Ninety seconds or so after they’d sent the Eastern Conference’s top seed home for the summer, the two lynchpins of the Indiana Pacers’ recent resurgence met for a private moment on the court in Cleveland. Pascal Siakam needed to remind Tyrese Haliburton of something.
“Remember, we’re not done.”
The Pacers had dispatched the Cavaliers in five, winning three Eastern Conference semifinals games on the road, including a Game 5 in which they’d trailed by as many as 19. If the ensuing on-court celebration felt muted, especially for a team that slogged to a 10-15 record to open the season, that was by design. Indiana was headed to the conference finals for the second straight year. Siakam wanted Haliburton and the rest of his teammates to know there was nothing to celebrate.
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“I can sometimes sound like I’m trying to kill the party,” the veteran forward would later admit. “Everybody wanna be excited, and I’m just like, ‘Man, I want more.’”
He should. This team should, too. For a long-tormented franchise, the door has swung open this spring. Suddenly, somewhat improbably, the Pacers are staring at their best shot to win an NBA title. And this time, they have the team to do it.
“We’re talking about eight more wins for an NBA championship,” coach Rick Carlisle said after closing out the Cavs. “The league is wide open this year.”
Three of the NBA’s final four — Indiana, Oklahoma City and Minnesota — are chasing their organizations’ first title. New York hasn’t won one since 1973. And this time, there’s no budding — or reigning — dynasty standing in the Pacers’ way, like Jordan’s Bulls were in 1998, like Shaq and Kobe’s Lakers were in 2000, like LeBron and Wade’s Heat were in 2013 and 2014.
This franchise has suffered too often and for too long. Nine times in their 49-year NBA history have the Pacers advanced to the Eastern Conference finals. They’ve been sent home one round shy of the championship eight times, including four losses in a Game 7: to the Knicks in 1994, the Magic in 1995, the Bulls in 1998 and the Heat in 2013.
So many moments of heartbreak have been seared into the fanbase’s psyche along the way: Larry Johnson’s dubious four-point play at Madison Square Garden in 1999; Tayshaun Prince screaming out of nowhere to block Reggie Miller in 2004 (then the horrific night at the Palace of Auburn Hills six months later that dismantled the Pacers’ deepest team); Paul George’s injury in the summer of 2014, then his trade request three years later.
This time, it feels different. The Pacers are not only the hottest team left in the playoffs — winners of 8 of 10 so far — but arguably the deepest. Indiana has built a contender the hard way, devoid of shortcuts. No superstar free agent is turning down Los Angeles or Miami or Boston to come to the Circle City. The Pacers haven’t had a top-five pick in 37 years. And it wasn’t all that long ago — 24 months, actually — that Haliburton was in New York repping them at the NBA Draft Lottery.
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The Pacers ranked 25th in the league in payroll last season and made it to the Eastern Conference finals. They made it back this year with a payroll that ranks 22nd.
They can barely sniff a nationally-televised game during the regular season; it felt like half of their first-round series against the Bucks was on NBA TV. Maybe that’s why Haliburton was voted by his peers as the league’s most overrated player: No one gets to see him play.
“It’s fuel we use,” Haliburton said on “The Pat McAfee Show” recently. “We have a lot of guys who’ve been overlooked.”
Four of the Pacers’ five starters have been traded. The Sacramento Kings shipped Haliburton out of town 15 months after drafting him. Siakam began his career in the G League. The lone starter who hasn’t been dealt, center Myles Turner, joked in a recent Players’ Tribune article that he’s “been on the trade block for like six years.”
The Pacers are here because team president Kevin Pritchard, who spent part of his childhood watching games from the cheap seats at Market Square Arena, pulled off two of the NBA’s shrewdest trades in years, acquiring Haliburton in 2022, then Siakam from the Toronto Raptors at last year’s deadline. For a team that felt aimless — weeks before the Haliburton trade, the Pacers’ starting five against the Golden State Warriors consisted of Keifer Sykes, Chris Duarte, Justin Holiday, Goga Bitadze and Torrey Craig — those moves changed everything.
But Pritchard’s real genius has been the players he’s surrounded his two stars with. This team is deep: only once in the Pacers’ 10 playoff games so far has a player scored more than 30 points, and that was Haliburton in last week’s Game 5 closeout in Cleveland. “We’re different than every team in the NBA,” the two-time All-Star said. “We defeat teams in different ways.”
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They’re here because of role players like Aaron Nesmith and Andrew Nembhard, whose collective impact shows up on the court far more often than the box score — like guard versions of the Davis boys — forwards Dale and Antonio — from the 1990s teams. It was Nesmith who drew the critical charge on the Cavs’ Donovan Mitchell late in Game 2 that helped set up Haliburton’s game-winner. And it was Nembhard who converted a crucial 3-point play with 67 seconds left in Game 5 after Mitchell had cut the lead to three.
They’re here because of a second wave that never takes its foot off the gas — Obi Toppen, Bennedict Mathurin, Jarace Walker and Thomas Bryant have all had moments in the postseason. Then there’s T.J. McConnell. “If he was on the other team, I’d hate that dude,” Turner wrote in his recent article.
Carlisle was the biggest reason Turner stuck around after years on the brink of being shipped out of town. When Carlisle was hired in June 2021, the two met for dinner in Dallas. Turner wrote that he had reached the low point of his career, weighed down by injuries, years of losing and the cloud of uncertainty that had long hovered over him. But over steaks, Carlisle convinced Turner to buy in again. He convinced him the Pacers needed him.
“He wasn’t trying to sell me anything … didn’t promise me anything,” Turner wrote. “But he was just like, I see your worth. I want you on this team. I think this has potential.”
In four seasons, Carlisle has lifted the Pacers from lottery team to championship contender. Players have lauded their coach’s ability to adapt his scheme to their talents, specifically Haliburton, whose grown into one of the game’s best distributors. Central to everything, they say, is a simple concept: outrun everybody.
Before last season, the Pacers decided to adopt a new identity: they were going to be the best-conditioned team in the league, the fastest team in the league, the group that shared the ball better than any team in the league.
It didn’t take long for the rest of the NBA to catch on. Teams would “legitimately plan their stars’ rest schedule around making sure they’d sit out against us,” Turner wrote. “Guys would be sitting out and then they’d be joking with us pregame, like, ‘Nah, I ain’t running with y’all tonight. F— that.’”
It’s how they sent the Bucks and Cavs home in five games apiece. The Pacers flat wore them out.
Haliburton has the keys to both the offense and the franchise. And maybe one day, the city. There’s something about a lanky, underappreciated guard with a wonky shooting form and a clutch gene that Hoosiers appreciate. It’s only fitting, then, that Miller will be on the call for these Eastern Conference finals, watching his old team square off against the one he so often used to torment.
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After those sobering words from Siakam on the court in Cleveland, Haliburton has kept his message short.
“Our goal wasn’t to get back to the Eastern Conference finals,” he said flatly. “It’s to win a championship.”
Siakam put it this way: “We’re greedy.”
Good. Be greedy. Complacency won’t win a championship, and for this team, one has never felt so close.
(Illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic, photos: Jason Miller, Dylan Buell / Getty Image)
