Introducing: 8p9s (Deleted Scenes)

Sorry about no game recap for the phenomenal shellacking of the Wizards. Weekend and all, ya know. The team obviously played its best ball of the year so far, and it was nice to see that they were able to not only win on a night when they shot poorly, but handily blow out DC’s finest in the process. It’s odd to watch the team win with defense. I know the front office preached about improving that end of the floor all summer, but the Pacers have been so mediocre at best defensively for so many seasons that I had pretty much adopted a “prove it” mentality.

Well, through five games, the Pacers are 11th in the NBA in defensive efficiency (giving up 102.9 points per 100 possessions) and 9th overall in opponent’s eFG% (47.1%). In speaking to the media this summer, Coach O’Brien touted FG% as the defensive metric that he was most concerned with, stating that something around 43% would mean they are doing the things he wanted to see. Five games in, they’re giving up only 43.6% shooting to the opposition, so they are right in line with his goal and significantly below the 45.8% the team allowed last season.

Getting back to the Washington game specifically for a second, Tyler was amazing during his debut, getting to the line 10 times and just generally being everything he was billed as. Great to see. And Roy in the post was perhaps even more fantastic. That needs to become a larger go-to component of the offense and will be interesting to watch progress as the season unfolds. With Troy and Jeff banged up and Dunleavy still a few weeks away from even practicing according to his own account, it’s nice to see that the young front court guys — including possibly even Solomon Jones — can all be counted on to produce. They’re all inexperienced, so no one should expect them to be stalwarts of consistency, but the ability seems to be there.

But that game was four days ago, so you likely already know this.

Have no fear, however. We have a big analysis of the first five games coming as soon as today (but more likely tomorrow). And that new feature, “The Five Game Report,” is going to be a new staple around these part. Every five games, we’ll step back and look at what happened: the numbers, the analysis and all the rest and put it up as a big info dump. Sort of a “State of the Pacers” type thing. Hopefully, it will make for good perspective at the time as well as something we can look back at later in the year when it will be harder to immediately recall what happened in November.

So look out for “The Five Game Report: Vol. I” shortly.

In the meantime, you can also check out our new complementary site: “8p9s (Deleted Scenes)”

Essentially, this will be the place where we dump a lot of the stuff that pertains to Pacer Nation and is interesting, but is either (a) too silly, (b) too ephemeral, or (c) too “I don’t have anything to add to this but it’s definitely neat” to actually devote a whole post to here.

It’s a Tumblr site so you can follow it that way if you’re into the whole Tumblr thing. Or just bookmark the site/subscribe to the RSS. And I’m sure we’ll be linking over there from here from time to time.

Enjoy. And please do email us at 8pts9secs@gmail.com if you find anything that involves the Pacers that might be a good fit. (Also, don’t worry, we’ll make it look prettier to look at eventually. Just using a Tumblr template for now until some extra hours in the day magically appear.)

8p9s (Deleted Scenes): All the Eight Points, Nine Seconds goodness you’ve come to expect, just shorter, shallower, sillier and probably worse — much like the guy in the photo.