What Roy Hibbert’s Shot Selection Says About the Pacers
By Tim Donahue
Ball Movement No Substitute for Talent
With the losses of Paul George and Lance Stephenson, it was obvious coming into the season that the Pacers would struggle at the offensive end. The 83 player games lost among four other key Pacers player (George Hill, David West, C.J. Watson and C.J. Miles) only dug a deeper hole.
Vogel’s response to the lost firepower has been to emphasize ball movement.
A big part of defeating a defense your ability to “move” the defense. Rotations and adjustments weaken a defense, and passing the ball is the best opportunity that Indiana — a team without any dynamic ball-dominant players — has to make this happen.
The Pacers have made a credible effort to keep the ball moving.
On a nightly basis, this year’s squad is making 5% more passes than last season’s team. It is also generating 17% more secondary assists and 11% more assist opportunities. This puts them 7th in both passes per game and secondary assists per game, and 6th in assist opportunities per game — very promising numbers.
Unfortunately, this increase ball movement has shown little return.
The Pacers only convert a little over 45% of their assist opportunities into actual assists. This puts them dead last in the Association. The rest of the league converts more than 50% of their opportunities into assists. No doubt, the team’s heinous 3-point and catch-and-shoot numbers play a significant role in this failure.
When it comes to offensive success, what the defense thinks your team can do is almost as important as what your team actually can do. Unfortunately, defenses rightly believe there is very little the Pacers can do that will actually hurt them, so there is very little reason for the defense to move.
Add Indiana’s inability to create easy buckets (27th in both points scored off turnovers and fast-break points), and you get an offense that scores only 98 points per 100 possessions. That’s 5 full points below the league average and good for 3rd worst in the NBA.
Somehow, even that depressing factoid fails to adequately communicate the dumpster fire that is the Pacers offense. Really, the offensive shortcomings become most readily apparent when contrasting it with the Pacers defensive performance.
Defense: Still Holding Strong
Despite the well-documented losses to their perimeter defensive core, Frank Vogel has managed to keep the Pacers in the top third of the league defensively. They allow just 101.1 points per 100 possession.
Even in their losses — 32 so far — the Pacers have allowed just 103.8 points per 100. The league average in losses is 108.9, and only four other teams allow fewer than 107.
Unbelievably, the Pacers have lost 12 times this season when holding an opponent below a point per possession. Worse: On two separate occasions, they’ve allowed fewer than 80 points per 100 — and still lost.
The contrast becomes even more starkly defined in January, where Indiana posted the 10th-best defense in the league while losing 11 of 16 games. In those losses, they allowed 101.9 points per 100. Milwaukee allowed 102.0 in their six losses, and no other team allowed fewer than 105.
Which brings us back to the team’s ongoing failure: Offense.
Here is what the Indiana Pacers offense has looked like in their 32 losses this season.
The Pacer offense has become necrotic, eating away at any chance of success the team has. Indiana has scored less than one point per possession in 26 of their 32 losses.
The return of George Hill does offer some hope.
With the Hometown Hero on the floor, Indiana has scored 108.3 points per 100. More promisingly, they have increased their points in the paint from 38 per 100 possessions to almost 44, and their fast-break points have jumped from 9 per 100 to almost 11.
These come with plenty of caveats, though.
First and foremost, it’s a small sample size number (226 minutes over 10 games). Secondly, Hill has played primarily as a reserve (and he’s been -14 in 38 minutes as a starter). Finally, it remains to be seen when (or if) he’ll be able to stay healthy.
That being said, George Hill will make both this offense and this team better. While he doesn’t provide a massive infusion of talent, Hill does bring several qualities at both ends — speed, physicality, shooting, intelligence — of which the Pacers are in desperately short supply.
Those things very likely could have been difference makers in some of the 10 losses of 3 points or less that Indiana has suffered this year. They very possibly can be difference makers in the remaining games this season.
But George Hill probably won’t make them “good.”
Because of that, Vogel will continue to try to figure ways to make do with what he has. He and his staff are tasked with generating points from a team that can neither effectively get to the basket, nor create spacing by forcing defenses to honor their outside shooting.
It’s an uphill battle, and the coach’s awareness of this leaked through in one of his answers.
“I don’t think it was really a sell job,” Vogel answered when asked if he had to convince Hibbert to look for more perimeter shots. “I think when we realized that we had so many bodies out, we needed to generate some offense from somewhere. We needed to be as creative as possible.”
And even that probably won’t be enough.
Statistical sources: NBA, Basketball-Reference, and Synergy (via @JailedFlynt)