Since acquiring Tyrese Haliburton in 2022, the Pacers haven’t made a single roster move that could slow them down. No hedges. No half-measures. No stylistic concessions. If you don’t run the floor, you can’t be an Indiana Pacer. If you do, you need to learn how. Most players aren’t used to dead sprinting downcourt after an opponent’s made basket, but the Pacers coach it and Haliburton reinforces it. If you get out and run, he will find you. If you then give the ball up to a teammate, it will find its way back.
There are so many things worth celebrating about this Indiana team as it heads to the NBA Finals. Most of all: The Pacers are a triumph of collaboration. That’s embodied in Haliburton—a star who jumps (often literally) at the chance to get rid of the ball—and it extends outward to every layer of the organization. Indiana scouts to its style, builds to its style, and coaches to its style. The result is an offense that layers action upon action, turning every possession into a sort of perpetual fast break. It’s overwhelming to defend, as the Knicks, Cavs, and Bucks can attest. And it wouldn’t work at all if the franchise weren’t operating in complete alignment.
To get to this point, the Pacers overwhelmed one of the greatest players in the world, embarrassed a 64-win juggernaut, and broke the Knicks so badly that New York is now reeling with existential uncertainty. They’ve grown together. They’ve held up defensively. It has been a run for the ages, punctuated by three of the most improbable comebacks in NBA playoff history.
Everything the Pacers are is predicated on movement. It’s the great equalizer. It beats size. It bests talent. In theory, a well-prepared playoff defense should be able to take Indiana out of its flow; but in practice, an opponent’s game plan tends to be garbled by cuts and screens and handoffs. It’s hard for a defender to keep their principles straight—much less contain Andrew Nembhard off the dribble or Obi Toppin popping out for a 3—when so many actions collide.
The Pacers aren’t a revolutionary team, but Rick Carlisle understands the trends in the modern game well enough to twist them just so. Indiana doesn’t shoot a lot of 3s. Their spacing, however, mimics that of a team that would—up until the moment three or four Pacers converge toward the same area on the floor. Most offenses avoid that kind of traffic, but Indiana forces the defense to play in a crowd. All of a sudden, defenders with different but overlapping responsibilities have to sort out their coverage in multiple directions at once. Two defenders might stick with Haliburton, another might follow Pascal Siakam as he ghosts through the middle of the play, and all of a sudden Aaron Nesmith is springing wide open for a 3.
It’s not easy to find players attuned to that sort of chaos, and yet Indiana has done a remarkable job of identifying those hiding in plain sight. In an era when every team in the league is looking for wings who can shoot and defend, the Pacers scrounged one up from between the cushions of the Celtics bench. Nesmith spent two years as an underwhelming reserve in Boston, mostly spotting up to stay out of the way when he did see the floor. Indiana brought him in via trade in the summer of 2022 and made him a starter. The Pacers recognized the player who had been successful curling and cutting off the ball at Vanderbilt, and thought those skills might pop if he had a chance to take on a more active role. “It's taken some time, but Aaron Nesmith now loves playing our style, and he understands it,” Carlisle told me in 2023. “He's shooting the ball better than he's ever shot it. That's the game.” Nesmith has only leveled up since. The more Nesmith moves, the better he seems to play. He can knock down a standstill jumper just fine, but run him through handoffs and around screens and, for a night, he might just turn into Steph Curry.
On so many other teams—the Celtics included—Nesmith wouldn’t have been given that chance. Other coaches might not have bought in so quickly on Nembhard, either, or their front office might have flipped him in a deal for a star. Indiana refused—even for Siakam. Pacers up and down the roster were given opportunities to score and create, but also to learn on the job. It takes time for a veteran like Myles Turner to rewire his basketball brain after years of playing other styles, but he turned himself into the kind of multi-faceted offensive weapon he had never been before. There’s also some luck in that, as there is with all great teams; if the Pacers had taken any of the many opportunities to trade Turner over the years, he wouldn’t have had the chance to reinvent himself. Even the January 2024 deal for Siakam—who in many ways was the Pacers’ finishing piece—was predicated on him playing a new role at a new speed, and giving him enough time to find his balance in it.
The most important part of scouting isn’t talent evaluation. It’s knowing yourself as a team—knowing what you’re scouting for. You can’t expect to know whether a player will succeed in your system until you understand what exactly will be asked of them. The Pacers ask the same thing of every player: Read the moment. It’s not your job to stand in the corner. It’s your job to cause chaos. That could come from a small exchange on the weak side or an explosive move with the ball, but there are moments for everyone. And with so many players involved in so many different ways, Indiana has made everybody in the lineup a constant threat. If you lose track of Turner, you lose hold of the entire possession. If you tilt your defense toward the ball, Haliburton will sling a pass to the weak side and punish you for it.
This playoff run has been a validation of Indy’s entire project. Finding players like Nesmith, empowering them, and watching them deliver in the biggest moments is a franchise-level accomplishment. And Indiana’s roster is full of them. This is an organization that has stacked smart decisions for years to make this run possible; they don’t get Siakam without signing Bruce Brown to a trade-friendly deal, and they don’t get Haliburton without first seeing the potential in Domantas Sabonis (after previously seeing enough potential in Paul George to draft him). The Pacers are about to return to the Finals for the first time in 25 years, and they’ve climbed their way back without ever bottoming out. This is a team that found its way in style—channeling the best qualities of its best player into an offense that, to this point, hasn’t been stopped.
Since 1990, only two teams have made the Finals playing faster than the Pacers: the 2016-17 Warriors … and the Thunder team Indiana is about to face. “They play fast,” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander told reporters on Monday. “They're stubborn in the way they play. They play like that no matter the game, no matter the environment, no matter the round or stage. They play to their identity, and that's why they've been really good.” Gilgeous-Alexander and the Thunder will be a test unlike any the Pacers have seen. This is another team of destiny, anchored by one of the greatest defenses in modern history. If any opponent is fit to challenge Indiana’s resolve, it’s a force of nature.
Yet these playoffs have shown that identity can be a haven. The style of the Pacers comes from Haliburton, but it’s been stabilized over these past three rounds by Siakam. He leads these playoffs in transition scoring, largely because he’s savvy enough to know just when to leak out, and Haliburton is daring enough to throw full-court outlets at any point in the game. Indiana has managed to turn transition offense into a legitimate crunch-time weapon, even after makes and contested rebounds. A ticking clock should never make you forget who you are.
The Pacers have spent the last three-plus years iterating on the same ideas and the same actions, over and over, until they clicked. Haliburton had already established a full-court chemistry with Toppin before Siakam arrived in Indianapolis, but Pascal is even more resourceful with a live dribble. He’s quick enough to beat entire teams down the floor, coordinated enough to slice through multiple defenders, and long enough to convert craning layups over and around a contest. Plus: Siakam knows when the window is there for him, and when it’s already been slammed shut. He’s the perfect Pacer. It’s easy to say that now, when he’s holding the Eastern Conference finals MVP trophy, but it was just as true on the day Indiana traded for him. Siakam always fit the vision of what the Pacers wanted to be. Now we’re seeing just how far that vision can go.
