Indiana Pacers Complete 2016-17 Season Preview
Larry Bird delivered a decisive message when he fired head coach Frank Vogel back in May: Nothing would get in the way of the vision he mapped out for the Indiana Pacers—not loyalty, not stability, not even finishing one win shy of a surprising second-round postseason bid.
Indiana's team president wanted his troops to play smaller and faster. He made that much clear at the end of the 2014-15 season. It didn't matter that jettisoning Roy Hibbert and signing Monta Ellis hardly fit the bill. The Pacers squad he watched on the floor in 2015-16 never met his standards.
Paul George spent most of his time at small forward. The Pacers cracked the top 10 in pace but finished bottom eight in offensive efficiency. They were middle of the road in three-point accuracy.
Vogel, in that sense, failed, so the next coach would be a better reflection of the identity Bird wished to champion. But then he named Nate McMillan as Vogel's successor, which portended a series of aggressive offseason moves that indicate no discernible identity.
Next season's Pacers are more confusing for it, their floor as low as their ceiling is high. Armed to the teeth with talented individuals who don't easily fit together, it'll take the right breaks for them to avoid getting lost in the Eastern Conference's hellishly deep middle class.
Biggest Offseason Move
Trading for Thaddeus Young and signing Al Jefferson are solid, if undefined attempts by Indiana to move the needle. But its biggest offseason move is the acquisition of Jeff Teague—which, considering he came at the expense of George Hill, doesn't sit right.
It seems justifiable for a team looking to sharpen its offense. It's beyond difficult to field an elite scoring machine without a top point guard, and Hill is more possession manager than floor general. Teague is by far the better playmaker; his assist percentage last season (34.4) more than doubled Hill's mark (15.5), and he initiated 545 pick-and-rolls to his predecessor's 259. He can also be considered a lateral shooting move after burying nearly 50 percent of his spot-up treys.
But this switch is rife with risks, as Ben Golliver underscored for SI.com:
"First, Teague reportedly played through a knee injury last season. Second, the Hawks weren’t able to recapture their 2015 chemistry last season, and Teague occasionally was benched for back-up Dennis Schroder down the stretch. Third, Teague grades far worse than Hill defensively: Hill ranked 14th among point guards in Defensive Real Plus-Minus last season, while Teague ranked 55th.
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Not even the offensive benefits of adding Teague are sure things: He had the better catch-and-shoot percentage last year, but Hill is the superior three-point marksman for his career and is used to working away from the ball, off of George, in volume.
Teague, on the other hand, hasn't played beside a ball-dominant supporting cast since 2011-12, when he counted Joe Johnson and Josh Smith as Atlanta Hawks teammates. While the two-man game between him and George should effortlessly blossom, adding Ellis and Young to the equation displaces Teague from his comfort zone and into a role he's never known.
Rotation Breakdown
At a time when many teams are scrambling to iron out consistent rotations, the Pacers don't have much thinking to do. Starting Ellis, George, Teague, Myles Turner and Young is a given. Incorporating two new on-ball contributors will take time, but the Ellis-George-Turner tricycle ranked among Indiana's five most-used trios last season. Working in Teague shouldn't be too hard if he gets enough time as the lead ball-handler.
The rest of the rotation is similarly set in stone:
| Jeff Teague | Monta Ellis | Paul George | Thaddeus Young | Myles Turner |
| Aaron Brooks | Rodney Stuckey | C.J. Miles | Lavoy Allen | Al Jefferson |
| Joe Young | Glenn Robinson III | Jeremy Evans | Rakeem Christmas | |
| Georges Niang |
Offense is clearly a point of emphasis for this second unit. Jefferson will steamroll most backup centers in the post and is flanked by a number of nimble-footed scorers, namely Aaron Brooks, C.J. Miles and Rodney Stuckey. If this group doesn't rank better than 15th in offensive efficiency—as Indy's bench did last year, according to HoopsStats.com—it has failed.
Minutes will rise and fall across the board throughout the season depending how often McMillan plans to run small. And the Pacers have a number of options on that front: They can sub in Miles for Young; coax three-point attempts out of Rakeem Christmas or Jeremy Evans and use them as backup 4s; trot out dual-point guard lineups that feature Brooks and Teague instead of Ellis; or sit Turner for Miles and, in an effort to play super fast, slot Young at center.
Ellis, George, Miles, Teague and Turner figure to make up the most popular small-ball cast. George and Miles can flip-flop defensive assignments, and Turner matches up with opposing centers better than Young. Provided Ellis delivers enough off-ball offense and the backcourt doesn't get burned defensively, this is the best way for Indiana to meld space with speed.
Reasons for Confidence
Superstars remain the ultimate NBA lifeline, and the Pacers have one of the league's 12 best on their side.
George showed little to no rust last season after missing most of 2014-15 with a broken leg. He averaged a career-high 23.1 points per game and tied personal bests in assists (4.1) and steals (1.9). He hasn't cleared 43.0 percent shooting from the field since 2011-12, but makes up for it with above-board efficiency from three-point range (37.1 percent) and foul-line accuracy (86.0 percent).
And even as George resisted defensive assignments at power forward—that honor often belonged to Miles—he re-established himself as one of the game's peskiest wings. The Pacers' stingy defense improved (slightly) with him on the floor, and Russell Westbrook was the only other player to clear 450 defensive rebounds and 150 steals.
This is what separates George from other all-world superhumans: Few other stars can lead an offensive charge and chase around elite scorers on defense. According to NBA Math, George was one of six players to add at least 100 points to his team's offensive cause while saving another 50 or points on the defensive end.
His company? Draymond Green, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, John Wall and Westbrook.
Reasons for Concern
It would be a lot easier to like the Pacers if they had an alternative aim for this roster.
"We want a style where we can score," Bird said on The Dan Patrick Show. "I’d like to score 105 points a game, maybe 106 if we can, and still defend the way we're capable of defending.”
Expecting to replicate last season's defensive performance is a problem. The Pacers finished third in points allowed per 100 possessions, and then parted ways with George Hill, Solomon Hill and Ian Mahinmi—three of their most valuable defenders—not to mention head coach Frank Vogel.
Ellis' shortcomings won't be masked nearly as well next to Teague, and Solomon Hill's absence jeopardizes the defensive integrity of certain small-ball combinations. Turner improved as a rim protector over the course of his rookie campaign, but Mahinmi saved more points on the defensive end (120.6) than him and Jefferson combined (64.7), according to NBA Math.
Regressing on defense wouldn't be a huge deal if the Pacers were set to explode on offense, but their collection of ball-dominant scorers in the starting lineup still stands in the way:
Only Turner and Young scored most of their buckets off assists last season, while just George and Teague shot at exceptional clips in catch-and-fire situations. There is minimal balance among this group—no seasoned sniper accustomed to extensive spot-up duty.
What the Pacers have is players who prefer to operate on-ball and the hope that they can make wholesale tweaks to their offensive styles in order to complement one another.
Player to Watch
Turner is the real deal. George and, apparently, everybody else who attended Team USA's training camp said so.
"Myles looked really good. I think the whole talk around that camp was, 'Man, you got a good one,'" George explained, per Nate Taylor of the Indianapolis Star. "That's coming from all the guys on the Olympic team. Everybody was just raving of how good Myles is."
If Turner's per-minute production is a harbinger of things to come, the Pacers have a star-in-waiting. Over the last 20 years, just three other qualified rookies have cleared 16 points, eight rebounds and two blocks per 36 minutes: Anthony Davis, Tim Duncan and Yao Ming. He also became the third rookie in Pacers history, and the first since Rik Smits in 1988-89, to average at least 10 points and one block per game, according to B/R Insights.
Turner's development is pivotal to the Pacers escaping middle-rung purgatory. At his peak, he should be a center who racks up blocks and strokes threes. He knocked down just 3 of 14 long-range attempts as a rookie but shot an encouraging 42.5 percent between 16 feet and the three-point line.
The jury is still out on the rest of his offensive game. He doesn't make meaningful passes, shot just 42.3 percent on post-ups and ranked in the 18th percentile of roll-man efficiency.
Jefferson is a good back-to-the basket role model, and Turner's playmaking should improve with more touches. But Indiana doesn't have the shooters necessary to turn him loose in pick-and-rolls, and it'll be interesting to see if the excess of mouths to feed on offense puts his evolution as a scorer on the back burner.
Predictions
Generating more offense at the expense of defense is never a sound strategy, and yet, that's just what the Pacers have done—minus any real guarantee that they'll actually score more points.
Teague is more dynamic than Hill but takes the ball out of Ellis' hands without being able to cover up for him on defense. Indiana has pigeonholed George to the 3 without adding range at the 4. Young has never been much of a shooter, and the defense nosedived whenever George and Miles shared the floor without Hill or Mahinmi, according to NBAWowy.com.
Getting a leap from Turner does little to solve this identity crisis. Short of Ellis and Young reinventing themselves as floor-spacers, this is a team that ditched last season's calling card in favor of artificial headway—change for the sake of change, not progress.
Final Record: 44-38
Division Standing: 3rd
Playoff Berth: Yes
B/R Leaguewide Power Rankings Prediction: 15th
Stats courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com unless otherwise cited. Salary information via Basketball Insiders.
Dan Favale covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter, @danfavale.
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