NBA Playoff Berth Sets Stage for Paul George to Rejoin Superstar Ranks
NEW YORK — In the summer of 2014, Paul George was riding high. He was coming off his second consecutive All-Star season, and his Indiana Pacers looked again like they'd be one of the best teams in the Eastern Conference. After all, they were coming off back-to-back appearances in the Eastern Conference Finals.
George had ascended Superstar Mountain during the previous seasons and was being counted among the very best players not just at small forward (where he was considered a rightful peer to LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Carmelo Anthony), but in the whole league. Cementing his status, George was getting ready to not just play for but lead Team USA in the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup.
A month before the tournament was to begin, George, while attempting to block James Harden during the team's televised scrimmage, came tumbling to the ground with one of the most gruesome injuries in recent memory: a compound fracture of both bones in his lower leg.
And just like that, his spot on the FIBA roster was gone, his 2014-15 season all but over, and both his ascent and the Pacers' shot at challenging LeBron's Cleveland Cavaliers for East supremacy were halted.
Building to a Comeback
It's been 21 months since George fell to the ground, but if you just scanned his numbers this season, you'd never know anything happened to his right leg in August 2014.
You would see 80 of 80 games played this season. You'd see improved offensive production. You'd see remarkably similar and, in some cases, better stats than those of his 2013-14 All-NBA season.
| Year | MPG | PPG | TS% | RPG | APG |
| 2013-14 | 36.2 | 21.7 | 0.555 | 6.8 | 3.5 |
| 2015-16 | 35.0 | 23.3 | 0.557 | 7.0 | 4.0 |
But the game, of course, is not played in the box score.
On the court, George's impact resembles 2013-14 but also looks and feels just a bit different.
"This year has just been up-and-down in general," George recently told Bleacher Report. "Being healthy, being unhealthy, being sore, being tight, having legs, having no legs. It's just been a whirlwind. But I'm just happy to have been in every game this season."
George is shouldering major burdens on both ends of the court, yet he has not asked Pacers coach Frank Vogel for any relief.
"Physically, he's in good shape and all that stuff," Vogel said. "He's healthy. I think he would say he feels a little bit different than he did prior to the injury, but he's playing at a high level."
Both coach and player credited George's resurgence to his surprising return at the tail end of last season.
"We felt like that would be a big step for him in terms of going into the summer having already been in a game, even if it was for short minutes," Vogel said. "And we think that did help him hit the ground running this year."
"When the summer approached, having played in those (six) games I was confident that I was able to go out and go through full training for that whole summer. I was able to just figure out what was the last little bit of areas that I needed to get better at," George said. "One was trusting it. And two was just explosiveness. Figuring out how to get back explosive and pushing off, jumping off it. I had to learn all of that and trust all of that."
Sea Legs
It looked like he already had it all back at the start of the season. George averaged 27.2 points per game on a .605 true shooting percentage through the end of November. But he lost his legs in December and January, when his scoring average dropped to 21.6 a night and his true shooting fell to .533.
Sometime around the middle of the season, Vogel gave George some rest—albeit not on game days.
"Giving him practices off really seemed to recharge his batteries," Vogel said.
Since then, George is shooting the ball better from the perimeter and regaining confidence attacking the basket, according to Vogel. George's three-point percentage held steady at 34.1 percent in February but jumped to 37.0 in March and 41.7 percent during the first four games of April. Those are right in line with his pre-injury numbers.
But George admits he doesn't feel like the same player defensively. Pre-injury, he was an elite two-way force—just as good (if not better) on the defensive end. George's ability to check any perimeter player in the league while also excelling on offense was a huge part of his value. At least to his eye, that balance has tipped this season.
"I think I was a better defender before the injury. I was a lot quicker on my feet," George said.
Indeed, some defensive measurements do not shine like they once did. He's dropped from third among small forwards to eighth in ESPN's Defensive Real Plus-Minus. While he suppressed his man's two-point shooting percentage by 4.9 percent the last time he was healthy in 2013-14, that number has dropped this year to just 1.5 percent, per the SportVU tracking data on NBA.com.
George, though, is confident the self-diagnosed slip is not a permanent one.
"I think I'll get that back at some point. This is still [my] first year back," he said. "So I'm going to have areas where I can look back and say, 'I need to work on this. I need to work on that. I'm not strong enough.' I'm going through that now, and once the season's over, I'll get that right and go to the drawing board."
The Mountaintop Awaits (Again)
On Sunday, the Pacers clinched a playoff berth, and George could very easily match up against LeBron James or DeMar DeRozan, depending on their first-round matchup.
Either way, his progress on defense will be put to a great test, and though he is not quite as assured of his own abilities on that end of the floor, he is far more confident in his team's defense now than he was earlier in the season.
Heading into the 2015 offseason, Pacers president Larry Bird announced the team would play smaller and faster. The Pacers would slide George up a slot to power forward, which would allow freedom of movement on the offensive end that they hadn't had during the previous era centered around the big-man tandem of Roy Hibbert and David West, both of whom departed in July.
"I thought we were going to be the West Coast team in the East," George said, when asked how he thought the small lineup would fare when the season started. "The idea of playing smaller, playing faster, having two elite wing defenders in myself and Monta (Ellis), I thought this was going to be a year that we just blew teams out of the water by our speed, our tempo, our shooting. And it started out as that until teams figured us out and kind of game-planned."
The Pacers won eight of the first 11 games they started with the small lineup, allowing opponents an offensive efficiency of only 96.8, the equivalent of a top-three defense in the league. Over the next 12 games with that starting unit, though, the Pacers went just 3-9 and allowed opponents to score an incredible 112.9 points per 100 possessions, just about the equivalent of Oklahoma City's No. 2-ranked offense in the league.
| Lineup | Record | Opp. PPG | D-Rtg |
| Big | 11-12 | 96.3 | 99.3 |
| Small | 12-10 | 103.4 | 105.2 |
"We were just small. Teams were outrebounding us, giving themselves extra possessions, which was a problem for us," George said. "We had a hard time with that."
The Pacers corralled 74.6 percent of available defensive rebounds through those first 45 games, per NBA.com, the equivalent of being the 20th-ranked defensive-rebounding team. Since switching almost exclusively back to a big lineup, that number has jumped to 77.3 percent, the equivalent of the 11th-best mark. That's a huge difference, one that should prove extremely important in the playoffs, as both Cleveland and Toronto rank among the league's top 12 offensive-rebounding teams.
But even if the Pacers are able to slow down the offense of their playoff opponents, they're not likely to run away with any wins—the tradeoff for improved defense and rebounding is that their offense is still stuck back in the muck.
The Pacers are 20th in the NBA in offensive efficiency, per NBA.com. They're ranked 25th in the final minute of close games, when they score just 92.9 points per 100 possessions, the second-worst mark of any playoff team. Indiana has made only 20 of 74 shots in the final minute of one-possession games—only the Detroit Pistons, Phoenix Suns and Washington Wizards have converted less often.
Worse yet, George himself has been the primary culprit. He has attempted the third-most shots in those situations (27) and has the fourth-worst shooting percentage among the 45 players who have attempted at least 10 such shots.
Vogel doesn't see it as a George issue so much as a team issue.
"We've got to get open. We've got to screen better. We've got to get into our stuff sooner," he said.
Doing those things would certainly give George a slightly better chance at hitting his shot in those situations, but he also needs the fast-twitch explosiveness that he said is still coming back in order to get the shot in the first place. When—or if—it does come back, George will be right back where he belongs, on that true two-way star mountain with the best players in the league.
Now, with the Pacers in the postseason, he'll have a chance to prove, on national TV, just how far along he is in that journey, and how much work still must be done.
All quotes obtained firsthand. All statistics via NBA.com/stats or Basketball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.
