To say the Indiana Pacers are rapidly losing hope to start their season is to undervalue just how bad it currently is, but also to overvalue a sample size that has seen the team struggle to do much of note without Tyrese Haliburton on the floor. The team lost to the Denver Nuggets while playing in Mexico City on Saturday afternoon largely because they continue to fail to create any type of offensive production without their superstar point guard.
While it's hard to pin the entirety of this team's issues on one player's absence, the relative difficulty with which the Pacers' offense now flows makes it so that role players are being asked to perform beyond their scope, leading to games like the one against Denver in which no one can get anything done outside of Pascal Siakam.
Siakam, admittedly, simply lived up to his own average with 23 points on 10/18 from the field. The team struggled to find any offensive production from anyone else. Shockingly, it was Larry Nance Jr. who scored 15 to be the team's second-leading scorer.
Without Haliburton in place, Indiana has no one to guide their rotation or to deliver easy points that lead to a general feeling that things will be okay. The frantic nature of the Pacers' current approach is why they keep dropping games, and it's only going to get worse as the team's schedule gets harder.
Brutal stretch of games could bury the season
Indiana is currently 3-7. They have two considerably easier games against the Dallas Mavericks and Washington Wizards coming up. While neither team is as awful as they were last year, neither is expected to make the playoffs in their respective conference. That's an easy stretch considering how bad it's about to get.
The Pacers have their next seven straight games against assumed contenders that seem relatively healthy, with the exception of the Oklahoma City Thunder. They will face the Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks, Philadelphia 76ers, Houston Rockets, and the aforementioned Thunder.
In the case of the Knicks and Sixers, they'll play against each other multiple times in the next two weeks.
That is a brutal schedule for a team that could very well enter that stretch at a mediocre 5-7 (in the best-case scenario). By that point in the year, the Pacers will have 20 games under their belt. If they are 10 games under 500, or even anywhere close to that number, it will be necessary to reevaluate what a successful season looks like.
Is it enough to see that Haliburton can regain a top-10 level of play, even if his injury concerns continue? For a Pacers team that's about to get very expensive and for a front office that has been very risk-averse when it comes to paying the luxury tax, that may not be enough to keep this team together.
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