Post-Game Grades: Unfathomable Blunder and Meltdown Costs Pacers Game 5, Probably Their Season

In one of the worst postseason loses in team history, the Indiana Pacers gave a game away and put their season on life support.

The Good: The Indiana Pacers could not have looked better early on. After a sluggish start by both teams, the Pacers starting whipping the ball around and making everything. Paul George was the star, but George Hill and everyone looked great. It was a bit ironic since early foul trouble to both Ian Mahinmi and Monta Ellis turned into a blessing. Things could not have been going better as the team mounted a 17-point lead and led 35-20 after the first quarter while going 7-for-10 from behind the 3-point line.

While the lead was mostly lost in the second quarter, the team stayed on point. The awful all-bench unit crapped away the advantage, but the starters returned to right the ship. Indiana scored 61 points in the opening half — the fourth most ever allowed in the playoffs by Toronto — and went into half time up by 9.

That lead grew again after the break, with Indiana outscoring the Raptors by 4 in the third quarter. All looked great. Indiana was not in complete control, but Frank Vogel rode George Hill and Paul George for the entire third quarter and it paid dividends later in the period. The starters didn’t get the jump they needed to start the third and reassert their dominance. It was only a 5-point game with 4:30 left in the quarter. But they pushed it to 13 by end and that actually included blowing two or three good possessions in the waning minutes. It really could have been a 15- or 17-point lead with 12 minutes to play. But it was still 13, and it seemed like there was no way that even the collapse-prone Pacers could lose. 

The Bad: The Pacers lost.

As he did in the second quarter, Frank Vogel trusted his reserves and put out a lineup with Ty Lawson, Rodney Stuckey, and C.J. Miles on the perimeter. It was a mistake. It was so obviously a mistake. This all-bench nonsense had buried the team in Game 2 on multiple occasions as Toronto’s Kyle Lowry + bench quintet ripped Vogel’s tissue-paper lineups in half. And his five-reserves unit had gotten ripped up in this very game in the second quarter.

Though it had played relatively well, only giving up a small amount or even extending the Pacers lead in Game 4, there were reams of video, statistical, and eye-test evidence that this bullshit does not work. It was a terrible, awful idea to try it again in such a high-leverage moment.

Everybody watching the game knew this was not a good idea, and those willing to accept that Vogel would — once again — put a team on the floor that wasn’t led by one of Paul George, George Hill or Monta Ellis were adamant that Vogel ABSOLUTELY had to eject from this minutes-of-rest-stealing strategy as soon as it started to look shaky.

To use an analogy, it was fine to stay in your house with the windows boarded up as a tropical storm started to approach and the trajectory was not set. There was a chance you would be fine. Storms don’t always become hurricanes. And even hurricanes don’t always hit. But this stance becomes riskier and increasingly foolish the longer you wait. And you can only wait so long. Once the weatherman actually predicts, with near-certain accuracy that the storm would become a Category 5 hurricane and tact into your city, you have to get the hell out of town.

Vogel stayed put. And the hurricane destroyed his house and killed all his pets.

The whole time, it was obvious, even to an idiot like me, that he was pushing his luck. And then doubling down on that risk. And then straight up acting like an idiot himself.

Here are some real-time thoughts on how the situation ratcheted up from dicey to “you’ve GOTTA be fucking kidding me do you even have eyes, sir?”

The cavalry came back in with a reasonable time and score. Vogel waited waaaaaaaaaay too long considering how badly his reserves were playing. It was a blunder of epic proportions, and it was so unforgivable because these reserve-heavy groups had given away so many points over the course of the series and, really, the whole season.

Frank sat on his hands when he should have just looked at Paul George when the lead slipped to 11 and nodded. His star would have known exactly what that meant: You’ll rest tomorrow, but we need this game so get in there now, stop the bleeding and bring us home. Paul George, not to mention George Hill, were certainly feeling that this was coming.

But that was too slow to come and, ultimately, proved to be too late.

On the other hand, he did reinsert Paul George and George Hill with a 7-point lead and 8:36 to play. The momentum had all gone sideways, the Raptors were full of confidence, and the Air Canada Centre crowd was rocking, but the team’s leaders had plenty of time to win the game.

They did not.

Combined with the reserves, they scored 9 points over 12 minutes of basketball. That is not even remotely acceptable play — even if Ty Lawson, Rodney Stuckey, and three guys off the street played the whole 12 minutes.

You just cannot win a basketball game playing like that and schemes, strategies, and rotations have nothing to do with that fact. You can apparently almost win when up by 13 and then playing like that in the fourth. But we saw something similar last season in the Western Conference playoffs second round when the Clippers blew a seemingly un-losable lead in the fourth. Players can perform so badly that no lead is safe — and that’s what the Pacers players did.

The wrong players were on the floor too long. But when Frank Vogel won Game 4 on Saturday, Stuckey and C.J. Miles played 10 minutes together, and the Pacers scored 23 points in that time. They were a +6 in those minutes. In Game 5, they played 12 minutes together. And the Pacers scored 13 points while getting out-scored by 15 points. That is their fault in addition to the fault of a coach who thought they could play more like they did last time and didn’t recognize when they did not.

The numbers aren’t the point. The point is that Frank had a reasonable expectation that his players would not perform as badly as they did. He didn’t think they would play, as Stuckey and Lawson both did, as badly as they ever had in a Pacers uniform.

And then there are Paul George and George Hill and the other quote-unquote good players who did nothing to hold the 7-point lead. They failed. Their coach put them in an awful position — and Frank Vogel may have just cost himself a job in the process — but they also did not do their job.

Everybody failed and there is no way for the team to have arguably its most embarrassing quarter in playoff history without everybody failing.

MVP: No. OK. Paul George. He was incredible in the first half and nice in the third. He failed to shoot or impact the game in the fourth, however.

LVP: Rodney Stuckey. He will never overcome this. He is dead to Pacers fans.

X-Factor: Bismack Biyombo was great. Let’s not forget that there can be no collapse without a great comeback. Tip your cap to the Raptors. Frank Vogel set the stage, the Pacers players opened the door, but it was excellent late-game play from the Raptors that won this game.

Shot great to start, but complicit like everyone else in the end.

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Shot great to start, but complicit like everyone else in the end.