Everything wrong with the Indiana Pacers:

• Tyrese Haliburton.
• Pascal Siakam has been the team’s best player by far but 1) he wasn’t supposed to be 2) the Pacers go through long stretches in every game where they forget he exists.
• Injuries to all the team’s best perimeter and point of attack defenders. Get well soon, Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith, and Ben Sheppard.
• Tyrese Haliburton. He has been one of the league’s worst volume 3-point shooters at 28.4% on 7.7 attempts per game. Only two players that have played at least 10 games this season have been worse while taking at least 5 per game (Jordan Clarkson and Kyshawn George).
• The Pacers are 27th in the league in 3-point attempts per game.
• The two highest draft picks the Pacers have had in the last 35 years are inconsistent and neither of them make the kind of quick decisions that made the offense hum with pace and precision last season.
• Tyrese Haliburton, making decisions like this far too often.

What is Haliburton doing here?

Nobody cuts him off
He doesn’t even look to score
Predetermined to pass in transition
Ran East and West instead of going to basket

😑 pic.twitter.com/31L561voUI

— Alex Golden (@AlexGoldenNBA) November 21, 2024

• The Pacers are 26th in the league in rebound percentage.
• Myles Turner is shooting just 51.5% on twos after four straight seasons over 60% inside the arc. While he’s been better on defense at times this season, he’s still not as good as he once was. His poor hands have caused issues on the glass and issues with turnovers.
• Tyrese Haliburton. He is shooting 30.4% overall and 20.0% from 3 in 9 road games. The Pacers are 2-7 on the road.
• The Pacers offensive rating has gone from 2nd in the league at 120.5 down to 19th in the league at 112.0.
• The Pacers waited far too long to sign an emergency center after losing both Isaiah Jackson and James Wiseman to Achilles injuries. Obi Toppin is a team-worst -78 on the season partially because he’s spent so much time out of position as a small-ball five.
• Tyrese Haliburton. He has made less than 30% of his shot attempts in 6 of 15 games this season. He only did that 9 times in 69 games all of last season.
• Bennedict Mathurin, screen navigation, jogging not sprinting.
• Compared to last season, the Pacers play slower, turn the ball over more, rebound less, score less, and average less assists. They’ve completely lost their identity.
• Their identity is Tyrese Haliburton and he’s lost himself.

• Jarace Walker, shying away from contact, being too casual.
• Where’s the joy? Even when this team was focused on development more than winning, they were still fun to watch. They played harder far more consistently than in those years too. Now, the effort disappears for entire games. Watching this team has been like the slog of watching a TV show that’s clearly ran out of interesting ideas and maybe should have been a limited series instead. While I believe the Pacers were correct in locking up this team with so many extensions this summer, I haven’t seen this large of a dropoff since Heroes Season 1 to Heroes Season 2. Praying that Shogun doesn’t suffer the same fate.

• Tyrese Haliburton hasn’t just been bad on his off nights, he’s bordered on unplayable. Is he hurt? No one in the organization is saying he is. He hasn’t shown up on an injury report and is one of only four guys to play every single game. But we also still don’t know what the injury was during the Olympics that Brian Windhorst reported on after USA won gold. Did he hurt his hamstring again? How bad is this back issue that forces him to wear that belt device whenever he’s on the bench? We don’t know. 🤷‍♂️
• The Pacers have outscored their opponents with just one healthy player that was planned to be in the rotation this season: Pascal Siakam. The Pacers are +2 in his 510 minutes.

• Other rotation players not on the injury report: Toppin -78, Turner -67, Haliburton -62, Mathurin -40, Walker -21, McConnell -14.
• Tyrese Haliburton. Per Cleaning the Glass, he is in the 23rd percentile in points per shot attempt. In his previous seasons in Indiana, he ranked in the 95th, 94th, and 91st percentile. He’s averaging 21 less points per 100 shot attempts compared to last season. The entire team’s effective field-goal percentage drops by 8.8% when he’s on the floor which ranks in the 2nd percentile.
• The chemistry is out of whack. The team isn’t in sync. Suddenly nobody seems to fit with each other. “Our connectedness is not where it needs to be. Our collective spirit is not where it needs to be,” Rick Carlisle stated after the loss to Houston.
• Teams have figured out how to attack the Pacers weaknesses on the glass while also slowing them down in transition. More on this and other Pacers struggles from Caitlin Cooper here.
• Tyrese Haliburton. His burst is nonexistent. He either can’t get to the rim or hasn’t been willing to. His attempts at the rim have been nearly halved compared to last season from 15.5% of his total shots coming from 0-3 feet to just 8.7% this season according to Basketball Reference.
• Not having Nembhard as a second ball handler in the starting lineup has made it easy for teams to press Haliburton into getting rid of the ball or not receiving the in-bounds pass at all, taking away a lot of his trademark hit-ahead passes, and no one else has been comfortable getting the team into early offense.
• The Pacers haven’t been able to run away with games and put teams away in blowout fashion. All 6 of their wins have been “clutch” games with the score being within 5 points at some point with less than five minutes left in the game. They are 6-4 in a league leading 10 clutch games this season.
• Tyrese Haliburton. The Pacers can’t win without him at least being mediocre offensively and looking to score. The Pacers are 0-5 when he scores less than 12 points and 6-4 when he scores at least a modest 15 points. Even while going through a minutes restriction for a chunk of last season, Haliburton only scored less than 12 points 7 times total in all of 2023-24.
• The Pacers remain unable to beat teams that can’t seem to beat anyone else and haven’t been able to take advantage of opponents that are missing their best players. I’d say they play down to the level of their opponent but often this year they’ve played below that level.

• Turnovers. Last season, the Pacers committed 16 or more turnovers in 19.5% of their games. This season that has more than doubled so far at 40%. They are 1-5 in those games this year. Far too many live ball turnovers have led to easy transition scores in their losses.
• Tyrese Haliburton. The Pacers have plenty of issues but none of them matter unless he can get back to being himself. The Pacers weren’t a perfect team last season but they did enough things so incredibly well that they could make up for their flaws. Haliburton has that ability at his best. Some of these issues are relatively minor, nit-picky items that could easily be overlooked if their superstar, All-NBA point guard, 18th best player in the Ringer’s Top-100 player list didn’t look like the nerdlucks from Moron Mountain had come to Earth to steal his talent in order to beat the Looney Tunes in a basketball game. The Pacers need him to rediscover his form and not just for one night here and there but consistently game after game. Until he does, the Pacers are going to continue to struggle. Simple as that.

-#31-