Thaddeus Young is more than just the glue for the Indiana Pacers

It’s hard to know for sure what’s next for Thaddeus Young. He enjoys playing on a playoff contending team, but before last season’s surprising run began, the Indiana Pacers had the appearance of a team ready to tank, not make the playoffs.

For Young, that moment gave him an uneasy feeling of déjà vu.

“Definitely, there was a ‘Here we go again’ moment with the situation with Paul (George) and other guys leaving this team,” Young said in an interview during the playoffs.

George headlined the departures, but with C.J. Miles and Jeff Teague leaving and Monta Ellis being waived, there was little left from the 2016-17 season but Thad, Myles Turner, and a few reserves.

It was looking like an all too familiar pattern for Young. A relatively successful team would begin its rebuild just as Young settled in. It appeared the pattern of continually ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time would repeat itself in Indiana.

The two players Indiana traded for — Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis —  were not proven commodities. Oladipo certainly showed promise as a scorer, but no one at the time expected him to make an All-Star team and lead the team to a 48-win season. Sabonis was too raw to know what to expect from him, either.

The consensus was the Pacers were a 30-win team going into the season even with the additions of veteran players Darren Collison, Bojan Bogdanovic, and Cory Joseph.

The pieces start to fit together for the Pacers

But once the roster started to take shape and Young started to work with his new (and old) teammates, his perspective changed.

“Once I got back in August and seen what we had and what guys had to offer, I was back on board,” Young said in April. He went on to explain that when the Pacers were pushing the Cavaliers to a seven-game series, that wasn’t a surprise at the time, either

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“What we’re doing now, I thought that in August where we had a lot of guys where we could do something, especially in the East,” Young said. “I knew some of the guys coming in and seeing what they could do in training camp and before training camp and was excited about what we had.”

And that was the moment for Young.

It wasn’t once the team was winning games last season. When he saw the team he was going to be playing with, he knew they weren’t going to be another team embracing losing for draft position.

“I’d seen the work ethic, what guys had to bring to the court as a far as talent-wise, I believed if we go out there and trust in our process as a team and not get tied up in the daily work, but continue to come in and to stay conscious of what we had to do as a team to get better, I knew we had a good team,” Young said.

While he might leave the team to test free agency, he certainly has indicated he isn’t in a rush to leave, either.