The Indiana Pacers Are (Literally) Built Different
We’ve hardly ever seen a team focus on offense — at the expense of defense — as much as Indy does.
While LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA’s inaugural In-Season Tournament this weekend, perhaps the biggest story coming out of the knockout round belonged to the runner-up Indiana Pacers. Led by high-scoring guard Tyrese Haliburton, Indy served notice to the rest of the league that it is a major threat to scorch any defense at any moment. Among players on the final two teams, it was Haliburton — not James — who led the league in points (26.7) and assists (13.3) per game, to go with plenty of indelible moments like this step-back dagger 3 in the semifinals against Milwaukee:
It’s fitting that Halliburton’s offensive outbursts stole the show in the tournament. Indiana has crafted a breakout scoring attack this season that, seemingly out of nowhere, ranks No. 1 in the NBA in offensive efficiency while averaging 123.3 points per 100 possessions. Although it bears mentioning that the league is approaching record levels of offensive efficiency, no team has ever averaged more than 120 points per 100 possessions over a full regular season before.
Indiana could become the first, which would be an incredible benchmark along the NBA’s path toward ever-increasing levels of scoring efficiency. But at the same time, with a near league-worst defensive rating of 119.9, the Pacers could also become the first team to allow more than 120 points per 100 possessions in a season. Simply put, Indiana is a study in extremes, which makes it a team unlike just about any we’ve seen before in NBA history.
If we set everything relative to the league average, the Pacers’ offense (+8.8 points/100 versus the league) is currently tracking for the second-best season in history, trailing only the 2003-04 Dallas Mavericks — more on them later — at +9.2. Even the legendary, Steve Nash-led “Seven Seconds or Less” Phoenix Suns offense only peaked at +8.4 in 2004-05, meaning Haliburton is powering a more potent attack than the Hall of Famer to whom he has recently drawn comparisons.
(As an aside, can we just appreciate for a moment that Nash ran four of the top six offenses in NBA history? Nobody else — save for maybe Steve Kerr and Michael Jordan — can claim anything close to as many connections to the teams on this list as Nash can.)
The Pacers’ offensive rating rises to an unbelievable 141 points/100 when Haliburton personally accounts for a possession, which is tracking to be the most efficient performance ever by a player with a usage rate of 20% or higher. At his current pace, Haliburton would join Nikola Jokić as the only players to ever score at least 35 points per 100 team possessions with a true shooting percentage of at least 65% and an assist rate of at least 45%. He is pushing the boundaries of offensive creation into places it has seldom gone before. (Much like Jokić last season, his teammates are also converting their chances at a high rate.)
But the other side of the coin for Indiana is defense. There’s a reason why the Pacers rank just eighth in point differential despite their unstoppable offense — their opponents have also found it very easy to put big numbers on the scoreboard. (My favorite example of this came on Nov. 21, when the Pacers and Atlanta Hawks boasted a record-setting over/under of 252.5 points before the game — then somehow shattered that mark by combining for 309 points in a 157-152 Indiana win). The way this team is constructed, it will simply need to score at an astronomical rate to overcome its defensive weaknesses. Even throughout its In-Season Tournament finals run, Indiana had the league’s 10th-worst D — and that’s as the team was experiencing its greatest success on a postseason-like stage in years.
Indiana isn’t alone in a sharp dichotomy between great offense and suspect defense; several other teams are trying that strategy on for size early this season. But the Pacers’ version is so extreme that the league has seldom seen anything quite like it before. The 14.2-point efficiency gap between Indiana’s offensive performance (again, relative to average) and its defense is the second-largest in NBA history, nearly matching the 1981-82 Denver Nuggets squad led by Alex English, Kiki Vandeweghe and Dan Issel. (And that team was slightly worse offensively — just also worse defensively as well).
To find a team with a wider overall gap between its strong and weak sides of the basketball, you’d need to go back 60 years (!) to the 1963-64 Boston Celtics, who were the anti-Pacers of sorts. The great Bill Russell and his teammates had the league’s best defense by far (10.8 points/100 better than average), but also its worst offense (4.5 points/100 below average). An interesting aspect of those dynasty Celtics that still flies relatively under the radar is that they had a surprisingly weak offense on a per-possession basis; Boston scored mainly through the high pace of a fast-break scheme via Russell’s outlet passing, but it otherwise perennially posted some of the league’s worst shooting percentages.
Because of this, Boston had a league-record 15.3 points/100 efficiency gap between its defense and offense in 1963-64 — a record the Pacers are currently chasing:
That didn’t stop the Celtics from winning the NBA title that season; in fact, they won it in each of their appearances on our list. (What can we say? Defense wins championships.) But the other teams on the list found things more difficult in the postseason.
Both the ‘82 Nuggets and the ‘04 Mavs — who decided it would be a good idea to add the notably defense-allergic Antoine Walker and Antawn Jamison to a lineup that already featured other defensive liabilities — failed to make it out of the first round. They were among the more successful non-Boston entries. The only team on the list to win a series was the 2001-02 Mavs; you’d need to go down to Nash’s 2009-10 Suns (No. 19) to find an all-offense/no-defense team that made so much as a conference finals run.
In the face of all that history, Haliburton and the Pacers didn’t flinch in the In-Season Tournament, riding their pure offensive firepower all the way to the title game. But the next step will be to prove their unconventional build can propel them on a run when the playoffs come around for real. If that happens, we might find that (go figure!) we’ve been staring at a modern, bizarro version of the ‘60s Celtics, with Haliburton serving as the mirror-universe version of Bill Russell.
Filed under: NBA