5 players the Indiana Pacers can look for in trades this summer

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As the Indiana Pacers demonstrated in the last offseason, the Pacers are pretty good at this trading thing. Where might the next big Pacer acquisition come from?

There is a ton to love about the 2017-18 Indiana Pacers. Fifth in the East at the All-Star break; the playoffs likely ahead; Victor Oladipo being really, really good; a roster full of players you can root for; and legitimately not too much to complain about. And, to be clear, this isn’t going to be one of those nit-picky articles. (LOOKING AT YOU, RYAN.)

But, since we have no games on the calendar let’s take a look ahead at how the Pacers can keep improving during the upcoming offseason. Yesterday we published a story on what the free-agent landscape should look like — spoiler, it’s going to be cheap — today we’ll peak at the acquisition market and where the next Oladipo/Sabonis windfall could come from.

For starters though, a bit of full disclosure, I’m the type of “boring” writer that doesn’t think you should just make moves to make moves. You should make moves that have a tangible positive impact on your roster (i.e. basically what Boston, San Antonio, Golden State, and what a bunch of other good teams do). And looking at this Pacers roster there’s a lot to be happy about.

Oladipo can take over games. There is not one but two promising centers (Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis). There’s a point guard who compliments Oladipo extremely well (Darren Collison, who’s shooting the lights out this season, by the way).

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The second unit: Sabonis, Cory Joseph, Lance Stephenson and eventually Glenn Robinson III is a unit as solid as most. So you don’t really need to tinker with the periphery of this roster to improve it, most roles are covered.

The area to improve is this disconcerting statistic: Indiana is 0-6 without Oladipo.

That’s a problem.

You have to have someone who can bear the weight when the star is gone and support the scoring workload when the star is active. In the mid-late 1990’s there was Rik Smits to share the load with Reggie Miller.

Then, for about a year and a half in the early 2000’s, Ron Artest was there to help shoulder the burden that Jermaine O’Neal carried.

While both Turner and Sabonis have flashed their capability for that role they aren’t quite there yet. Currently, Indiana doesn’t have that second consistently high scoring option. The Pacers aren’t going to improve much until they find that guy or guys.

Fortunately, there are options (both farfetched and realistic) this summer to do just that. The question is what type of players Indy should target. And to do that we need to look for compliments to Indiana’s best players.

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