The 'lifeless' Pacers are 'terrible right now' because they can't stop anybody
Heading into the season, most of us wondered whether swapping coaches and point guards would really be enough to give the Indiana Pacers the super-charged offense that team president Larry Bird has been dying to see. Two weeks into the new campaign, it looks like we should’ve been focusing more on the other end of the court.
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The Pacers got their doors blown off on Monday night, giving up 75 first-half points to the Charlotte Hornets en route to a 22-point defeat. The loss dropped Indiana to 3-4 on the season, and to the verge of the NBA’s defensive basement.
In five full seasons under Frank Vogel, the Pacers finished 10th, first, first, eighth and third in defensive efficiency. Through seven games under new head coach Nate McMillan, Indiana ranks 28th on that side of the ball, allowing an average of 109.3 points per 100 possessions to slot in ahead of only a Boston Celtics team currently operating without ace defenders Al Horford and Jae Crowder, and a New York Knicks team that has been a defensive laughingstock for the better part of the last 15 years.
They let the Hornets score on their first 12 possessions on Monday night, completely devoid of answers for Charlotte forcing cross-matches that required the diminutive Monta Ellis to guard the 6-foot-7, 230-pound Michael Kidd-Gilchrist in the post, or to meaningfully impede the progress of Kemba Walker, who had 10 points and seven assists in nine minutes of first-quarter floor time. Indy put together a late-first flurry to cut an 18-point deficit down to nine, but the game was ostensibly over before halftime.
After a loss to the Milwaukee Bucks last week in their fifth game of the season, Paul George said it’s “embarrassing, the way we’re playing and how we look on the floor,” with C.J. Miles terming the Pacers defense “clueless” and “pathetic.” After the annihilation in Charlotte, George once again lambasted his club’s defensive comportment, according to Nate Taylor of the Indianapolis Star:
Several Hornets baskets were followed by the Pacers looking at each other with either confusion or irritation. In transition, many Pacers ran back on defense without locating the player they were assigned with guarding. George and C.J. Miles, on separate occasions, raised their arms to ask their teammates who was going to defend the opposing guard dribbling up the court. Both times, no other Pacers answered. George and Miles were left to try to stop the Hornets’ dribble penetration.
Miles’ expression throughout the second half was to look up and shake his head in disgust. George voiced his displeasure in the locker room with sharp criticism for how the Pacers were not a cohesive team.
“We’re all out of whack,” George said. “There’s no trust, there’s no chemistry, there’s no belief. We’re kind of just lifeless right now.” […]
“We didn’t get up on screen-and-rolls, we didn’t stop rolls from going to the basket, we didn’t get out to 3-point shooters and we gave them too many easy opportunities,” [power forward Thaddeus] Young said. “They were just getting drives to the basket and we were just giving tick-tack fouls and they were scoring.”
Other than that, though, everything’s going great!
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If you’re of a mind to look for a silver lining to Indy’s awful defensive start, you’re going to be staring at an awfully gray sky for an awfully long time. The Pacers are dead last in opponent’s field-goal percentage. They’re giving up the game’s highest-value shots with relish, ranking 27th in attempts allowed inside the restricted area and tied for 26th in corner 3-pointers allowed. They’re hemorrhaging points all over the floor, standing 23rd in points allowed in the paint, 24th in points allowed on the fast break and 30th in points allowed off turnovers, despite coughing it up on just 14.8 percent of their possessions, tied for seventh-lowest in the league.
As is often the case with defense, everything starts up top, and the Pacers are getting blistered whenever the starting backcourt of Ellis and Jeff Teague share the floor, allowing 107.7 points-per-100 in their 160 minutes together. (For what it’s worth, the Pacers gave up 100.4 points-per-100 last season when Ellis and George Hill, who was shipped out this summer to bring Teague in, played together.)
The struggles of the undersized and defensively underwhelming duo to hold up at the point of attack have led to a trickle-down effect that has made it difficult for interior defenders like Myles Turner to hold down the fort on the back line. From Pacers blog Indy Cornrows:
Neither [Ellis nor Teague] have been even average defenders in their career. Both of them are getting buried on screens, forcing a ton of awkward switches for no reason. In the past, Pacers big men were able to sit back on pick and rolls protecting the paint because George Hill was so adept at fighting through screens. Before opposing guards could decide to drive or dish, Hill was back in their face. Now it’s taking longer for Teague and Ellis to fight through, forcing Turner and Thaddeus Young into an awkward dance of deciding whether to step up on the ball handler and hope the help defense will pick up the roll man, or sit back and concede space for either an open jumper or a driving lane.
There [was] a play in the second quarter of the Brooklyn game where Brook Lopez comes up to set a screen for Jeremy Lin at the top of the key. Lopez sets a rather poor screen but Teague still falls behind as Lin begins to drive towards the basket. Al Jefferson, who was guarding Lopez, plants himself at the elbow to corral Lin. Lopez has begun to roll to the rim but Jefferson is unable to drop back to him because Teague is still trailing. CJ Miles then leaves Bojan Bogdanovic to bump Lopez. Lin picks up his dribble, Teague still behind him, and looks Bogdanovic’s way, causing Miles to jump back out to prevent the three. This gives Lopez a free roll because Jefferson is too late to drop back and the result is a dunk. That kind of play has happened [too] often.
The consistent breakdowns when Teague and Ellis share the floor have led some to suggest that McMillan pull the trigger on a lineup change, moving Miles into the starting five and Ellis to the bench.
The 6-foot-6 Miles — who played the bulk of his minutes at small forward last season and even took on some power forwards when George was moved up to the four but balked at the defensive responsibilities that entailed — might be better equipped to ride shotgun with Teague, and to handle switching multiple defensive assignments in the Pacers’ base coverages, than Ellis, while also offering more spot-up floor-spacing (he’s currently shooting 51.4 percent from deep, and knocked down nearly 37 percent of his triples last year) than Ellis, who perennially flirts with a 30 percent success rate from downtown. And with reserve playmaker Rodney Stuckey sidelined by a right hamstring strain, Ellis might make a bit more sense as a pick-and-roll attacker and second-unit creator working alongside left-block landlord Al Jefferson. It would leave the Pacers’ reserve corps subject to similar defensive problems, but when your starters are falling behind 30-12 and can’t stop the ball, sometimes you have to deal with the first thing first, you know?
The good news for the Pacers is that they’ll get a chance to get back on the same page with a Wednesday/Friday home-and-home against the Philadelphia 76ers. Not only are the Sixers winless, but they’ve turned in the NBA’s worst offense by a staggering degree thus far, scoring an average of 90.3 points per 100 possessions — a full 5.1 points-per-100 below 29th-ranked Memphis, meaning Brett Brown’s club is as far away from second-to-last place in offensive efficiency as the 19th-place Brooklyn Nets are from the seventh-place Toronto Raptors. On top of that, the 76ers will head to Bankers Life Fieldhouse for Wednesday’s game without leading scorer Joel Embiid, as Philly continues limiting his minutes and workload to keep the finally-healthy-and-brilliant former No. 3 overall pick operational throughout his long-delayed freshman campaign.
The bad news: if Indy can’t get their ducks in a row against an Embiid-less Philly, a Pacers team that entered the season with hopes of mounting a real threat to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the East might be too flawed to harbor those hopes for much longer.
“We couldn’t get a stop and we couldn’t get a break,” George said after Monday’s loss, according to The Associated Press. “It’s concerning that they are scoring and no one cares. No one cares. We are looking bad. We are terrible right now.”
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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