Myles Turner hasn’t had the start to the Indiana Pacers season that he hoped for. Neither from a team perspective nor a personal one. During and after Friday’s miserable loss to the Miami Heat that was haunted by a lack of effort from the starters, Turner let his frustrations boil over with negativity in ways that were affecting the group.

“Publicly, I just haven’t liked my attitude around here the past couple days,” Turner said after scoring 34 points in the rematch victory over the Heat. “I feel like you have to be an energy giver. Just in the interest of accountability, I’ve been an energy sucker. I think I’ve been getting in my own feelings a little bit if I don’t get the ball or a shot doesn’t go in. That type of shit is just negative, bro. Obviously, it was a great game, but just growing as a leader and growing as a man, you just can’t put that type of stuff out until the universe. So I’m gonna hold myself accountable for that.”

Turner responded with one of the best games of his roller coaster early season with 34 points, 9 rebounds, and 2 blocks, and his teammates praised him for things that went beyond the box score.

“I thought he was just present,” Pascal Siakam said of the Pacers starting center. “It’s easy when somebody’s scoring 34 points to be like ‘Oh, he had a good game.’ As people we look at the stats and that’s the only thing that jumps out. I thought he was phenomenal on defense helping out, talking, just his presence everywhere. When he does that, he’s engaged offensively also. We know he can shoot but I just thought his focus, intensity into the game, helping out, talking, communication, just being present. I thought he did that well tonight and he’s one of the reasons we won the game. After the game that happened before, the response was awesome.”

The presence that Siakam spoke of was evident throughout, especially on defense. He was hustling to get involved in plays at the rim where it appeared the Heat would have an easy basket, making second efforts on plays where he was initially beaten, fighting for loose rebounds, tipping them towards teammates if he was unable to corral them himself. All while matching 40 minutes with Bam Adebayo, who torched the Pacers in the second half of Friday’s game, but Turner was able to out-score him 30-24 and out-rebound him 9-8 in this one while the Pacers won Adebayo’s minutes by 9–the same difference in the final score of 119-110.

“He was frustrated after Friday, we all were,” Tyrese Haliburton said of Turner after the game, “but like I told you I’ve been a part of building the culture here, he’s been here the longest so he understands that as well. He wants more for himself like he didn’t feel like he played as good as he can. He came out aggressive, came out motivated, came out communicating and that really helped.”

Often during this season, Turner has shown poor body language by hanging his head or throwing his arms out in frustration after he comes to assist a teammate that was beaten off the dribble, helps force that player to miss, but then no one is able to rotate to help prevent his man that he was forced to leave from getting an easy rebound and putback. In this game, you could hear him on the broadcast–in a positive way–calling for Bennedict Mathurin to come crash the glass on a potential Bam Adebayo putback. While Mathurin was late, Adebayo missed the initial putback opportunity and Mathurin made sure there wasn’t another chance by securing the board. Turner, who just surpassed Paul George for 8th on the Pacers all-time points leaders, feels like his eagerness to repeat the success of last season has let his emotions get the better of him at times.

 “I’m so emotionally invested into this season more than I ever have been in my career,” said Turner, who is in his 10th season in Indiana. “I think there were a few years here where I was in limbo, going through the motions but I’m way past that point. Having so much success in the past and wanting to repeat that, it eats at you. So when you see the film, you see stuff that you could have done better, it hits you a little harder than it had in the past. I think my emotions are tied up into it a lot more, for the better and for the worse.”

While it wasn’t only Turner’s attitude and effort that were lacking on Friday night, those things tend to build when one guy is sulking or bringing in negative energy and can cause the team to lose its togetherness.

“We had some fragmenting that happened,” Rick Carlisle said of the first game. “Some of that was due to quick pass shots, things like that, and we let offense affect defense. Yesterday (Saturday) as a team we had a good talk about what this is all about. Everybody was accountable for the horrible performance and this was a really good bounce back.”

The defense, anchored by Turner inside, held the Heat to shooting just 32.6% on shots inside the arc (17 for 47). 

“I thought we were just more connected,” Siakam said of the difference between Friday and last night. “There’s a lot of things happening in the game, ups and downs. It’s easy–we’re human–to kind of go away when things are not going right. I think we just had to get back to us, being together no matter what. It’s never going to be a perfect game. There’s going to be mistakes. As long as we know they are honest mistakes and that guys can rally behind that, it always helps. I thought we did a lot better today just in terms of being connected … I thought our response was phenomenal today.”

Turner credited the team’s best players in Siakam and Haliburton for delivering a needed message during the team’s brutal film session on Saturday. While Turner didn’t say that they called his attitude out specifically, it’s clear he took their message to heart and looked at himself in the mirror. 

“Ty and Pascal stepped up yesterday in the film room with a great pep talk, great speech,” Turner said. “Just keep giving good energy to your team, good energy to each other. Celebrate each other’s successes and you can’t only do that when you have a good game, not just when shots are falling, and things are going your way. I was a bit of a shell of myself the past 48 hours but that shit’s no more. I’m better than that.”

The key for Turner will be finding consistency in his play and in keeping that positive energy on nights when he isn’t hitting more shots (14) than anyone else on the team even attempts (Haliburton’s 13 attempts were second most on the team). Much like the Pacers as a whole, Turner’s season has been filled with peaks and valleys. From his dominating performance in his hometown of Dallas and going blow for blow with Karl-Anthony Towns against the Knicks to struggling against the Joel Embiid-less Sixers while committing six turnovers in a loss or getting outplayed by his former backup’s backup in Goga Bitadze in a loss to the Magic. 

“I think Myles has been one of the main guys where when he’s had a rough night, he’s done a great job of bouncing back,” Haliburton said. “I think that obviously our connection has really built into something. It tends to be when I have a good night he has a good night and vice versa.”

And when both players aren’t having good nights, it’s going to be hard for the Pacers to be having a good night which has unfortunately been the case in many early season losses. Turner thinks teams have made adjustments to defending the duo in their standard pick and roll action that has been one of the most efficient plays in the league for the last two seasons. 

“It’s different now. I feel like in the past me and Ty have had a real easy pick and roll combo,” Turner said. “These teams aren’t going to let you just keep killing them with the same stuff, so they’re starting to throw different stuff at us. (Haliburton’s) starting to dissect it. It helps when you play the same team two nights in a row so you know what’s coming your way but I think it’s a testament to him. He watches a lot of film, puts in a lot of work on his game so it’s something that happens naturally for him because he studies the game so much.”

Haliburton knows the team can’t keep bouncing back and forth beat debilitating losses and uplifting wins. If they want to make noise in the playoffs once again, they’ll have to eventually string together some wins and get out of this morass of teams around .500 below the undefeated Cavaliers and defending champion Celtics. 

“We’ve done a good job of responding when we’ve come off a loss and our backs against the wall a little bit,” Haliburton said of the season so far. “But I think the maturation of this group is continuing to do the little things on an every-night basis, not having to lose to gain a reminder. I think the maturation is being able to do that for 48 minutes on a game-to-game basis every night. We just have to keep building off this.”

They’ll have their chance to get back to .500 tonight against the Raptors but Turner is questionable with a sore right calf and Ben Sheppard is out with a left oblique strain, joining Aaron Nesmith, Andrew Nembhard, Isaiah Jackson, and James Wiseman on the injury report.