The Indiana Pacers are still a top 10 team according to the experts as we gather this week’s power rankings.
It’s hard to say how the Indiana Pacers loss to the Boston Celtics will affect them in the power rankings next week. If there’s any good news for them, it’s that most of the media saw them as a top 10 before Sunday.
The Pacers were flying as high as 7th place a week ago, but a pair of losses to the Detroit Pistons and Oklahoma City Thunder slowed their momentum, but taking care of business against the Brooklyn Nets kept them from losing too much ground.
They may be on the edge of the top 10 in the NBA, but a more important question is: Where exactly do they fall in the Eastern Conference?
While they’ve beaten the Cleveland Cavaliers twice, they’ve lost to the Celtics twice. They’ve split with some of the East’s playoff teams (at the moment), including the New York Knicks and Toronto Raptors, but they’ve yet to take on the Washington Wizards or Milwaukee Bucks.
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The Pacers were ranked as high as 4th in the East as recently as five days ago, but currently, they are ranked 7th as a cluster of teams jockey for position.
The question of just how good the Pacers are is still hard to answer. No team, other than the Houston Rockets, can stop them from rallying late to make games close. If Bojan Bogdanovic holds on to the ball, we might have been talking about them as a top four team, but things didn’t turn out that way.
Despite their current position in the rankings, I believe this team can fight for the third or fourth spot in the Eastern Conference. As long as Victor Oladipo can summon his greatness, this team is certainly dangerous. They stopped a streaking Cavaliers team and pushed the Celtics to the brink. They may be better than Indiana, but they probably don’t want to deal with them in a seven game series unless they have to.
Enough worrying about the future, let’s look at what the experts said this week.
Next: Victor Oladipo and Myles Turner join The Starters
After losing a close one to the Boston Celtics, the Indiana Pacers face the Atlanta Hawks tonight, and then return home to host the Brooklyn Nets on Saturday.