After the Tyrese Haliburton-less Indiana Pacers trudged their way through a 19-63 season just one year after their epic 2025 NBA Finals run, the basketball world was set ablaze with criticism of President of Basketball Operations, Kevin Pritchard.
Pritchard made the decision to deal Indiana’s 2026 first-round pick with a top-4 protection in a mid-season swap for star big man Ivica Zubac, a pick they’d ultimately relinquished to the Los Angeles Clippers when it fell just outside of their range at No. 5 overall.
Pritchard perfectly understood the gravity of his mistake, later apologizing to the fanbase via X for losing the pick.
I'm really sorry to all our fans. I own taking this risk. Surprised it came up 5th after this year. I thought we were due some luck. But please remember - this team deserved a starting center to compete with the best teams next year. We have always been resilient.
— Kevin Pritchard (@PacersKev) May 10, 2026
Even still, it became hard to view the deal as anything but a nightmare following the draft lottery.
However, a recent deep-dive into Pritchard’s move from professionals in the decision science space could allow for Pacers fans to cut the 58-year-old executive some slack heading into the 2026-27 campaign.
Kevin Pritchard put Pacers’ title chase first
Hindsight is 20/20, and it’s easy to poke holes in the judgement of a franchise’s front office after all the dust has settled.
While analyzing Pritchard’s judgement with regard to the Zubac blockbuster, Harvard decision science professor Dr. Jennifer Lerner and GiveWell’s senior researcher Dr. Brian Gill left a reminder that a negative result of a decision does not necessarily determine its quality in that moment.
“Pritchard could not control how the lottery balls fell,” Lerner and Gill wrote Friday morning for The Athletic.
“If Indiana truly had about a 52 percent chance of keeping the pick, then there was also nearly an equal chance of losing it. The fact that the worst outcome occurred does not, by itself, prove the trade was a mistake.”
Pritchard took a chance and came up short from the perspective of planning for the future, but let’s not forget that one of the main motives for completing this deal was a deafening sense of urgency.
No one knows whether or not this current iteration of the Pacers will get back to the Finals stage, but Pritchard did his best to address a crucial position of need with what would virtually come down to a coin flip.
At 29 years old, the 7-foot, 240-pound Zubac has developed into one of the more well-rounded two-way centers in the entire association, averaging 16.8 points and 12.6 rebounds while placing 7th in Defensive Player of the Year voting during his last full season with the Clippers in 2024-25.
He was a massive addition for a group looking for their next true rim deterrent following Myles Turner’s departure for the Milwaukee Bucks in the summer of 2025.
Pacers’ downfall resulted from a very human reaction.
Aside from his roster decisions, Pritchard was also a victim of believing things would even out after Haliburton’s deflating Achilles tear in Game 7 of the 2025 Finals.
As evidenced in his address to the fans, Pritchard’s thought process was that the Pacers were due for a break given their previous struggles.
Lerner and Gill recognized this to be the gambler’s fallacy, or a common belief that good luck is sure to appear after an extended stretch of negative outcomes.
Should Pritchard have realized that Haliburton’s injury or the Pacers’ unfortunate season had no impact whatsoever on the actual draft lottery? Sure. But the gambler’s fallacy has fooled plenty in the past, and it will continue to lure front office executives into a false sense of security moving forward.
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