The NBA Draft Lottery is ultimately a game of chance, and the Indiana Pacers entered the proceedings with reasonably strong odds. They had a 52.1% chance of walking away with a top-four pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. The remaining 47.9%, their odds of landing at No. 5 or No. 6, meant sending their pick to the Clippers thanks to their February trade for Ivica Zubac.
That’s ultimately how Sunday played out. The Pacers missed out on the top four, meaning their No. 5 overall pick went to Los Angeles. Rarely will a team directly acknowledge the negative consequences of their decisions, but after Sunday’s lottery drawing, Pacers president of basketball operations Kevin Pritchard did just that by apologizing for the risk he took in dealing the pick.
“I’m really sorry to all our fans,” Pritchard wrote on Twitter. “I own taking this risk. Surprised it came up 5th after this year. I thought we were due some luck. But please remember – this team deserved a starting center to compete with the best teams next year. We have always been resilient.”
It was an admirable display of accountability from a top basketball executive. It was also, frankly, unnecessary. The Pacers took a calculated risk. Just because that risk backfired doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision.
The Pacers lost Myles Turner to free agency last offseason. Right now, the NBA is experiencing a bit of a supply-side crisis at the center position. We’re in the middle of an offensive rebounding boom, and with many of the NBA’s best teams like the Thunder and Spurs loading up in the front court, other teams have needed to follow in their footsteps. The days of Golden State’s shooting rendering centers helpless are long gone. You need size to compete in the modern NBA. There are far fewer desirable centers than there are teams that need them.
A number of big-name centers moved at this year’s deadline. All of them presented some meaningful flaw that made them unpalatable to Indiana, specifically. The Pacers are paying Tyrese Haliburton and Pascal Siakam max contracts. Therefore, adding a third max contract like Anthony Davis or Jaren Jackson Jr. just wouldn’t have made sense for them financially in the apron era. Davis and Kristaps Porziņģis were simply too injury-prone to bet on. The next tier of available centers down, like Daniel Gafford, would have represented a meaningful downgrade on Turner. The Pacers reached Game 7 of the Finals in 2025. They weren’t looking for a compromise candidate.
Zubac checks virtually every box they were looking for besides matching Turner’s 3-point shooting. He was an All-Defense selection in 2025, an elite screener and rebounder that also passes and finishes at a high level who will change the way the Pacers function in the half-court offensively, and perhaps most importantly, he’s cheap. He’ll earn around $42 million over the next two seasons, allowing Indiana to acquire him without giving up any other core players.
The Clippers weren’t going to move him for pocket change. He’s only 29. They could have simply kept him and built around him moving forward. They needed a high-upside asset to even consider a deal. The Pacers conveniently had one in their 2025 pick. The protection they conceived made handing over the pick essentially a 50-50 proposition, but the true rationale behind it was a bit more complicated.
The gap between No. 4 and No. 5 in this, specific draft was enormous. There are four prospects — AJ Dybantsa, Dylan Peterson, Cameron Boozer and Caleb Wilson — who are widely treated as future stars. Each of them are so valuable that Indiana would have been crazy to sacrifice the chance to draft one. That player could have become Tyrese Haliburton’s long-term co-star.
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But for the Pacers, specifically, there was a cliff at No. 5. The next batch of prospects — Darius Acuff, Keaton Wagler, Mikel Brown Jr., Kingston Flemings and Brayden Burries — are all guards, and they’re not such obvious stars like Peterson that fit is no longer a consideration. Indiana already has Haliburton, Andrew Nembhard and T.J. McConnell in its back court.
Considering how demanding Rick Carlisle is of his guards, it’s not clear what sort of role any of those prospects would have played for Indiana. After all, the Pacers had a very similar pick in the 2022 NBA Draft, No. 6, and they spent it on a scoring guard in Bennedict Mathurin. He wasn’t even a starter by Indiana’s 2025 Finals run. Of course, the Pacers would rather have had the No. 5 pick than not. This year’s prospects may wind up better than Mathurin. But a guard-heavy team that just came one game short of a championship, prioritizing a center when it had no other viable options at the position made plenty of sense. It was a calculated risk.
And in this era, risk is probably going to be a team-building necessity. Look at the juggernauts Oklahoma City and San Antonio are building. The Thunder and Spurs are not only the two best teams in the NBA, but two of the youngest and most asset-rich. The entire league is at a disadvantage against them. Keeping up means taking risks.
That’s what the Pacers did. They entered Sunday with better than a coin flip’s odds of both addressing their biggest need and adding a potential young superstar. If it had worked out, it would have been hailed as brilliant. The process made sense. They got the bad result. That’s the thing about coin flips. Sometimes you call them wrong. That doesn’t make participating in them inherently foolish.
All of this leaves the Pacers, essentially, where they were a year ago. They still have an NBA Finals-caliber roster, just with Zubac in place of Turner. Considering how poorly Turner’s contract has thus far aged in Milwaukee, it’s fair to call that swap an upgrade at this point. Instead of being out two future first-round picks to the Clippers, they’re out one: their 2029 selection. The 2031 pick the Clippers would have gotten had Indiana landed in the top four now reverts to the Pacers.
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In a way, that makes it found money. It wouldn’t be terribly surprising if the Pacers used it to improve elsewhere. “If it doesn’t happen, there’s a contingency plan to build the team up, too,” head coach Rick Carlisle recently said of landing a top-four pick. “So, we’re gonna view it as a win-win situation. We got Zubac here, who’s gonna be a terrific player for us. And if it turns out we don’t get one of the (top) four picks, then we fulfilled a pretty significant part of what we owe the Clippers. And we’ve gotten a center, and we’d probably have the ability to go get some other veterans.”
The primary goal for Indiana has always been the immediate pursuit of a championship with this core. That’s what happens when you reach Game 7 of the Finals. Adding a top young prospect was always a side quest, something the Pacers would have been eager to do, but not something they’d ever allow to interfere with their main goal. They drew a sensible line at No. 4. That was the line at which risking the pick became worthwhile to bolster the present. The mere fact that they were comfortable drawing that line suggests that No. 5 was a pick they were comfortable losing.
Losing it makes the trade sting a bit harder. It doesn’t undermine the process that led to it, or take away what the Pacers gained out of doing so. A decision doesn’t have to work out perfectly to make sense. Indiana punted its season, hoping for a top pick. It still came away with Zubac, a player who ultimately would not have been available otherwise. That may not be as exciting a prize as Dybantsa or Peterson, but it’s enough to keep the Pacers in pursuit of their ultimate goal: a championship here and now. No general manager who has ever come as close as Pritchard did to winning one last year should have to apologize for aggressively pursuing another shot.
