This season has been off to a rough start for the Indiana Pacers. Before they could even see what their pre-existing corps could do with some gap-year additions, the team was ravaged by injury and is still barely working their way back from having only six active players at one point.
Because of all of these absences, the Pacers have taken an early schedule that was filled with presumed rebuilding teams and easy competition and have turned it into a 3-6 record.
While it will not be easy to beat the Denver Nuggets on Saturday in Mexico City, it will be harder still to survive the impending schedule that Indiana will need to face beyond that.
The Pacers are three games away from starting a stretch in which they will face seven straight contenders, all in a row, over the course of just 14 days. That means that after they play the Nuggets, they have the Dallas Mavericks and the Washington Wizards before going through a Saw trap of scheduling. Maybe optimism isn't really in the cards right now.
This schedule is deeply, deeply unfair
It's hard to overstate just how hard this stretch of games will be for Indiana.
First, there's a back-to-back of the New York Knicks on November 14th and the Philadelphia 76ers on November 15th, followed by the Houston Rockets, who have likely been the most impressive team in the league across the first handful of contests, on the 19th.
Following that, the Pacers play three games in four nights, starting in Cleveland on the 21st to face the Cavaliers, before heading to Madison Square Garden to play the Knicks again, before they play another double-header back home in Indiana against the admittedly hugely injured Oklahoma City Thunder.
As if all of that wasn't bad enough, they end that stretch by playing the Sixers again as well.
If the Pacers managed to play the next three games at their best possible level, there's a real chance they enter this stretch at 500. If Indiana is 6-6 ahead of this seven-game stretch, they have hope.
However, if any of those games do not go to plan and Indiana finds themselves going into this stretch at 5-7 or even worse 4-8, there's a real situation where the team could leave this stretch being nearly 10 games under 500.
While it's too early in the season for there to be any real death blows to a team's playoff chances, that's about as bad as it can get this early on.
The Pacers badly need to get back on track, as their December schedule is only easier, not easy.
This team is in a hole that is going to get worse; the question is simply whether they can dig themselves back out of it.
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