It took me a while, pretty much until this morning, but I finally got over the thrill of watching the Pacers play an entire basketball game without Roy Hibbert. When I did, I realized that they lost.
The game, for most of the first half, seemed like it was in the bag. Then the 2nd half happened. The loss, taken by itself, isn’t much to worry about. When you have nearly 50% roster turnover and start the season on the road against what is universally considered to be a superior team, losses are expected. What I wanted to know was just how such a thing happened.
I started running through my mental list of observations I’d made during the game. It seemed like the Pacers were dramatically outrebounded, but the box score showed the Raptors with only one more offensive rebound with the Pacers. It seemed like the Pacers turned the ball over a lot, but they actually had only 13 turnovers compared to 20 for the Raptors. I knew guys (Ian Mahinmi, Monta Ellis) had been in foul trouble, but the Raptors only made 1 more free throw than the Pacers.
In looking at the box score, the only number that offered any explanation was field goal percentage. The Raptors made 45% of their shots while the Pacers made 37.2%. While those numbers easily explained the final point differential, I wanted to dig a little deeper. What I found was that this loss was a bit uncharacteristic of Vogel’s good teams for two distinct reasons.
First, with the exception last season, the Pacers under Vogel have routinely trotted out one of the NBA’s top 5 man units as their starters. Last night, the starting unit of Hill-Ellis-Miles-George-Mahinmi played 15 minutes together. For the most part, they were bad. During those 15 minutes they allowed Toronto to score 39 points on 56% shooting. Toronto also shot 13 free throws over that span. They posted an overall plus/minus of -7. Ugh.
The second reason is tied closely to the first. It was the 3rd quarter. Over the course of Vogel’s career, the Pacers have been a very good 3rd quarter team. Our own Tim Donahue noted that in this post a couple years ago.
Last night they were awful. The aforementioned lineup played the first 6 minutes of the 3rd quarter together. They weren’t good but weren’t awful either and were only outscored by 4 points over that span. Once the bench players started coming in, it only got worse.
Overall, I’m not worried at all yet. The team missed a myriad of pretty good looks last night. The defense, in the first half, was nearly excellent. The offense was fun to watch for the first time since Rick Carlisle. On the whole, the game only served to make me more excited for this new era of Pacers’ basketball. I just hope these 2 factors that seemingly caused the loss don’t become season-long trends.
Next: Post-Game Grades: Indiana Pacers Come Up Short Against Toronto Raptors