INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The Indiana Pacers simply couldn’t wait to get home early Monday.
There’s a slew of possible reasons for that. Maybe they just wanted to get out of Oklahoma City with their split of the first two games in the NBA Finals. Maybe they couldn’t wait to see what finals fever will look like in Indianapolis after a 25-year wait to get back to the title round. Or maybe they just wanted to get back to work.
It’s probably a little of everything — especially the last part.
Yes, the Pacers are tied with the Thunder 1-1 after two games of the NBA Finals. For the lower-seeded team, that’s huge; the Pacers took home-court advantage away by winning Game 1. But they know that if they don’t take care of their own business at home, starting with Game 3 on Wednesday night, it’ll be advantage Thunder again, just like that.
“We’re going to have to be a lot better on Wednesday,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said.
That might sound like coaching hyperbole, but really, it isn’t. The Pacers have yet to have anyone score 20 points in a game in these finals. They’ve led for a total — a total! — of 1 minute, 54 seconds in this series, or just under 2% of the time. (That’s a major improvement over the 0.0001% that they led Game 1 for, in a winning effort, somehow.) And in Game 2, the Thunder held the Pacers without a point in the paint for the entirety of the first quarter.
Points in the paint isn’t a stat that tends to jump off the page. It’s possible that a lot of people didn’t even notice. But consider this: Before Sunday night, more than nine years had passed since the Pacers didn’t manage a single paint point in the first quarter of a game.
“We have to do a better job of getting to the paint,” Pacers guard Tyrese Haliburton said. “It’s a lot easier said than done. … Our offense is built from the inside-out, and we have to do a better job getting downhill. They collapse and make plays from there. I thought we could improve a lot there. But yeah, man, they are flying around. They have got great point-of-attack defenders and great rim protectors.”
For a team that has now won 81 of its 100 games this season (not counting the NBA Cup final loss, since that doesn’t figure into any records), the Thunder somehow tend to get overlooked on the defensive end. Oklahoma City handcuffed the Pacers in the first two games, daring Indiana to take 3-pointers and barely giving up anything easy around the rim.
It starts with bothering Haliburton, which the Thunder have managed to do for the majority of the first two games.
“Most of the guys I guard have the ball most of the time,” said Thunder forward Luguentz Dort, who has drawn the assignment on Haliburton for much of the first two games. “My main thing is to stay in front of him and make everything tough. He’s a great player. He is going to make some tough shots and great reads, so I just have to stay in front of him.”
No team gave up fewer paint points in the regular season than the Thunder. It truly is a clash of styles; the Pacers are averaging 46 paint points in their 13 wins in these playoffs as opposed to averaging 36 paint points in their five losses.
“I think we have been one of the better teams scoring in the paint all year and we have to establish that early,” Pacers forward Myles Turner said. “I think we only had four or six points in the paint in the first half (of Game 2) and that’s not Pacers basketball. When you live and die by that three or mid-range shots, it doesn’t always fare well for you.”
Maybe at home, things will be easier. The Pacers got a split in Oklahoma City; things could be much worse. And now, the Pacers have two days to try to find a way to respond to what the Thunder defense is taking away.
“We’ll watch the film, see where we can get better,” Haliburton said. “We know that the paint is our emphasis and the paint is our friend. The more that we’re able to attack the paint, usually better things happen for us.”
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