The Indiana Pacers frontcourt is the center of discussion this offseason
The Indiana Pacers frontcourt pairing of Domantas Sabonis and Myles Turner has only played one season together in the starting lineup and it wasn’t even a full one. Many are critical of the Turbonis pairing so I’m going to talk a little bit about the pairing then look at some options if the Indiana Pacers were to move on.
While we have not seen a ton from the two in the lineup together, they have shown some promise. At the same time, there are problems that arise when two bigs are on the floor for long stretches.
What the Indiana Pacers have in Turbonis
The pairing of Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis is an unusual pairing in the league’s current state but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In my opinion, the pairing actually worked pretty well this year with Domantas Sabonis making the All-Star team, but that lead to Myles taking a back seat with his role on the team. With Nate McMillan not being a great offensive coach, it led to Myles Turner mostly standing on the perimeter on the offensive end. That’s not a bad strategy but it is when it’s not in the coach’s mind to shoot threes at all.
The defensive end was where you could say the pairing got a little tricky. Two centers on the floor at the same time created the question of what to do with them. The Pacers were lucky that one of the two centers happened to be Myles Turner. Myles doesn’t get the credit he deserves for his defensive prowess from anyone besides the true Pacer fans.
Myles has the ability to guard many positions on the perimeter with great success and sending back their shot if they somehow get past him. I’d say Domantas Sabonis throws off the defense a little bit at times, but he isn’t actually a terrible defender like people think.
On defense, Myles guards the PF and Sabonis guards the C. Sabonis struggles if being switched onto the faster power forward because he struggles to move laterally, but if he is guarding the Center in the post he uses his big body to be able to mostly contain them. However, a knock on Sabonis is that he actually has pretty short arms for his size. I’ll be honest I could go into some full-on analytics about the pairing on the defensive end, but I truly don’t understand every advanced stat.
Let’s take a look at what could happen if the Pacers decide to move on from one of them.