The Pacers couldn’t have tanked even if they wanted to

With so many other teams tanking all season long, the Indiana Pacers couldn’t have tanked even after Victor Oladipo went down.

The Indiana Pacers were cruising along with one of the NBA’s best records up until Victor Oladipo’s injury. Tanking clearly wasn’t on their mind before then, and even after, Kevin Pritchard stated the Pacers wouldn’t be taking that road.

As seductive as any vice can be, tanking certainly entered the minds of Pacers fans and the intoxicating hope of a higher draft pick was coursing through their veins. Hope is a drug for basketball fans, no matter what the odds are.

But that’s the thing, the odds of Indiana getting a lottery pick from that moment on were slim to none.

At that point in the season, Indiana was 32-15. Effectively, they were already were outside of the top 5 picks, as the Atlanta Hawks finished with the NBA’s fifth worse record at 29-53.

The Pacers simply had been too good already to make tanking a viable option. If they had finished in 6th place, they would have only had a 37.2% chance of a top 4 pick and a 9% chance of the first overall pick.

That’s if they lost every game from that point out. Even when looking at the records and then crediting the teams with a win (if Indiana beat them after January 23, when Oladipo went down), the Hawks still finish a game behind the Pacers in this hypothetical.

And again, that’s supposing that Indiana would have thrown the remaining 35 games. Do you realize how absurd a losing streak that long would be? The record for losing steaks in the NBA are 28 across two seasons and 26 in one.

To get a 62.8% chance of NOT getting a top 4 pick, the Pacers would have required the longest losing streak in NBA history.

And if you watched the final game of the regular season, you saw that even the deep part of the Pacers bench is capable of winning games. So unless the Pacers were historically bad down the stretch, they likely would have picked up at least a few wins.

Just one win would potentially move them back to 7th. If the Pacers would have only won nine more games, 41 wins could have put them into the playoffs.  It would have taken something truly historic for Indiana to even get so-so odds of a good pick.

The real question for the Pacers

Now, tanking wasn’t an option, or at least not a sane one. However, they could have turned into the skid and traded away some of their veteran players in hopes of retooling for the upcoming season.

The logic being that the Pacers knew they were doomed, so might as well plan ahead and enter the trade market.

But what were the market conditions?

After looking at this season’s transactions, I’m led to believe the market was bearish. While a total of 10 first-round picks moved, outside of the Dallas Mavericks moving their’s for Kristaps Porzingis, the others were from playoff teams.

So, the Pacers could have moved perhaps some package of Thaddeus Young, Bojan Bogdanovic (two players they might have interest in retaining) and Darren Collison for a non-lottery pick. The other angle of a trade might have included Indiana taking on bad contracts, but that obviously would curtail Pritchard’s options this summer in free agency.

That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have considered it, but judging from the trades we saw happen and the rumored ones, the price for a lottery pick appears high. The math doesn’t seem to work out well for Indiana on trade as their potential trade partners would be taking on veteran players that could leave this summer.

It’s hard to know what was out there, but my informed speculation tells me the Pacers wouldn’t have gotten a lottery pick by tanking or by trading their veteran players.

The only tanking the Pacers should have considered was a mini-one, and as it turned out, they still got the pick the best pick they could get at that point.