The Good, The Bad, and What’s Next: Ladies and gentleman we officially have an All-Star

The Bad: The Pacers struggle on tail-end of Western Conference road trip

After putting beat downs on the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz in the first two games of the Western Conference road trip, I seriously thought there was a chance this Pacers team could sweep the rest of their games. While the Portland Trail Blazers are a likely playoff team, they have had their fair share of challenges and drama this season, and were coming off a stretch of loosing. I expected the Pacers to ride their momentum to a victory, before taking care of business against a bad Lakers team that was missing three of their top five players.

Unfortunately for the Pacers that didn’t turn out to be case.

After battling back-and-fourth with the Portland Trail Blazers through three quarters, the Pacers defense seemingly fell apart in the fourth quarter. Indiana was only able to score a measly 12 points, while allowing Portland to get out to a 14-0 run, while giving up 13 to Damian Lillard. Even with Darren Collison and Victor Oladipo putting up 23 points (he did so on a not so effective 9/25 shooting), the Pacers only scored 12 points in the 4th and allowed the Blazers to pull out a 100-86 victory.

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This was the first game since Myles Turner was out that I could remember (I could be wrong here, a lot of opinion coming in this statement) the Pacers struggling with a teams length/size. Portland big men Jusuf Nurkic, Ed Davis, and Zach Collins combined to grab 33 rebounds, while the trio also really affected what the Pacers did inside.

Next up came the Los Angeles Lakers, a 16-29 team, who would play this game without their starting back-court in Lonzo Ball & Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, as well as forward Brandon Ingram. There was no reason to believe the Pacers couldn’t pull out a victory easily, even after coming off of a loss the night before.

However, once again that wasn’t the case. The Pacers got out to a hot start behind Victor Oladipo, and led the first quarter 25-18. After that point the Lakers reserve guard Jordan Clarkson took over. Clarkson would finish the game with 33 points, 7 rebounds, and 7 assists, seemingly to be almost unstoppable.

This was likely one of the worst losses of the season for the Pacers. When a team is missing three of their top players, especially one of the leagues worst teams, there’s no excuse to drop a game. However, with Myles Turner still out, Lance Stephenson being ill, and the Pacers coming off a back-to-back, they get the pass just this one time.

The Pacers would go on to get a big victory against a Kawhi-less San Antonio Spurs team, that is looked at to be a potential western conference contender. Even after another poor 3 point shooting performance, the Pacers were able to get back to playing good defense (held LA to 10 points on 5/14 shooting) moving the ball around, and getting shots for everyone (4 out of 5 Pacers scored in double figures).