This offseason, so many of the Indiana Pacers' flaws were framed as questions of fit. Would Tyrese Halliburton be back to his former status? Would Ivica Zubac be able to fit in with a team that, at least on paper, did not fit his biggest strengths? Would there be enough shooting on the wings to have the rotations make sense?
Well, the good news is that for the first two or three of those, the answer has been yes. The bad news, however, is that new questions have surfaced. Most notably, after a series of bad preseason performances, Pascal Siakam has forced fans to wonder whether this is the downturn of a 32-year-old hitting father time or if it is simply a hiccup en route to another excellent regular season.
While many of these problems are overblown, it is worth exploring whether Siakam is taking a step back. Across three preseason games, he has shot 1/9 from three, is averaging fewer than two rebounds per game, and has a negative plus-minus in two of those three games while playing almost exclusively with the starters.
It remains to be seen if Siakam is actually regressing, but any downward trend in his rebounding, shot-making, or general aggression heading downhill could have potentially disastrous effects for a Pacers team that has been looking very, very good so far this summer.
It's not falling apart, calm down
While Tyrese Halliburton is clearly this team's leading option, most of the on-ball scoring load has been placed at the feet of Siakam. He has been the team's leading scorer since he was acquired in an excellent trade with the Toronto Raptors, in which all they gave up was Bruce Brown's bloated contract and a handful of mid-to-late first-rounders.
What Siakam is asked to do is, in many ways, thankless. While he is allowed to get shots up, the difficulty of his on-ball load is always far greater.
On a team that categorically avoids isolation basketball, Siakam does what the team decides to grit its teeth through. He scores late in the clock, defends opposing forwards, and runs in transition in a way that matches the team's energy and identity.
For the past two years, the Pacers have relied on him while he has had little to rely on outside of himself. Now that isn't to say that this is a bad team or that Siakam has had no help, but only to say that when things get bad, the team turns to Pascal, and he has bailed them out more often than he hasn't.
Without Siakam playing up to his standards, Indiana would immediately put so much of the scoring load on Tyrese Haliburton and Ivica Zubac.
While it is fair to expect them to be able to carry this load, a huge part of the calculus of keeping all three of the Pacers' best players at their best was having them help each other out. Going from a three-headed monster to only two would make the Pacers exponentially easier to defend and would make the regular season even harder for their best players.
For that reason, all we can really do is hope that Siakam's slow start is limited to the month of October.
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