The Indiana Pacers end the season this afternoon in their final chance to stake their claim on a top-6 seed in the Eastern Conference as they face the Atlanta Hawks. Win and they’re in the playoffs. Lose and they’ll be in jeopardy of falling into the play-in tournament.
It didn’t have to come down to the final game of the season. If the Pacers simply beat teams that are under .500 at the same rate as other teams bunched together with them in the standings, they could have been in the clear long before this high-stakes game. But alas, the Indiana Pacers lost to every team that has been eliminated from the postseason except for the Detroit Pistons and the Houston Rockets. They swept a team at the top of the Western Conference in the Thunder and got swept by a team at the bottom in the Portland Trail Blazers. It’s been a weird year.
Today’s game reminded me of a very different final game of the season five years ago when the Pacers also ended their regular season against the Hawks—who they had already beat three times this season. These Pacers–in the season they lost Victor Oladipo to a ruptured quad–had already won 47 games and were going to be the 5th seed regardless of the outcome of Game 82. In this game with no stakes, Nate McMillan rested most of his starting lineup and key players and it turned into one of the most fun games of that particular season. It was a fast-paced game with little defense from either team, similar to many Pacers games from early this season.
The Pacers won the game 135-134 after six lead changes in the final 69 seconds, culminating in Edmond Sumner sinking all three free throws after getting fouled on a corner 3-point attempt with 0.3 seconds left.
The final ATO play where Sumner got fouled with him coming off a screen for a 3 in the nearest corner to the sideline passer is reminiscent of the infamous “India” play that Nate McMillan would debut in the very next preseason in India against the Kings as TJ Warren hit a 3 to send the game to overtime. The Pacers would then run that play what felt like a dozen times in the regular season without it ever working again. The set up for the Sumner play is different but the look they got are very similar.
There’s something about Pacers coaches and really loving a certain final play that worked the first time. The following season Nate Bjorkgren (this did actually happen, right?) used a fake hand-off play for Domas Sabonis against the Celtics and it worked but then he spammed it to no avail at every opportunity for the rest of the season.
This season Rick Carlisle has opted to let his team attack against a non-set defense in the final plays instead of calling a timeout and drawing up a play but it has not worked to the Pacers advantage yet this year. The closest they have come in that situation was undone by the superhuman leaping abilities of Anthony Edwards who hit his head on the rim to block Aaron Nesmith.
Anyway back to that meaningless game from 5 years ago, 135-134 now sounds like just a typical Tuesday night but this was the second-highest scoring game of the season for Indiana.
Edmond Sumner, the speeding bullet of a Hype Train himself, was running the Pacers offense in the 4th quarter and going back and forth with a young Hawks team coached by now Pacers top assistant Lloyd Pierce. Sumner was pulling up for clutch middys, hitting open 3-pointers, finding TJ Leaf for a dunk, and using his speed to slice up the defense. He finished with 22 points.
The Hawks were young and struggling but many of the players that would be part of their conference finals run were already with Atlanta and playing in the final game of the season including Trae Young, John Collins, and Kevin Huerter.
The star of the show: TJ Leaf. Yes, that’s right, one of the worst draft picks in team history had the best game of his career as he played 34 minutes with the Pacers resting Myles Turner, Domantas Sabonis, and Kyle O’Quinn getting ejected from the game after 10 minutes of playing time for a flagrant two foul. He had 28 points, 10 rebounds, 2 assists, 2 blocks, and 2 steals in 34 minutes. It was Leaf’s only 20-point game in his career. Every bust has his day.
Of course with Leaf playing center and the Pacers without any other bigs after O’Quinn’s ejection, the Hawks bigs John Collins (20 points and 25 rebounds for the player picked one slot after Leaf) and Alex Len (20 points and 10 rebounds a draft bust in his own right but with a longer career) were also dominant. Alize Johnson, rebounding specialist, had 11 rebounds in 25 minutes.
Tyreke Evans had one of his best games in an infamous one-season Pacers career as he scored 27 points in just three quarters. Doug McDermott, now back on the team, played 32 minutes as a starter in this game with 13 points on 4-of-12 shooting.
Vince Carter got chants for “one more year” from the Atlanta Hawk. His 1-point performance was not the final game of his career as he returned the next season.
There’s always something fun about a brief reprieve after a long season before the playoffs in the final game of the season with a no pressure, let’s-see-what-the-bench-can-do kind of game. Chris Copeland once hit a game winner in 2014 against the Milwaukee Bucks to end the year. No such luxury for the Pacers this season.
So now we get to see whether this Pacers game will live on with good memories of the team clinching their first playoff appearance since the Bubble or whether it will live in infamy if it sends the team down to the play-in and a tougher matchup in the first round if they can make it out of the do-or-die tournament.
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