The Indiana Pacers Lose Tiebreaker with Milwaukee Bucks and Will Draft 18th

The Indiana Pacers are now figuring out who to pick with the 18th selection in the 2017 NBA draft.

The Indiana Pacers closed the season on a five game win streak in their final push to make the playoffs. As a result of the late season success, they finished with a 42-40 record, and the 7^th seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs.

Well, we all already knew that. What we didn’t know is where is the Pacers would be picking in the draft. An unfortunate drawback of winning the last five games of the season is that the Pacers finished the season with the same record as the Milwaukee Bucks, who also won 42 games. This meant that the Pacers draft position would come down to a randomly selected ping pong ball from a machine.

So it was between the Pacers are the Bucks. The team that had its ping pong ball selected would get the 17^th and 48^th draft picks and the loser would draft 18^th and 47^th.

So the NBA fired up the machine…

And the Bucks ping pong ball came up.

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This means that the Pacers will be picking after the Bucks in the first round (pick 18) and before them in the second round (47^th). The difference isn’t too staggering. Some noteable recent players drafted 18^th were JR Smith, Eric Bledsoe, and Terrance Jones. With the 17^th pick, there have been some more successful players drafted, such as Jrue Holiday, Denis Schroeder, and two of the Pacers finest; Jermaine O’Neal and Danny Granger.

When push comes to shove the difference between the two picks isn’t that much, but having the higher first round pick is clearly advantageous.

The Pacers can look at one positive from this, and that is that the 2 year contract of the 18^th pick costs essentially $200,000 less, meaning they gain that much cap space. If the contracts are compared over the full 4 year rookie scale amounts, the Pacers will save around $500,000 against the cap by picking 18^th instead of 17^th. The 47^th pick will likely make the league minimum of $815,615, if the Pacers even choose to offer him a contract.

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So all in all, it was an unfortunate ping pong ball selection show for Pacers fans. Currently, DraftExpress has the Pacers drafting center Ike Anigbogu with the 18^th pick, and power forward Cameron Oliver with the 47^th pick. If the Pacers decided to hold on to their picks this year, who knows who they will actually draft, but at least now we know the actual picks.