Indiana Pacers: Defining moments from the last 10 years
By Josh Wilson
Pacers trade for Thaddeus Young
The Pacers trading for Thaddeus Young at the time felt like the right call. They gave up a high ceiling but injury-prone player in Caris LeVert who didn’t project to be very productive for the Pacers until years down the road.
The Pacers needed some defensive help immediately in order to compete at a high level with LeBron James in the Eastern Conference Playoffs. Placing assets that provided instant return around Paul George was necessary, and that’s what led to the trade with the Brooklyn Nets.
Unfortunately, the trade, in retrospect, was ill-timed and hardly moved the needle for the Pacers. The Pacers would get just one year of Young with PG before George requested a trade out of Indiana, and the decision to make moves for more immediate returns in exchange for draft assets no longer matched up with the current circumstance of the team.
Young and the Pacers would still play out the remainder of his contract. At the 2019 trade deadline, Young was on the final year of his deal with Indiana and Victor Oladipo was ruled out for the remainder of the season due to a troubling quad injury.
Most teams would have attempted to trade Young — an attractive player for a number of highly competitive playoff teams — while they could in order to get a few assets back.
Given that the Pacers surrendered a second-round pick along with LeVert to get Young in the first place, it would have been ideal to come out of his time with the team with that second-round pick back.
Instead, the Pacers kept Young (and didn’t trade other expiring contracts like Bojan Bogdanovic, either) and went into the playoffs only to be swept in the first round.
Young’s contract is the perfect microcosm of how the Pacers run their organization. They don’t make organization-first opportunistic moves, they generally opt to not throw players through a whirlwind of movement at the trade deadline.
It’s up for debate. Some might say it’s foolish to not trade a player like Young while you can, some might say it’s smart and keeps the team in the good graces of player agents for future team-friendly moves or free agent meetings.
At any rate, Young’s trade from Brooklyn was one of the moves the Pacers made while building around Paul George that came back to bite them, working against them in the years following George’s demand out of Indiana.