Feisty Indiana Pacers Remain Resilient Despite Injuries

Most the time there is little reason for excitement over a 4-7 team. Most of the time that team isn’t missing half of their roster and most of their starters. That’s why Indiana Pacers fans are excited after winning 3 of their last 4 games, including two of teams with winning records.

So what’s working? Roy Hibbert has averaged 15.5 points a game while playing strong defense as always in the wins. Also surprisingly A.J. Price has scored 16 ppg in that stretch. The emergence of Solomon Hill as a rotation-quality player has help stabilize the struggling offense with his 13.8 ppg. They defense still needs to improve but when Indiana has surprise performances like Price’s and Luis Scola‘s against Bulls, the Pacers will be able to pick up a few wins even against good teams. It is too early to get too excited, but these are still good signs.

Only in the loss to Denver did the Pacers look like a truly bad and broken team. It was ugly, but that’s only one game out of the last four. In the 3 wins they posted a 101.8 offensive rating and a 93.9 defensive rating. With Hibbert being the only starter left from last year, there are reasons to be optimistic as Indiana gets closer to full-strength this season.

The Games

The win over the Utah Jazz snapped a six game losing skid and was a great bounce back game as Hibbert scored 29 points while Price exploded for 22 points.

It may not be the same rivalry, but that doesn’t mean there still isn’t a little animosity left between the two teams. It looked like this could have been the game where the reality of all the injuries showed itself… but that isn’t what happened. The Pacers shut down the Heat’s offense in the win, to many folks surprise. Don’t forget to thank Lavoy Allen for his sneakily good performance. It was close in the final minutes, but Indiana simply executed better down the stretch than the Heat.

It was ugly. It wasn’t pretty, and in the loss to the Nuggets it looked like maybe we saw fool’s gold and this was maybe the real Pacers squad as they were hammered by a struggling Denver squad. But it turned out to be the week’s only loss.

Luis Scola, I apologize for all the negative things I’ve written about you lately. Scola scored 21 points and grabbed 11 rebounds in the Pacers victory while Solomon Hill bounced back with 21 points as well.  Guess who else scored 21? A.J. “I don’t want to go to China” Price. Even though the Bulls didn’t have Derrick Rose, they still should have been able to handle a heavily injured Pacers team.  Indiana is proving to be quite feisty.

Again, it is very early in the season, but picking up wins while the roster returns to anything close to 100% is only going to help their chances of getting to the playoffs. It doesn’t look like Larry Bird or Frank Vogel is going to send this team into taking mode, so fighting for a 7th or 8th seed is the goal. It is going to be a tough road, but any wins before David West, George Hill, Rodney Stuckey, and C.J. Watson return is making that job easier.

Ebay finds of the week: What says Christmas but also an unhealthy love for the Pacers? This.