Indiana Pacers: 3 reasons to not trade Myles Turner this offseason

We haven’t seen the Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis frontcourt for long enough

This might be Shrodinger’s Cat, but we won’t know until we open the box.

The Domantas Sabonis and Myles Turner frontcourt was a contentious item among Pacers fans to open the season. Rarely does running two players with such overlapping skill sets in the same minutes produce quality results.

At best, it creates a small logjam at one of your positions, and at worst, it completely holds your team back tremendously.

And this duo wasn’t just something the Pacers were trying in a few minutes per game, this was their starting unit.

Ultimately, the overlap between the two would be more scarce than it was initially sold as — Sabonis also spent a lot of time with the bench unit, as per Nate McMillan’s crafty rotation design — but it was there to kick off the first and third quarters of just about every game that the duo played in together.

So, what did we learn?

Not enough, unfortunately.

There were some low points for the duo, their net rating was at times pretty rough, but there were also high points, and there were also revelations from their time together that are worth rolling into strategy and seeing how they work.

For instance, the whole idea of having Turner and Sabonis on the floor is having Turner take more 3-pointers so Sabonis has space to work on the interior. The monthly data suggests that works, with a positive correlation between the net rating of the duo and the number of 3-pointers Turner takes.

But how does that hold up with a larger sample size? Was this an outlier dictated by some outside circumstances? Or is this a repeatable phenomenon with results that can be consistently actualized?

We don’t know, exactly, and that’s part of why the Pacers shouldn’t trade Turner. It’s worth finding out.