As preseason basketball rolls around, with the actual NBA season on the horizon, it's worth looking at some potential matchups the Indiana Pacers will have to prepare for. Some of those opponents will be teams that simply offer problems that the Pacers' roster is not equipped to fix or lineups that can attack the very weak points Indiana seeks to hide.
However, there's also a separate category for the rare teams that do something far, far scarier and more confounding.
They do the same things. They prioritize the same battles and they fight the same wars.
In a field of teams that can't play as fast, shoot as much, or move around the court as selflessly, you have the Minnesota Timberwolves, who are preparing to emulate the Pacers' winning formula with the hope that their top-10 player in Anthony Edwards can take them over the top.
The Pacers have reached higher heights, but both teams lost to the same godforsaken franchise in the 2024-25 Playoffs. While Minnesota fell to the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, the Pacers went down in seven brutal games in the Finals.
2025-26 saw them both take a step back, but while Indiana added a star big man in what will likely be seen as one of the most one-sided deals in franchise history, the Wolves tore everything down.
Now, with two teams seeking to outplay the summit they once reached, it will all come down to the three best players from the 2020 draft.
Six years later, the same point guards are compared again
A huge storyline of the 2020 draft was which of LaMelo Ball or Anthony Edwards should go first overall. With D'Angelo Russell in place, Minnesota decided to bring in the better fitting Edwards who also ended up becoming the better player.
A slightly less huge, but no less massive conversation was had around the tiers of point guards in that class. With LaMelo considered to be one of the top prospects, there was a mild drop-off to the next level of guards (not to me; I had Haliburton top-three).
Between Haliburton, Killian Hayes, Tyrese Maxey, Malachi Flynn, Kira Lewis Jr., and Cole Anthony, there were so many different options for so many different archetypes of players to fall in love with. Still, there were two players that were grouped together.
It was Haliburton and Ball – pass-first point guards with strange shooting forms and atypically long arms – that seemed matched up from the start, and it has only continued since then.
The 2020 draft was universally regarded as one of the worst in NBA history at the time of these players' selections. Instead, it has produced multiple all-stars up and down the board. At this point in time, there's truly an argument to be made that the 2020 draft is the strongest in nearly a decade. It has given the league a fringe MVP player, more than five separate all-stars, a Most Improved Player, and a baffling amount of quality role players.
Now, the class's best are leading contenders, forever tied in comparisons.
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