Indiana Pacers boast third-most roster turnover in NBA this year

In an off-season that saw massive change, the Indiana Pacers rank quite highly in roster turnover, bringing back the third-fewest amount of points and minutes of any team next season.

Kevin Pritchard promised changes, and boy did he deliver. Now that the Indiana Pacers are set on their 20-man training camp roster, it’s time to step back and look at the consequences of the last few months.

Now that all the dust has settled, the Pacers are only returning a few key players from last year’s rotation: Victor Oladipo, Myles Turner, Domantas Sabonis, and depending on your definition of “key”, Doug McDermott, T.J. Leaf and Aaron Holiday.

Thanks to some good work from HoopBall’s Michael Pellissier, we have a bit of an idea just how much roster turnover went down this off-season. Pellissier ran the numbers and ranked each team based on how many minutes and points they were returning from last year.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but Indiana ranked 28th in both categories, meaning they’re returning the third-fewest amount of minutes and points out of any team in the NBA next season. The Pacers only have two returning starters (Oladipo and Sabonis), and with Oladipo’s season cut short due to injury last year, his absence was made up by a lot of players who aren’t here anymore (Bojan Bogdanovic, Thaddeus Young, Darren Collison, etc.).

The Pacers rank only behind the Memphis Grizzlies, who have the least amount of returning minutes and points in their new post-Grit rebuild, New York Knicks (second-least points) and Washington Wizards (second-least minutes) in roster turnover. Luckily for Indiana, this off-season felt like much more of a retool than the rebuild that the other mentioned franchises are facing.

This isn’t the first time Pritchard has made so many drastic moves in a summer, though. His 2017 off-season, the one in which he traded Paul George, signed Bojan Bogdanovic, Darren Collison and so forth, featured the third-fewest minutes returned into the 2017-18 season, per Basketball Reference.

Hopefully, the new talent brought in can provide a new spark to the team that’s fallen short in the first round for the first two years of the Oladipo era. One thing is for certain: if the team flops, it wasn’t for a lack of trying on Pritchard’s end.