Indiana Pacers Bench Failing to Be a Weapon Again This Season

The Indiana Pacers have been fighting the same battle for three seasons now—finding a productive combination off the bench.

Since 2011-12, the Pacers' starting lineup has consistently been among the best in the league, but things have absolutely fallen off a cliff as soon as one of the starters goes to the bench. 

It's a bit difficult to tell early in the season because the bench is essentially starting due to injuries to George Hill, David West and Rodney Stuckey, but it looks like the Pacers may have again failed to address their biggest weakness this offseason.

The table below shows the Pacers' net efficiency for the past three seasons, split between their starters and bench units. The bench-units category here includes all five-man units alongside the intact starting lineup.

The starters have consistently produced a dominant net efficiency, outscoring their opponents by around 10 points per 100 possessions each season. As soon as one of those starters goes to the bench, things have come crashing down.

Looking at Basketball-Reference.com's new Box Plus-Minus we can take things down to an individual level and see just how bad the bench has been. Box Plus-Minus is a box-score-based estimate of a player's overall (offensive and defensive) impact per 100 possessions.

It's calculated so that zero equates to an average player and that minus-2.0 equates to a replacement-level player—essentially a level of production that could be found at any time by signing a player from the D-League, etc.

The table below shows the BPM for each player who has played at least 500 minutes off the bench for the Pacers the past three seasons:

Player	2014	2013	2012
Luis Scola	-3.4	-	-
Ian Mahinmi	0.4	-2.4	-
C.J. Watson	0.5	-	-
Danny Granger	-2.2	-	-
Evan Turner	-2.9	-	-
Tyler Hansbrough	-	-2.6	-2.5
D.J. Augustin	-	-1.6	-
Gerald Green	-	-3.1	-
Sam Young	-	-2.5	-
Dahntay Jones	-	-	-1.8
Lou Amundson	-	-	-2.3
A.J. Price	-	-	-1.6

Of the 14 player-seasons in this table, only two represented above-average production—Mahinmi and Watson, both last season. Nine of the player-seasons represent production that is below replacement level. This is an absolutely horrific level of production and helps show why the Pacers have continually run into a brick wall against teams with depth in the playoffs.

Every summer the Pacers have sought to bolster this depth inadequacy, and every season the same problem has arisen. Watson, Mahinmi, Green, Scola, Augustin and Chris Copeland were all signed as free agents or brought over in trades. Hansbrough, Solomon Hill and Orlando Johnson were all selected in the draft.

None were supposed to become dominant, impact players in the sixth-man role. The Pacers were just looking for competence to hold down the fort for a few minutes each night until they could get back to their foundational unit. None of those pieces, save Watson, has even approached competence.

The project of building the bench was somewhat trickier this season because of the departure of Lance Stephenson opening a hole in the starting unit. Replacing his production in a single player was a nearly impossible task, so the Pacers tried to capture Stephenson's skill set in two different players—C.J. Miles (the shooter) and Rodney Stuckey (the penetrator). 

When Paul George broke his leg in August, both Stuckey and Miles were moved into the (hypothetical, when healthy) starting lineup, and the musical chairs at the end of the bench brought the Pacers' rotational holes to the forefront.

Stuckey has been good when he's been able to stay on the floor, and Miles is not nearly as bad as his 25.4 field-goal percentage or 17.2 three-point percentage have implied thus far. Eventually, West, Hill and Stuckey will return, Miles will progress to the mean and things will stabilize somewhat. 

While stabilization will come, it won't really solve the problem. Without George and Stephenson, the Pacers only hope of staying near the top of the Eastern Conference was to complement a weaker starting unit with a deeper and more competitive bench. 

USA TODAY Sports

Frank Vogel recognized that with Stuckey and Miles needing to start, they would need to try and accomplish this as much with style as with personnel, according to Mark Montieth of Pacers.com:

"

We're going to have a similar bench (but) we'll try to have a different approach with them and give more opportunities. Have more confidence with them and get them into a rhythm more. Continuity is something we haven't had and hopefully something we can have this year.

"

So Vogel will essentially be faced with the same task as last year: trying to squeeze competitive play out of Watson, Scola, Copeland and Mahinmi. The graph we looked at above gives a pretty good representation of what to expect from this experiment. 

Watson can help, but Scola has become a progressively bigger and bigger disaster on both ends. Copeland can make three-pointers but offers next to nothing on defense. Mahinmi is the polar opposite—a passable defender who contributes nothing on offense. Damjan Rudez, Lavoy Allen and Solomon Hill have all shown flashes in this early season, but none appear to be the kind of binding agents this group needs to hold itself together.

Again, it's difficult to draw conclusions just five games into the season, but this story feels so uncomfortably familiar. The Pacers' starting lineup will not be nearly as effective as it has been in year's past. There won't be much help coming from the bench, either.

Statistical support for this story from NBA.com/stats