Why the Indiana Pacers needed their Victor Oladipo-less win

Beating the Utah Jazz wasn’t just another win for the Indiana Pacers. It was clearing the mental hurdle that Victor Oladipo was mandatory to win.

Beating the Utah Jazz handily without Victor Oladipo wasn’t just a statistic — the Indiana Pacers were 0-7 in games without him, unless you count the game he was injured in as one — it was a way of showing the NBA and themselves they weren’t just his sidekicks.

In the seven games, three of them were to teams with losing records and they rarely looked competitive in any of them. They looked hapless without their best player on the floor.

The first time Oladipo went down, it was only one game and in a loss the Boston Celtics. Respectable, at least. It was one thing to drop the second game to the Dallas Mavericks.

That could have been chalked up as a SEGABABA loss or an anomaly. But the loss the next time out to the Chicago Bulls was confirmation of the trouble ahead.

It was a five-game skid in all, with and without Oladipo, but those four without him were particularly ugly. Another ugly loss in February to the Wizards gave plenty of fuel to the idea they couldn’t win without Oladipo.

The Pacers lacked an offensive identity in particular. Outside of one Darren Collison 30-point performance and a pair of hot shooting nights from Bojan Bogdanovic and Domantas Sabonis (and one 20-point night from Joe Young), Indiana struggled to establish their flow in a meaningful way.

A strange mix of self-reliance for some and others looking for someone to take the reins led to chaos more than anything else.

But the win against the Jazz changed that.

Stepping up

The win over the Atlanta Hawks was a de facto victory without Oladipo, but with the Hawks rebuilding, it was hardly impressive. And besides, mentally speaking, it wasn’t the same as going into a game knowing the team’s star player would be wearing street clothes.

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Despite their record, the Utah Jazz weren’t expected to be a pushover. They were a four-point favorite according to Odds Shark.

But Indiana dominated. Utah took an 8-4 lead early, but Indiana responded with a 25-6 run as Tyreke Evans took Oladipo’s spot among the starters.

At that point, it was clear this Pacers team wasn’t going to go winless without Oladipo. And it wasn’t Evans stepping up as much as it was Bojan continuing his offensive renaissance while Thaddeus Young and Myles Turner held things down with the starters.

Once again we saw the value of Indiana’s deeper bench as Sabonis and rookie Aaron Holiday scored 19 each. Doug McDermott’s 12 ensured that the Jazz wouldn’t get anywhere close to coming back on the Pacers.

Of course, Indiana dropped their next outing on Thanksgiving Eve to the Charlotte Hornets without Oladipo, but with four games in six nights, there are built-in excused.

The sum of the Indiana Pacers’ parts

Oladipo is key to any real success for the Pacers, but finding a way to win without him serves as a counter to the idea they are dead on arrival without him.

It isn’t easy winning without your best player, but Indiana needs to win without Oladipo when he both figuratively and literally isn’t there.

The win against the Jazz was a lesson as much as the loss to the Hornets was, but much like the Pacers’ free-throw shooting, removing the mental block is as important as actually doing the deed.