On Dec. 4, the Indiana Pacers, the high-octane offensive team that won 47 games and made it to the Eastern Conference finals last season, scored 35 measly points in the first half against the Brooklyn Nets. They finished the game with twice as many turnovers as they did made 3s. The night before, Tyrese Haliburton, the Pacers’ franchise player, had said following a loss in Toronto that they were putting an embarrassing product on the floor and needed to start matching or exceeding their opponents’ energy level. They did not come close to doing that at Barclays Center.
Back in Brooklyn on Monday, Indiana coach Rick Carlisle called it “our worst game of the year.” I can’t say for sure that he is haunted by the performance, but he then cited the exact number of points in the paint that they’d scored at halftime: 12.
“We were coming in and it was a back-to-back and all of that stuff, but none of that should matter, we should still look like a professional basketball team,” he said. “But we didn’t.”
The Pacers were 9-14 after that loss, with an offense that ranked 21st in the NBA and a defense that ranked 25th (and 27th in the halfcourt, per Cleaning The Glass). This was a stark contrast to the fun, frenzied December of 2023; the Nets loss took place on the one-year anniversary of the Pacers’ NBA Cup win against the Boston Celtics in which Haliburton punched their ticket to Las Vegas with a clutch four-point play and a triple-double.
“It wasn’t a good feeling,” Pacers guard Andrew Nembhard said. “It wasn’t necessarily a feeling of disbelief, but it was a feeling of this is going to be harder to get out of this hole.”
Five weeks later, Indiana is out of the hole. By beating a severely shorthanded Brooklyn team on Monday, it climbed above .500 for the first time since it was 1-0. After taking care of business without center Myles Turner against Chicago on Wednesday, the team has now won 10 of its last 13 games, and during that stretch, it has had the NBA’s third-best offense and 12th-best defense, per CTG. The Pacers’ transition attack, which was weirdly ineffective early on, has been tops in the league, and their halfcourt defense, which I’m still hesitant to describe as a strength, has ranked No. 8.
Given how thoroughly they’ve flipped the script, does it feel like that debacle in December was a zillion years ago?
“It feels like yesterday, shit,” Nembhard said. “I feel like we just turned it around. We just started getting going. I think it’s been a process for us to be consistent and go back to what we were doing last year, in terms of compete level and energy and playing together. I think we’re just getting that feel back, a little bit. So it’s nice to see where we’ve come in the month maybe or so since we’ve been here.”
The missing piece
Lately, Haliburton has much more often looked like the All-NBA playmaker who earned Steve Nash comparisons in 2023-24. His usage rate has barely changed, but after averaging 17.5 points on 55.8% true shooting in the first 25 games, he has averaged 20.1 on 63.8% true shooting in the last 13. In a win in Boston on Dec. 29, Haliburton put up an efficient 31 points, six rebounds and seven assists; on consecutive fourth-quarter possessions, he broke the game open by beating Jayson Tatum off the dribble for a layup, then finding second-year wing Ben Sheppard for a corner 3 and a transition layup.
If there is one player, though, who is most responsible for Indiana finding its footing, it might be Nembhard. The 6-foot-4 guard missed more than three weeks with left knee tendinitis in November, and during that time, the Pacers’ most-used starting lineup allowed 119.1 points per 100 possessions. During this turnaround, their regular starters — Haliburton, Nembhard, Bennedict Mathurin, Pascal Siakam and Turner — have allowed 96.1 per 100 and had the best net rating of any lineup in the league (minimum 50 minutes).
Watching the team when he was hurt, Nembhard thought he could “bring back some competitive energy, especially on the defensive side of the floor,” he said. “And then I think on the offensive side, some more connecting, ball movement. Just another guy that can play within our pace and play with other good players.”
Haliburton’s resurgence can’t be separated from Nembhard’s presence. With opponents often pressuring Haliburton and denying him the ball, having another steady hand has made an enormous difference.
“I think he just helps our offensive processes a little bit more, having him to be an initiator when defenses are hugged up on me, or we’re trying to free me off the ball,” Haliburton said. “I can be used better as a screener. The league is moving towards everybody’s lineups having more than one primary initiator, so having him in our group takes some pressure off and allows me to do some other things.”
In Haliburton’s view, the conversation about the team early in the season didn’t properly account for how banged-up it was. “We were missing two starters,” he said, referring to Nembhard and 3-and-D wing Aaron Nesmith, who has been out since the sixth game of the season with a sprained left ankle. Both of their backup centers, Isaiah Jackson and James Wiseman, suffered season-ending Achilles injuries. “Having four injuries like that pretty early in the year was tough for us.”
On top of that, Sheppard strained his left oblique in mid-November, which thrust Quenton Jackson, a wing on a two-way contract, into the starting lineup. As hard as Jackson played, neither he nor anyone else on the roster could replicate Nembhard’s point-of-attack defense, off-ball awareness, ball-handling, smarts and shooting.
“He’s just really solid,” Carlisle said. “He’s a playmaker on offense. He can score. Defensively, he’s our best on-ball defender. He’s physical. He hits people. And he brings a rock-solid consistency that we need. When you talk about a glue guy, the definition of a high-level glue guy, that’s what he is.”
The silver lining
In this year’s NBA Cup, the Pacers lost all four of their group-play games, and only the Washington Wizards had a worse point differential. This was not what they envisioned, having made it to the title game the previous year, but, in a way, the Cup still served them well: After a rough loss against the Charlotte Hornets on Dec. 8, the Pacers had only two games in the next 10 days.
“We got to take a mental break,” Nembhard said. “I think everybody underestimates how nice it is to have a break in the league. You play every other day, you’re just in constant motion, so it’s nice to just sit back, relax, not have as much pressure on yourself and then feel refreshed coming back. I think with a young team, that was a big thing for us.”
To be clear, Indiana didn’t just take a bunch of days off. The schedule allowed the team to take a breath, look at what was going wrong and, crucially, have proper practices.
“We were turning the ball over a lot,” Haliburton said. “Offensively, our concepts, we weren’t doing a great job of implementing those and doing those as a team. So I think the practice time was needed. It wasn’t, like, rest. We were competing. It was like training-camp practice.”
It is not a coincidence that this is when Indiana started to string wins together. In addition to tightening things up on offense, the Pacers have gotten way stingier defensively. As Caitlin Cooper of Basketball, She Wrote pointed out, they’ve done more peel switching, mixed in some zone and generally done a much better job when it comes to helping defense. This defensive improvement has been the more surprising storyline, but it’s difficult to disentangle one end from the other. It has been a virtuous cycle: Stops lead to easier opportunities on offense, which lead to fewer turnovers, which lead to more stops.
During this run, the Pacers have a turnover rate of 11.7%, the lowest mark in the NBA. They have also been about average in terms of allowing shots at the rim, after allowing more than any team last season and starting this season similarly. Nembhard’s work at the point of attack is a big part of that, but it wouldn’t mean as much if the team’s defense hadn’t become more stable.
“I think it’s taken a full team effort,” Nembhard said. “Everybody coming together, buying into their role, playing their role the harder and being consistent every night.”
The challenge
Turnovers remain a point of emphasis in practice. “It’s basic stuff, I’m getting a lot of eye-rolling on some of it from them,” Carlisle said. “But we’re seeing some results.”
Dating back to the preseason, Carlisle has continually referenced the league’s increasing physicality. The Pacers want to run, and they want ball and player movement in the halfcourt, but they can’t allow defenders grabbing and holding them to throw them off their game. “Two hands, two eyes,” Carlisle said. “Two hands on the ball, two eyes on whoever you’re throwing it to. And that’s the starting point.” The challenge is to play fast, but not loose.
“Possession, this year in the NBA is, for me, the most important aspect of the game,” Carlisle said.
During last season’s conference finals run, most notably in the second round against the New York Knicks, Indiana tried to wear down opponents by pushing the pace, creating confusion on offense and applying full-court pressure on the other end. “And what’s every team doing more this year?” Haliburton said. “Picking up 94 feet and ghost-screening and getting up and down more than everybody has. And that’s league-wide.” Ironically, the Pacers struggled to adapt to some of the tactics they’d used to annoy other teams, especially the full-court pressure.
The key, Haliburton said, is to “attack pressure with pressure.” That means getting downhill, forcing the defense to rotate and making the right reads. It does not mean pounding the ball and dribbling into traffic. In this respect, Mathurin’s recent play has been encouraging. The 22-year-old wing is a gifted scorer, and, after lots of film sessions with Carlisle, he’s making better, quicker decisions.
“We know he can get his shot off at any time,” Haliburton said. But if “you run one ball screen and shoot it, it’s not always a great shot. We know if we get the ball side to side, we’ll always get a good look. He’s doing a great job of committing to that, and it’s working out for us.”
After Mathurin scored 20 points on 8-for-14 shooting in the Brooklyn win, Carlisle praised him for his “timely buckets,” but also for playing “a winning brand of basketball.” Mathurin simply has to “play a simple game,” he said: Run, take open shots, play hard-nosed defense.
Carlisle credited him for putting “three solid games” together. The next step, though, for Mathurin and the team, is to keep this up. If he returns to a sixth-man role when Nesmith is healthy, will his shot selection change? If the Pacers lose some momentum when they play the Golden State Warriors on Friday and the league-best Cleveland Cavaliers (twice) after that, will they recapture it?
“We’ll take this, finally get over that .500 hump,” Haliburton said. “But we want to stay there.”
