Indiana Pacers Have a Big Man Depth Problem

With most of the Indiana Pacers’ injury issues fading into the rearview mirror (get well soon, Young Trece and George Hill), the Pacers find themselves with something they’ve rarely had since Rick Carlisle was the head coach: big-man depth.

Legitimate big-man depth is scarce around the NBA. For every Chicago (what an embarrassment of riches the Bulls have with Joakim Noah, Pau Gasol, Taj Gibson, and Nikola Mirotic), there are three or four Clevelands that struggle to even suit up an actual center, much less anything worthwhile off the bench.

As little as two seasons ago, the Pacer lineup only hoped to tread water when either David West or Roy Hibbert went to the bench. If they both sat, it was a catastrophe, and coach Frank Vogel started trying to stagger their minutes.

Today, they have the opposite problem: too many guys.

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Early-season injuries to West and Hibbert revealed that the Pacers had more rotation-ready players on their bench than they may have originally thought. And this is mainly due to the solid contributions of Lavoy Allen.

Allen has been one of the best rebounders in the league so far this year. His offensive rebounding percentage of 14.7% trails only Tyson Chandler among players that average at least 20 minutes per game, per NBA.com. He is seventh in total rebounding percentage, at 19.9%, putting him in a class with guys like DeMarcus Cousins, Zach Randolph, and Andre Drummond.

Allen has also shown some real offensive skills, featuring a nifty high-post passing game and an improved jump shot out to about 17 feet. While he’s not the 17-foot assassin that David West is, Allen has shot a top-notch 45% from the midrange and has been good enough to slightly stretch defenses away from the restricted area.

With an emergence like that, Allen deserves minutes even now that the cavalry has returned. The problem is that the player Allen has been backing up has been solid, too.

Luis Scola, after a slow start, has come into his own as an excellent sub for West. The Argentine features many of the same offensive qualities as West — midrange accuracy, crafty passing skills, and underrated post-up repertoire — and enables the Pacers to run many of the same offensive sets that they would were West still on the court.

And Scola has held his own on the glass this season, grabbing more than 7 rebounds per game in less than 24 minutes of action. Defensively, he’s an adventure, but at the very least, he exhibits effort and somehow seems to come up with one of these entertaining thefts every game.

Then there is Ian Mahinmi, who completes perhaps the league’s best set of defensive centers along with Hibbert. Mahinmi has been the most reliable bench option on the team for years now and despite his free throw struggles, he is doing his job protecting the rim again this year. On the season, teams are only shooting 47% in the restricted area when Mahinmi is in the ball game, a mark that puts Mahinmi 23rd in the entire league. (Hibbert has held opponents to a preposterous 40.2%, trailing only Andrew Bogut.) This number is probably even more impressive considering Mahinmi plays most of his time with Indiana’s backups who are less sound defensively than their starting counterparts.

The final guy Vogel could reasonably consider for the big-man rotation is Chris Copeland. While he would be a stretch four on most teams — and you can argue he should be exactly that on this team, too — he really isn’t someone Vogel seems to consider at the power forward spot.

Even with all the injuries the team has faced, Copeland has only played about 30 of his 511 minutes at the 4. Moreover, he is shooting just 35.2% from 3-point range, so he will likely be battling to retain minutes on the perimeter while Vogel doesn’t consider him for the 4 — and increasingly questions putting him in the game at all.

Nevertheless, the Pacers feature five, real and useful rotation players in the front court. (This also excludes Damjen Rudez, who has shown promise as a stretch four but, like Cope, is probably stuck under Vogel’s small-forward distinction).

And five is probably too many.

Countless fans watched Tuesday night’s game in Phoenix with the same question: “Why isn’t Lavoy Allen in the game?!?”

On the surface, it was a fair question. Allen has been a revelation so far this year, and Vogel intimated as much when he said it would be hard to leave Lavoy on the bench considering his early stellar play. Allen’s defensive versatility and energy on the boards seemed like it could have been greatly beneficial in a game against Phoenix’s athletic front line. And yet, minutes for Allen just may not exist.

Simple math shows that only 96 “big-man minutes” exist each game. If you visualize those 96 minutes as a family around the Thanksgiving turkey, it’s a little easier to see how they are split up.

The family head is always going to get the biggest piece, and it’s hard to envision a world in which Hibbert takes less than 30 minutes, if healthy and out of foul trouble. The same goes for West, although his age and accumulated wear and tear means Vogel should try to lighten his load some.

But even if the coach tries to give both more-than-adequate rest, Popovich-style, throughout the regular season and decreases their minutes to 25 per game (50 minutes combined), more than half of the turkey is already gone.

While Vogel has shown more lineup creativity this season, he has never been too fond of going small. And he probably won’t do it much this year, instead keeping a true center on the court, meaning Mahinmi will eat up the 18 to 23 minutes per game when Hibbert sits no matter what.

This leaves only the “non-West” minutes at the four sport — 18 to 23 total minutes left to be split between Luis Scola and Lavoy Allen. If Vogel bends a bit on the true center stance, you can eek out a few more in there, but we are already talking about an unrealistic “best-case” scenario in which the team can survive while keeping both Roy and West to 25 minutes per game. In real life, we’re probably talking about less than 20 minutes per game to be split among Allen and Scola.

While 10 minutes per game for each doesn’t sound bad in a vacuum, there is another issue: Basketball, more than any other sport, is often about rhythm. Players that are great in 20 minutes of action may not see the same success in less than 10 minutes. Scola is the prototypical rhythm player, and it’s hard to envision him being super-effective in a shorter playing stint. In fact, he’s never played less than 17 minutes per game in his entire career.

Even if you play Allen and Scola together in “small lineups” (this isn’t exactly ideal because neither of them would stretch the floor out to the 3-point line, pretty much the entire reason to play small in the first place), Scola and Allen would wind up getting about 18 and 10 minutes respectively.

No matter how you slice that turkey, a healthy Pacers’ lineup probably has too many bigs. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indiana can tell you better than anyone just how bad injuries can get. Real depth, especially on the front line, can also come in handy when foul troubles arise up from time to time.

On the other hand, chemistry issues can also corrupt teams when too many guys that aren’t playing feel that they should be. If Lavoy Allen winds up being the odd man out (a very real possibility considering what happened Tuesday night), could you blame him for being upset over the dry pieces of white meat leftovers that he was stuck with?

Perhaps Vogel should kick Scola to the curb, choosing the younger player in Allen as West’s backup. Or maybe Larry Bird could force his hand and try to trade Scola, whose per-36 minute scoring numbers have slipped dramatically this season even while his accuracy and rebounding have improved. They could attempt to simply optimize matchups and play Allen instead of Scola against more athletic teams, even though this could destroy continuity — something the entire Pacers’ organization values highly. Or maybe they simply hold onto everybody, hoping to keep everyone happy while preparing for the inevitable attrition of an NBA season.

Depth is a good thing, and the Pacers, for the first time in years, have it in the front court. But there aren’t unlimited turkeys on the table, and the solution is never as easy as it seems from home on your couch.

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The Pacers Have Too Many Big Men

By Jon Washburn | Dec 4, 2014