So, what now?

The Indiana Pacers lost Victor Oladipo for a while. What happens next?

The path forward for the Indiana Pacers is now about as clear as mud. Just yesterday, the fanbase was discussing Mike Conley trades and how to improve the team for a run in the postseason.

Now, that is moot. Most of the discourse about the teams future that has happened over the past month is irrelevant. All of the optics have changed.

Victor Oladipo‘s 2018-19 season is over. The ruptured right quad tendon he suffered against the Toronto Raptors changed the course of his career and changed the course of the Pacers franchise, at least temporarily. A pivot starts now.

Before the injury, the path forward was easy to comprehend. The team had a top-5 record in the NBA. The goal was to make a deep postseason run. The plan going forward would have been to stick with the core that had gotten them to that point, plus potentially adding some players on the edges that make the team minorly better.

It wasn’t a complicated formula this season, and then the team would retool around Oladio with its $50+ million in cap room in the summer. Bada-bing, bada-boom.

Now, it is a very intricate trail into the future. This team has enough good players to make the playoffs still (and enough wins banked already), but this squad probably does not have enough talent to make a long postseason run. Then, you are tasked with building a team around an injured superstar. This is a tough area to be in.

Let’s continue on the extremes. Blowing it up has no value. Tanking when you already have 32 wins is impossible. Plus, Kevin Pritchard said he would never do it.

Even if you tank, you win at least 10 more games. 42 is enough wins to cruise into the postseason in the Eastern Conference. Plus, the Indiana Pacers don’t tank. It just doesn’t happen.

Because the Pacers can’t pursue the lower extreme (tanking) or the upper (competing late in the playoffs), their path forward has to be in between this season. After that, it’s tougher to say. Finding the best balance is really, really challenging, but there are some choices that make more sense than others.

As a related aside, thankfully the trade deadline has not yet passed. In theory, that gives the Pacers more options. More on that later, it has less to do with the plan moving forward. Back to that. Let’s start with option 1.

Play for the future.

In this scenario, you treat this current season as a sunk cost. You already bought into success. You cannot back out of it now. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the remainder of this season as a springboard into next season.

Next year, Aaron Holiday will be a sophomore. Edmond Sumner will be in year 3. The Domantas Sabonis-Myles Turner pairing will also enter their third year, as will TJ Leaf.

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Those things are all key to the future of the Pacers, albeit at varying levels. With the current season’s goals altered, playing for the future would create a scenario in which it becomes time to more aggressively create opportunities for those players, or combination of players, to play more frequently.

Let’s start with Holiday. He is going to slide into to Tyreke Evans’ role as the fourth guard, while Evans likely gets promoted to the starter he was when Vic previously missed time. Holiday needs to soak up all of those 4th guard minutes, and then some more if the team goes this route.

The front office has to learn what they have with this dude. He’s clearly good. If he can develop into a piece that can be a competent backup on next years team, that is one less role that the front office has to sign in free agency in the coming summer. Finding out if Holiday can do that now, while you have the playing time to give him, is a must do while playing for the future.

Sumner is in the same boat but to a much less serious degree. He had a preseason that gave many of us hope he could be in the rotation sooner rather than later. Contract constraints have made it hard to give him the playing time required to see how much he can really offer, but he has been the best player on the Fort Wayne Mad Ants this year.

I don’t know how it gets done, but in this scenario in which the team plays for the time ahead, finding a few minutes here and there for Sumner is a good idea. If he shows you that he can be your 5th guard long term, a-la Aaron Holiday right now, that is another role the Pacers have locked down in free agency next season.

With Sumner, there is a decision now, too. The Pacers will have an open roster spot next Thursday when the newly-signed Stephan Hicks’10-day contract expires. Originally, I contended that Edmond Sumner would not get his contract converted this season, as the Indiana Pacers were more likely to pursue buyout market candidates.

But the buyout market scenario is likely out the window if you play the long game. Sumner yet again has a chance to get called up to the pro team full time.

TJ Leaf shares a similar boat to those two guys, just not at the guard position. He has recently been reinserted into the rotation, albeit for a very small amount of time every game, and he has done some good stuff. He would need more playing time in this hypothetical. He is going to be on the roster next season if he isn’t traded. Finding out what he could offer you next year is extremely important.

And that takes us to THE pairing… Domantas Sabonis and Myles Turner. The future front court of this team, in theory.

It is unknown if this was ever the actual plan, but all of the signs pointed to the Sabonis-Turner pairing being the starting frontcourt of the next great Pacer team. Thaddeus Young is really good, so there wasn’t really a point of giving them a ton of playing time together to date; they only have 236 minutes together this season. But if you push for building blocks, I think you have to get them more time together. You need to see what they can do out there. The returns this season have been promising on the small sample size we have seen. Let’s make that sample size bigger and see what they can do.

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• 2 positives, 3 negatives from first week of Indiana Pacers basketball
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The “play for the future” route is a tough sell to fans and internally, tough. There is a cost to the younger guys playing more. One of them is wins, which may be unappealing to the organization. I’ll get to that in a second.

The other one is playing time for the veterans. If Sumner and Holiday play more, then Collison, CoJo, and Evans will play less. Are they cool with that? They are in Indiana to win. That is a tough sell. If Leaf and the Sabonis-Turner pairing play more, Thad Young plays less. Does he go for that? He’s the best player on the team now.

That’s impossible to say from the outside. I think all of those guys want to go for it. They are veterans who bought into winning. That’s why they are here. Stripping them of a substantial amount of minutes would be a tough sell from the front office. If you pivot to an extremely forward thinking route, then that’s that. But it could add some unneeded animosity to the tight-knit group. That might not be a plausible choice, even if it makes sense on paper. These are humans with egos and emotions.

Let’s pivot, though, and talk about those sacrificed wins I just mentioned. All of the last 12 paragraphs operated under the assumption that the Indiana Pacers treat the rest of this season as a sunk cost and set themselves up for subsequent seasons. They don’t necessarily have to do that.

They could still go for it. That’s option 2.

Stay the course and go for it this year.

The season isn’t over. There are still 35 games to go, plus a postseason. The Indiana Pacers have veterans on the roster. They can still go for it without Vic.

Unlike the first option, this one requires less explaining. Essentially, the team just continues on the same course. They played 11 games without Oladipo earlier in the season and went 7-4! Granted, the schedule at that time was a breeze. But they won the games, and they won them with team ball.

They can still harness that team ball. The same rotation they rocked with back then, with Tyreke starting in Vic’s place and Holiday inserted as the new 4th guard, has shown it can be successful. During the 11 game span in which Oladipo did not play in late November through early December, all 9 players in the rotation had a usage rate between 16 percent (Collison) and 25 percent (Sabonis). That is textbook “everybody eats”.

I’m not sure how good the Pacers minus Oladipo is against the cream of the crop. But that deserves a chance to show how good they are. The veterans signed here, or have given it their all here, for this chance. They want to win playoff games. They are owed the opportunity.

Anedoctally, this group now has a huge chip on their shoulder. Each and every player could be a part of a story “bigger than themselves” for lack of a better cliché. In theory, that would motivate everyone, and I’m confident in this group getting the most out of each other should the team go this route. I don’t know what kind of noise they can make in the playoffs, but this group can still be a good team with a common goal and a huge internal motivator. That combination usually breeds success.

The trade deadline now has a different appeal.

The trade deadline is exactly two weeks from today, so the Pacers still have some time to examine if there is a move that makes sense for them. Thankfully, there are trades the Pacers can make to go down one of the two paths laid out that doesn’t sacrifice too much from the goals they already have.

I won’t muse any specific trades, now is not the time for that. We don’t know what direction the team is going to go yet. But we can be general.

Trading one veteran now, maybe two but not any more than that, makes a bit more sense now than it did two days ago. Flipping someone for a worse player and an asset sets you up better for the next great Indiana Pacers team as opposed to this simply good one. But these, again, are humans with egos and emotions. Who knows how well that sits with guys, and that. It is a business, and relationships are a part of that.

Exploring Markelle Fultz trades, for example, makes a lot of sense now. That is the type of swing you can make. It’s now a pretty low-risk move this season and could lead to something great in the future. The risk of it hindering you has substantially decreased while the upside remains somewhat. Maybe the team looks at that.

The threshold for “gotta say yes” trades for those expiring contract guys is lower.

In a broader sense with the vets, the front office might change their thinking ever so slightly. I’m stealing this phrasing from the great Will Furr, but it is a sentiment I strongly agree with so I’m still putting it out there:

The threshold for “gotta say yes” trades for those expiring contract guys is lower. Basically, if it took a ton to pry away a contributor on an expiring contract from this team before, it should take less than a ton now, even though the Pacers probably shouldn’t be willing to move those guys since they deserve a shot.

It’s a harder balance now, but I think you owe it to the team to compete and keep mostly everyone. It’s a team, not “the Victor Oladipo’s”. Just because Vic is hurt doesn’t mean you pivot into trade mode. Staying the course makes more sense from almost all angles.

My personal opinion, for those who care.

I am not void of opinion. I would stick to the plan the team has had all season, just without Vic.

Keep playing the Sabonis-Turner pairing in a limited capacity. Thad Young deserves to play. Let Aaron Holiday be the 4th guard and nothing more. He can develop there and help the team still. Let these veterans go for it.

Maybe you lose in the first round. Who cares? Making the playoffs is an accomplishment. Making the playoffs when your superstar is going to miss over half the season is a milestone. Letting the guys the team has now go for it, and maybe even make some noise in the first round, is better team (and relationship) management than any path that looks too far forward. You can’t just cave in.

Long-term, things might get mangled by not focusing enough on the future. But you have to bet on your own guys. Otherwise, nobody is going to want to be one of those guys in the future. Vic will come back someday, but an organization giving up on its players and success will be remembered forever.

To quote (approximately) Jonathan Matthes in the 8 Points, 9 Seconds group chat: “The veterans are more crucial now than ever. Indy needs all of them to salvage the season.” He’s right. The path forward may look bleak, but you can’t give up on the guys you have.

These veterans are going to rally together and prove what they can really do. Post brawl, we saw a variety of guys step up. When Granger got hurt, we discovered PG. When PG got hurt, we saw a misfit group win nearly half their games. The Pacers have done this before and they can do it again.

What comes next for the Indiana Pacers isn’t what anyone expected, but packing it in signals quitting. If I’ve learned one thing in my life, it is that the Indiana Pacers don’t quit.