carlisle told him he will have a chance to compete for a larger role in the fall, though the coach has let him know that “everything here’s got to be earned.”
“Benn Mathurin has a chance to be a star-caliber player for the Indiana Pacers,” Carlisle said. “He has gotten to see over the last two-and-a-half months what wins. And it is defense, speed, quick decision-making, and recognition. His workouts this summer are going to be geared toward fast, efficient, quick decision-making and developing defensively. He has the ability to be a terrific two-way player in this league. His competitiveness is well-documented.”
Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan said that they feel great about the shape of the roster, which includes several contributing players still on rookie-scale contracts with plenty of room for growth. That doesn’t mean they won’t explore other options to improve the roster, but Buchanan did say they would love to retain free agents Siakam and Toppin and continue to foster their young players’ development.
“Our coaches, our players really came together this year and to get to the Eastern Conference Finals in year one of this is truly remarkable, but it also puts us in a position of looking forward,” Buchanan said. “Our job as a front office is always to look forward. We want to continue to be contenders in this league. We want to eventually win a championship for our fans. This season was a great step. In the NBA, there’s nothing that’s linear…The challenge is on us to continue to find ways to improve.”
After the Pacers surprised the league with their success, but they know that that means, as Carlisle noted on Monday, that “expectations will be raised next year.”
Now, it’s about living up to those expectations.
“Just continuing to play with that chip on our shoulder,” Haliburton said of the team’s mentality heading into next season. “I think we’re a roster full of guys with chips on our shoulder. And understanding we haven’t arrived by any means. We had a great year, did something that I don’t think anybody anticipated we’d be capable of doing, getting to the Eastern Conference Finals. But understanding we’ve still got to have a chip on our shoulder.
“Now it’s a whole new thing. Now we’ve got to prove that this year wasn’t a fluke and that we’re capable of doing this.”
Originally posted on pacers.com