A quarter of the way through the NBA season, the Indiana Pacers are having a hard time. One year ago, they were about to knock out the Boston Celtics and the Milwaukee Bucks en route to the finals of what was then known as the In-Season Tournament, playing a furiously fast-paced brand of basketball and scoring at a historically efficient rate. Now they’re 9-13, and, with a 122-111 loss against the Toronto Raptors on Tuesday, they finished NBA Cup group play 0-4.
“I think the product we’re putting on the floor right now as a group is embarrassing,” Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton told reporters in Toronto.”
In the first half against the Raptors, Indiana committed 14 turnovers and trailed by as many as 22 points. For much of the season, it has struggled to handle physical defensive teams that pick up full-court.
“A lack of overall force led to an absence of any kind of leverage,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle told reporters. “The physical nature of the game now, if you don’t have leverage on offense, I mean, teams are pressuring, there’s a lot of contact and turnovers happen. The second half was much better, but we own the first half and we’ve had too many stretches like that. We all own it, and we need to fix it.”
Haliburton himself was excellent, finishing with 30 points on 10-for-16 shooting and six assists in 40 minutes. It was his best performance on the road this season; coming into the game, he was averaging 11.9 points on 43.3% true shooting in 11 games away from Gainbridge Fieldhouse, and in the team’s previous trip to Toronto he finished with 16 points on 5-for-18 shooting. Haliburton said he understands that most teams are going to try to deny him the ball and pressure him. This has been an adjustment.
“I’m just trying to navigate the waters a little bit, figure out the right way to attack it, just be myself while also trying to help us win games,” Haliburton said. “So it feels good to see the ball go in — especially on the road, I’ve struggled on the road this year — but really all that matters right now is winning. And as the leader of this group, I don’t really care about individual anythings right now. We gotta put a better product on the floor.”
Haliburton said that the Pacers cannot let their frustrations about missed shots or substitution patterns dictate their approach to the game: “You can’t control stuff like that, but you can control how hard you’re going to play. You can control your energy and your spirit. Those are all controllable things.”
After a halftime conversation, Indiana made a game of it on Tuesday. Halfway through the fourth quarter, the Raptors’ lead had dwindled to just two points.
“But it’s gotta be like that for 48 minutes,” Haliburton said. “Every team is playing hard right now, every team is young and has energy and there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be matching that and beyond.”
If the Pacers don’t play with more energy, Haliburton said, Carlisle will have to “keep playing around with lineups, playing around with different guys to figure out what’s going to put the best product on the floor.”
Through 22 games, Indiana has turned the ball over much more frequently than it did in 2023-24 and gone from an amazing transition team to a below-average one. Some of this can be attributed to injuries — Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith and Ben Sheppard have all been sidelined for significant stretches and Isaiah Jackson is out for the year with a torn ACL — but the Pacers weren’t injury-free last season, either.
“I think there needs to be a reality check right now,” Haliburton said. “Individually and collectively. Guys need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves what they can do better. And that starts with me. I have to be a better leader. I gotta do everything better and harder ’cause I’m not ready to piss away a year of my career, or this organization or this team’s season. So everybody’s gotta come together collectively, figure out what we can do better.
“It’s part of the growing pains, you know? I mean, listen, we’re 9-13 right now, we can act like the world is falling apart, and that’s not the case. But there also needs to be a sense of urgency, you know? Everybody can keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s four games, we’ll be back to .500’ — it ain’t that easy.”
Coming off a 47-win season and an appearance in the Eastern Conference finals, Indiana understandably expected to have a better start than this. Fortunately, it is not the only team in the East in this sort of situation. Five teams in the conference have exactly nine wins right now, and the 10th-place Pacers are only three games behind the fifth-place Milwaukee Bucks. Haliburton is right, though, to stress that they need a sense of urgency. If Indiana can’t reestablish its identity, none of this stuff about the standings matters.
