Pascal Siakam has gotten a lot of heat from media and fans alike for his bad start to pre-season. This site has been no different in covering that story as well. Siakam had shot toward dates from the field and over half of these exhibition matches, and his age at 32 was enough to make some worry that the regression was here.
Well, the good news is that the Pacers game against the Milwaukee Bucks on Saturday dispelled some of these worries at least for a little bit.
During the Pacers' build of a 15-point lead in the first half, Siakam managed to score more than a point per minute. Siakam may not be the Pacers' best player, but he is probably their best scorer. In the same way that the team can't function without Tyrese Haliburton, they are usually one-dimensional and broken without their star power forward.
There will be nights in which he is an absolute absentee from the offense, or nights when he takes ill-advised shots and finds himself with a negative line on the stat sheet, but basketball is not so simple that a player's value is determined entirely by the number of points they score.
Siakam does so much to keep the defense on us, and that makes everyone's lives easier. If he were to take a step back, this team would no longer even be close to being a contender, so all we can do is hope that the Pascal who showed up against the Bucks is the person he really is this year.
The Pacers are built like Lincoln Logs
There is a lattice formed in the way this Pacers team is built. Each player individually is perfectly suited to be the complement to another one of the starters.
Ivica Zubac sets perfect screens to open up Aaron Nesmith for open shots off the ball. It is then Nesmith's gravity off the ball that opens driving lanes for Andrew Nembhard and Pascal Siakam. Their ability to take on more of a scoring load allows Haliburton to keep his energy up. That, in turn, opens up Zubac to work against exhausted opponents.
This team is a well-oiled machine. It sustains itself and runs maintenance in its own action. It requires players who – to quote LeBron James – try to fit in instead of trying to fit out.
Siakam embodies this concept perfectly, and it is due to his versatility that Indiana can make the fit of so many different specialists work. At the middle point of the fast-break play of Tyrese Haliburton and the post-up style of Zubac is Siakam and his never-ending drive for another title.
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