BOSTON — Following his team’s Game 7 victory over the New York Knicks in Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Indiana Pacers coach Rick Carlisle proclaimed his team to be “the uninvited guest” of the four franchises to advance to the 2024 NBA conference finals.
The problem with uninvited guests, though, is they don’t always know how to act. The Pacers hung around with the Boston Celtics in Game 1 and put themselves in position to win multiple times, but lost 133-128 in overtime because of unforced mistakes in important moments.
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On Tuesday, the Pacers committed 22 turnovers. Two of All-NBA point guard Tyrese Haliburton’s three came with the game hanging in the balance: one with 27.7 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter and another with 1:02 remaining in overtime. While Haliburton made some big plays to help the Pacers build a lead, the fourth-year point guard remained his own harshest critic less than 24 hours after the loss.
“Throughout this playoff run, I’ve had, I think, some really good games and some of my worst games of the whole season, to be honest,” Haliburton said in a Wednesday news conference at the Pacers’ hotel. “And I think just understanding that that happens through the course of this and win, lose, good game, bad game, they’re all lessons. Like, it’s my first playoff run, I’m learning a lot.
“And, I think yesterday, honestly, it sucks that it happened, but it’s good for me. It’s really one of the first playoff games that I really feel like, ‘Man, I f—– it up. It’s on me.’ So, it’s good to learn. I’m 24. I got a lot of time, but I’m trying to win right now, so I’m just trying to learn every day, learn from every game.”
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The easiest way for the Pacers to put themselves in a position to beat the Celtics in Game 2 is to take better care of the ball.
The Celtics were the class of the NBA this season, dominating opponents on offense and defense. Headlined by All-Defensive Team members Jrue Holiday and Derrick White, the Celtics defense was built on a foundation of elite, versatile point-of-attack containment.
But while the Celtics allowed the third-fewest points per 100 possessions in non-garbage time minutes, per Cleaning the Glass, they did not force many turnovers. Opponents coughed it up on just 12.3 percent of their possessions, fourth-lowest in the NBA. There were only three regular-season instances of Celtics opponents turning the ball over 20 or more times, with the Minnesota Timberwolves committing a season-high 23 turnovers in an overtime win over on Nov. 6.
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“As a team, they don’t turn people over a lot. They’re just very solid,” Pacers backup point guard T.J. McConnell told The Athletic after Tuesday’s game. “So I think it might have been a little bit of carelessness on our part. Obviously, the way we play, we’re going to have turnovers, but 22 is way too many. So we have to kind of look at the film and see where we can clean it up in those areas and get better.”
After re-watching Game 1 and charting each of the turnovers, Carlisle and the Pacers coaching staff came to a staggering realization.
“We had 22 turnovers. Seventeen of the 22 were when the shot clock was at an average of 15.1 seconds,” Carlisle said on Wednesday. “So, there were only five possessions where the clock was under 10.
“When the clock’s at 15, we get a chance to keep working the possession and keep trying to make it hard on them. We totally lost those opportunities. So, I don’t know the number of turnovers that were unforced, but a lot of them were, and that stuff is stuff that’s fixable.”
Haliburton took the blame for his two miscues late in the game during his postgame news conference, but his other turnover came on an unforced error in the first quarter.
Pacers rookie Ben Sheppard committed a silly turnover on a pitch-ahead pass in the second quarter, as well.
As McConnell noted, the Pacers will take risks early in possessions to create their breakneck pace and generate quick looks at the start of the shot clock. But those two turnovers represent the type of errors the Pacers should easily avoid in Game 2.
“They don’t force a lot of turnovers, but they do a great job of staying in front, showing bodies,” Haliburton said on Wednesday. “But I do feel like a lot of our turnovers were more on us than them. And when you watch the film, I think that a lot of people would agree with that. We had a lot of boneheaded passes out of bounds. I dribbled off my foot like three times, just some things that we can correct and we will going into tomorrow.”
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More meaningful improvement, however, can be found by working deeper into the shot clock on more offensive possessions.
It’s not in the Pacers’ best interest to slow the pace. Pushing the tempo is a core part of their identity and made them one of the league’s best offensive teams all season. But in situations when the Celtics get back in transition, the Pacers need to continue to use their pace deeper in their half-court offense to make the Celtics work for the entirety of a possession.
Turnovers like this one from Myles Turner in the third quarter, when he attacked Jaylen Brown one-on-one too quickly instead of keeping the ball moving, need to be eliminated.
“I think it’s important we get to the second or third action,” Haliburton said on Wednesday. “I think what makes our offense so elite is we’re not a one-action team. There’s a lot of teams in the NBA who run one action, pull it out and run the same action.
“I think what we do so well is we run an action. It’s not there, we swing it through, get to a (dribble handoff) or a blur screen, and it comes back and we run three or four actions. That’s what makes us so, so tough to guard. So I think the more that we can do that, the better.”
For example, the Pacers did well at the start of this fourth quarter possession, but reserve forward Obi Toppin lost his patience and forced a drive against Jayson Tatum that resulted in a turnover with 10 seconds left on the shot clock.
The Pacers aren’t likely to beat the Celtics with a stout defensive performance, so they will have to perform even better offensively than they did in Game 1.
They need to regularly string together offensive possessions in which they push the ball up the floor and then flow into fast-paced offensive actions that force the Celtics to defend long enough to make a mistake and yield the Pacers an opening. This possession at the end of the first quarter is proof:
“I just feel like the way we play, going deep in the shot clock, it just creates confusion,” Toppin said. “We move the ball, we screen, roll, and, yeah, we give up good shots for better shots. And that’s what (Pascal Siakam) did. He is obviously an elite scorer. He could have shot that elbow shot, but he saw that I was open and passed that ball.
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“That just shows what type of team we are. Try to get everybody involved, want to see everybody be successful and it’s fun playing that way.”
The Pacers’ ball movement, player movement and screening were not perfect on that possession either, but they found an easy look for Toppin through unselfish play and constant movement around the floor.
Pulling off an upset victory in Game 2 will require a much higher level of precision than the Pacers brought to Game 1. It might be the only way for them to fully embody their role as the conference finals’ uninvited guest.
(Top photo: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)
