The Indiana Pacers defense was top notch in game 1

The Pacers only gave up 80 points to the Cavaliers in game 1. Their defense was as good as it could have been.

The Pacers have an impossible task in their first-round series. They are challenged with defending the Cleveland Cavaliers, who had the 5th ranked offense in the regular season. With LeBron James, Kevin Love, and a plethora of shooters, the Cavs are almost impossible to stop.

The Pacers did it.

In game 1, Indiana’s defense was sublime. Cleveland only shot 38.5 percent from the field and struggled to get good looks from anywhere on the court. The three-point line tends to be the bane of opponents’ existence against Cleveland; they finished the regular season with the sixth-best percentage shooting the deep ball. In game 1, the Pacers held them to 8/34 shooting.

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How were they able to do it? By overloading the strong side, shutting down LeBron James, and sticking to the game plan.

These first two successes go hand in hand. An underrated skill of LeBron’s is his ability to make seemingly impossible passes look easy; he’s a master at squeezing the ball into tight spaces. The easiest way to counteract this is to overload the “strong” side (the side the ball is on) of the court.

Overloading the strong side does two things. It puts more players around LeBron James, which forces him to make a decision sooner than he would like to, and it often propels the ball to go to the weak side in some capacity. The advantage of the weak side is that the passes it takes to get the ball over there take a decent amount of time, and thus the defense has time to recover and make the stop.

Want to see it executed to a T? Watch this:

The moment LeBron comes around the screen, the Pacers set up four guys on his side of the court to anticipate his next move. James makes the right move and fires a pass to an open José Calderón on the weak side. But because the pass was somewhat lengthy and laborious, Darren Collison is able to recover and get his hand up. DC executes his closeout to perfection, and there you go; a miss as a result of the excellent defense.

Overloading the strong side was a method implemented to stop LeBron James, but really that was the focus of every defensive possession regardless of the tactics used to do it. The King averaged 28.8 points per game against Indiana this regular season and finding a way to stop him was imperative.

Head Coach Nate McMillan had Bojan Bogdanovic on him for most of the game. That action plan was criticized early in the game, but Bojan put in one of his best defensive performances of the season. LeBron only shot 7/17, and Bojan finished with three steals, an outstanding number for him. He kept his body in a perfect stance and ensured his hands were active, which allowed him to make things happen on the less glamorous end of the court:

Who knew Bogdanovic had that in him?! Apparently, LeBron didn’t, and that is how they got the steal.

The other tactic that was implored against James: just stay in front of him. Usually, this isn’t enough. He is the best player in the league and can finish over pretty much anyone with ease. But if you stay in front of him, you at least give yourself a chance to make the stop. That is exactly what the Pacers were able to do.

How Victor Oladipo was able to stay in front of James, keep his hands engaged, and strip the ball away I will never know. But this type of effort and cognizance to stay in front of LeBron granted the Pacers a stop and set the tone for other possessions:

LeBron James weighs 250 pounds. Oladipo weighs just 210. That is some impressive strength from the little fella, and it adds fuel to the fire that was the Pacers defense in this game.

The last thing the Pacers were able to do well is that they stuck to the gameplan. The most significant portion of this was forcing attacking Cavaliers player to the middle of the court. Why does Nate McMillan want to coerce the opponent to the rim in the middle of the court? Because that is where this man is waiting.

Turner’s rim protection was a weapon that the Pacers wanted to use this game, and they did it with aplomb. Turner was a +15 in 33 minutes largely thanks to his great defense, and the Pacers did a great job of funneling opponents to him.

Turner’s presence at the rim is almost like a siren song. He lures opponents in and gets them thinking that they are on the brink of scoring. But at the last second, he snatches that away and gets the stop. Larry Nance Jr. thought he had the easy layup here, but Myles had different ideas:

Myles was, of course, awesome on D in this game, but this segment is about how the Pacers forced guys to the middle. This clip is more about the result than the action, but watch how Turner stops Jeff Green at the rim here after Green goes middle:

The rebound too! What a possession by Turner.

Ultimately, this upcoming clip is how it usually went down. Darren Collison starts it off by defending the pick and roll in ICE coverage, but instead of forcing George Hill away from the screen like conventional ICE coverage, he entices Hill to actually use the screen since that would put him in the middle of the hardwood.

Once Hill is in the center, Bojan lays off and tempts Hill to keep attacking. Hill continues, but then he sees Turner. In a sheer panic, he forced up a crappy floater:

Aiiiiiiiiiiirball!

Hill freaked out when he saw Myles, and instead of continuing to drive and create contact, he threw up junk and missed. Hill actually airballed two floaters thanks to this same defensive style. The Pacers pulled off this strategy to perfection in game 1.

Next: 8p9s Roundtable: It’s Playoff Time

So, how were the Pacers able to shut down the Cavs? A little bit of this and a little bit of that. The most important part of it: it was repeatable. Nothing the Pacers did to slow down the Cavs in game one was a fluke. They could pull it off again as the series goes on. We will have to see how it goes, but McMillan may have some aspects of the Cavaliers offense figured out.