The Indiana Pacers’ Miserable Season Is Over. They Must Learn From It.

Where were you in 1985?

That was the last time, prior to this season, that the Indiana Pacers lost 57+ games in an NBA campaign. Not a single member of the current Pacers roster was born at that time, and head coach Rick Carlisle was a shooting guard for the Boston Celtics. It has been a long while since the Pacers had a season filled with this much losing.

But here Indiana sits, trying to figure out what went wrong in a 25-57 season. This franchise was the fourth overall seed in the Eastern Conference just two seasons ago, and now they sit near the bottom of the entire league. The fall from grace came fast for the blue and gold.

2021-22 was truly a miserable season for Indiana. Before training camp even began, things started to go wrong — guard Edmond Sumner tore his Achilles while wing T.J. Warren was dealing with a slowed rehab process. The Pacers were down two bodies before they played a game or even held a practice.

That continued to be a theme throughout the season. Only one player — Oshae Brissett — played in more than 60 games for the franchise, and only eight guys suited up for more than half of the team’s games. Indiana was wiped out by injuries, and it cost them big time.

“I think we were legitimately decimated by injuries. Obviously, that’s not an excuse, that’s just the flat out truth. It was unfortunate and we’re not going to use it as an excuse, we have to be better,” Pacers guard T.J. McConnell said this past weekend. “We’re going to get everyone healthy this offseason and get back to it.”

Some would chalk up the Pacers poor health luck to just that, luck. But that’s not accurate. The organization dealt with the same fortunes last season, and the team pointed to injuries as a factor in their struggles then, too.

“I feel like these last two years we’ve had so many injuries. They are not excuses, but at the same time it hurts,” former Indiana center Domantas Sabonis said after the 2020-21 season. That sounds familiar.

Injury luck has been a small factor in the struggles, but the reality is that the Pacers took a gamble on several injury prone players. Caris LeVert, T.J. Warren, and Malcolm Brogdon were all guys with an injury history before the Pacers acquired them. Myles Turner and Goga Bitadze have been hurt often. It makes sense why a small market team like Indiana took the chance to acquire all of them and bet on their award-winning training staff to keep the players on the court. But that has not worked.

The Pacers dealt LeVert to Cleveland during the season, and the guys Indiana acquired at the trade deadline (Tyrese Haliburton, Buddy Hield, and Jalen Smith) had a clean bill of health down the stretch of the season. As the old adage does, the best ability is availability, and Indiana appears to be learning that lesson after the last three-plus seasons.

“Player health has become such an important subject that every team’s talking about it, meeting about it in great detail,” head coach Rick Carlisle said this month. “If you look at my phone log, the guy I’m on the phone with more than anybody, including my wife, is Josh Corbeil, our head trainer. We’re hoping that next year that’s not the case.”

Injuries were not the sole cause of Indiana’s struggles, though. Indiana’s projected starting lineup at the start of this season — Brogdon, LeVert, Justin Holiday, Sabonis, and Turner (Warren missed the whole season) — played in 13 simultaneous games this season, and Indiana went 5-8 in those games. The team wasn’t particularly good even when the core players were available.

Shrinking the scope to just games that Sabonis, the team’s two-time All-Star, suited up in, and ignoring who else was available, the Pacers went 16-31. The blue and gold were a miserable team this year, the pieces just didn’t fit together.

Offensively, the Pacers fell to below average this season. Their strategy was sound and featured strong ball movement with creative sets. But without quality shooters and a lack of continuity, largely thanks to injuries, the team never could put it all together on that end of the floor. Grabbing shooters at the trade deadline will help going forward, and Haliburton’s growth should help the team improve from their nearly league-worst turnover rate last season, but the Pacers offense still came up short too many times this past season.

Defensively, the Pacers tumbled from a slightly above average group to one of the worst teams in the league — Indiana finished the campaign 28th in defensive rating at 115.5. That’s where the team didn’t fit and gel, there was little defensive chemistry or identity this season.

It’s hard to name something that the team from the Circle City did well on defense this year. They acted like matadors on the perimeter and let ball handlers into the paint with ease. They jumped at pump fakes and rotated without communicating. Around the basket, the Pacers were ineffective at deterring shots — something they have excelled at in seasons past. Opponents shot nearly 32 times per game from inside of six feet (second worst in the league) and canned 64.2% of those looks (seventh worst). No matter where opposing attackers were on the floor, the Pacers struggled with defense.

“I think, at this stage, it’s always going to be [about] consistency,” Assistant coach Lloyd Pierce said of the team’s defensive struggles this season. He said that the squad simplified coverages late in the season as injuries hit the team hard and trades altered the squad. Still, though, Indiana was wildly inconsistent on defense, and many factors led to that, including dynamic schemes and inattentive play.

“When you get undermanned, you have to change some of your schemes and coverages,” Pierce added. He was in charge of the defense for the blue and gold.

Beyond any strategy, the Pacers personnel was not exactly built for defense. Many of the team’s best players are stronger offensively than defensively, and the best defenders who suited up for the team this year (Holiday, Brogdon, Turner, Torrey Craig, and Chris Duarte) all either missed many games, saw their defensive effectiveness decrease, were traded, or some combination of those things. Strategically and characteristically, the Pacers were a rough defensive squad in 2021-22, which goes against much of the Pacer ethos dating back several seasons.

If the poor health and dreadful defense wasn’t enough to paint the picture of the Pacers struggles this season, their shortcomings in close games will finish the artwork. Indiana went 4-19 in games decided by four or fewer points this season, and three of those wins came against lottery teams. When the game was on the line, the blue and gold were dreadful.

The Pacers became the ninth team in NBA history to lose by four points or fewer 19 times in one season. If anything, that stat could be viewed as a positive — it means Indiana played their opponents to essentially an even draw for the entire game in one-third of their losses.

But that positive way of looking at it means nothing, in actuality. Indiana was horrible in clutch situations, and it changed their season.

The signs showed up early in the season that this could be the case. The Pacers lost both of their first two games by exactly one point, and their close game execution never got better. They couldn’t stop anybody and they couldn’t score. When the game was on the line, the Pacers crumbled.

“I think we’re not getting stops when we need to,” Brogdon said of the Pacers’ crunch-time woes during the season. The team finished 26th in defensive rating in what the NBA calls “clutch” situations. “We have breakdowns. Just one little breakdown in the last minute, minute-and-a-half, will kill us.”

Even beyond the injuries, the defense, and the late-game woes, the Pacers did deal with bad luck this season. They had a brutally hard schedule to start the season, both in terms of opponents and travel, and the team started the year off 1-6. Right when the schedule was projecting to ease up in late December, a COVID-19 outbreak on the roster led to more losses. Some injuries, such as Isaiah Jackson getting hit in the face with a pass right after his concussion, were truly unlucky. Luck is a factor in every team’s campaign, and it was not on the Pacers side this year.

Everything that could have gone wrong for the Pacers this season did go wrong. Sometimes, that’s out of your control as a franchise. But most of the time, you make your own circumstance, and the Pacers need to learn from the many things that hurt them this season so that the same issues (defense and injuries) don’t crush the organization for a third season in a row.

“It’s been a tough year. We’ve had a lot of stretches where wins have been hard to come by,” Carlisle said in March.

Avoiding the same obstacles next year is all about action. The Pacers have to put an enhanced focus on acquiring players with less health risk. It’s fine to have a few guys on the roster with the injury prone label, but deploying several can lead to a situation like the one the Pacers have been in for the last few seasons.

Defensively, Indiana must both acquire defensive talent and simplify their strategy. Personnel issues hurt the Pacers, but even early in the season when much of their team was similar to the squad from the year prior, the group was weak defensively. Some of the strategic changes Indiana made defensively this season hurt the team, and the coaching staff must identify what those changes were, even if better resources are acquired.

“Defensively, we have a lot of work to do,” Myles Turner, the team’s best defender, said. “When you’re constantly changing lineups or constantly reintroducing other concepts, I think that it can be a bit much.”

In crunch time, the Pacers have to buckle down on both ends. Some natural improvement will come on that end as young players improve their one-on-one skills, a talent that Haliburton mentioned wanting to improve this summer. And as the team’s defense improves, so will the crunch-time defense. But the Pacers cannot rely on the same skills to win them close games next season. It didn’t work in 2021-22.

If the Pacers don’t learn from their mistakes, then the 25-win campaign will have been wasted. It will be time lost. If the Pacers want to use the sunken season for growth (beyond the draft), they must make it a point to sit down and evaluate how to fix their mistakes heading into next year.

“It’s been a tough year. We’ve had a lot of stretches where wins have been hard to come by,” Carlisle shared this season. “But this has been a resilient group.”

That resilience will be key for a now-young Pacers team. Because if this team, and this franchise, learns from their mistakes and takes steps to fix them, the team will advance forward in the coming seasons. Maybe that won’t be an immediate advancement into the postseason, but they will make strides in the right direction.

That’s key for any franchise, but especially one that hasn’t had a season this poor since the 1980s. The Indiana Pacers can’t allow years like this to become a habit. They must make it a lesson and move forward.

“This summer is a big summer for everybody on the team,” rookie center Isaiah Jackson said during the final weekend of the season. He’s right, and that extends to everyone in the Pacers organization. The Pacers started making steps in the right direction at the trade deadline, but there is still more work to do.

The Pacers miserable season ended. Now, it needs to become a valuable piece of education for the franchise.