Pascal Siakam, at this point in time, is the Indiana Pacers' best player. With all the uncertainty surrounding Tyrese Haliburton's return from Achilles surgery and recovery, there is no way the power forward doesn't deserve that honor.
Still, it's quite obvious that the car that is the Indiana Pacers runs because of the engine of Haliburton. Siakam is simply an extra gear that the vehicle can go into, flying past similar options to being one of the best teams in the East.
If we follow the car metaphor just a little longer, it's clear that bringing in Pascal in that early 2024 trade brought Indiana to a new level.
Committing to playing Siakam at the five for serious minutes could take this baby into third gear.
The Pacers have already found this market inefficiency. Pascal played 11% of his minutes last year at the five, after spending an average of 1.5% there in his first two (one and a half) years in Indiana. That comes down to just over three minutes a game.
That is clearly not a big enough sample size to use any real data from, but with Ivica Zubac in the fold, it doesn't have to be a big-minute solution.
It only needs to be good enough to allow the Pacers to play their best eight players, instead of arbitrarily adding another center in for the non-Zubac minutes. If they're lucky, it may even become a strength.
Here's why it will.
Identity and overcoming standard wisdom
The Cleveland Cavaliers are the latest team to abandon typical wisdom and reject the positional prototypes that are becoming increasingly rare today. The Peyton Watson deal catapults a power forward to their small forward spots and makes them one of the biggest lineups in basketball.
It's truly a fascinating move, but in a league rapidly abandoning expectations for what a position looks like, the Pacers have relatively normal answers at each spot.
Their point guard plays like a point guard, their shooting guard like a shooting guard, their small forward like a small forward, et cetera.
In that way, they are predictable. They may be excellent, but they are certainly predictable. They will play in a way that teams have decades of film and wisdom to prepare for. They will run in transition and create out of the pick and roll.
That's not a problem. As sports have been showing us for years, new is not always better, and creative roster constructions do not always go well. There is, after all, a reason why that wisdom is common.
However, it's also worth knowing that good teams have an identity; great teams have multiple.
It's a lesson that the Cavs themselves learned a few years ago as the top seed. When things got bad, they couldn't play in a different way. They sunk that season, slowly and tragically, knowing they were going down without knowing how to fix it.
In that way, putting Pascal at the five provides a new way to play within a similar identity. Sure, they can't spam the pick and roll the way they used to, and their rebounding takes a hit, but they rapidly become, well, the most rapid team in basketball.
Indiana used this look frequently in the 2024-25 playoffs en route to a Finals appearance. Part of that was because of the inadequacies of Myles Turner.
Zubac is the better player, but having an ace up your sleeve becomes even more valuable when you're already good at poker.
Using Siakam's strengths as an extra motor for this team would do exactly that.
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