Draft picks are valuable. I mean, that much is obvious; the NBA clearly values them to an extreme. The LA Clippers just committed an absolutely egregious bit of cheating, with the Pacers' picks at the center of it, and their punishment came in the form of stripped picks.
Sure, picks are real important, but you know what's even more important?
Timing.
The 2023 draft lottery did not carry the same demoralizing fall as the 2026 one. The Pacers stuck in their seventh overall slot, missing out on the 6.8% chance to move up.
The worst part is not what happened on draft night, when the Pacers drafted Jarace Walker at eighth and Ben Sheppard at 26th overall. While the fact that neither has become a difference maker is a pretty devastating blow to the young core Indiana sports, there were no massive talents that they missed out on down the board.
No, the problem is timing. And the Pacers had some terrible, terrible timing.
Three picks, no hits
Missing on Sheppard is not really a story. Of the last seven 26th overall picks, only two – Bones Hyland and Payton Pritchard – have even been rotation pieces during their career. Missing on a very late first-rounder is not uncommon.
However, the issues come when you look at Walker. The eighth overall picks have nearly a 50% conversion rate into being good players. Just look at the past 10 or so years, and you have Franz Wagner, Dyson Daniels, and Egor Demin.
Finding a difference-maker, or even a star that high in the lottery, is so much easier than the Pacers made it. Imagine what Wagner or Daniels, or any player of their ilk, really could provide for this Pacers team.
If you incorporate Mathurin's draft spot at sixth overall, another high position, and it's clear that the Pacers lost their chance to build a real young core around Tyrese Haliburton in those two years, with those three picks.
Sure, it would've been far easier to simply luck into some lottery luck and to get a gimme in Victor Wembanyama or Cooper Flagg or whoever it is. But despite not getting the good fortune to make their lives easy, they made their lives increasingly hard.
It's hard to win a championship. Really hard, actually. It's even harder to try to win a title when you wasted assets.
In a league where picks are everything, timing is what makes those picks valuable. The Pacers got unlucky, sure, but they also did this to themselves by wasting prime asset after prime asset.
Within those nights, they may have doomed themselves to being just good enough to be dark horse contenders, but never champions.
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