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On the tactics of tying the team's single-game scoring record in what was a milestone game for the team's tactician

By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper 

A little over 24 hours before the Pacers were raining down threes and dousing Rick Carlisle with water in celebration of his 900th career win, their opposition was at home in San Antonio, playing the Toronto Raptors on the front end of a back-to-back that would ultimately result in an overtime loss. On the first defensive possession of the game for the Spurs, rookie sensation Victor Wembanyama uprooted himself in the ball-side corner as though he had suddenly sprouted an extra pair of limbs, bothering the drive and closing out to three before peeling to the rim for the block. That's what he does. He takes up space. Even in providing help where it isn't necessarily needed, he has an omnipresence, allowing him to be elastic where others would be tethered.

To combat this, the Pacers were clever, constantly repositioning and distorting his point of tension as a tagger. Just look at this possession against the Golden State Warriors. Similar to the excessive help he showed on the drive against Dennis Schroder, tagging this deep on the roll would normally lead to giving up an open three for most defenders. But, Wembanyama isn't most defenders. His lateral size and seemingly infinite reach allow him to play by a different set of rules, in which he can have his cake and apparently still eat it, too.

That is, unless he has to do so while standing on a spinning plate. During the first half for the Pacers, in which the team amassed 86 points, tying the franchise record for most points scored in a half, Obi Toppin was always on the move, cutting in and around the pick-and-roll with Tyrese Haliburton putting early pressure on the rim. For the game, Toppin was scored 19 points, which was his most since joining the Pacers, but he also made a difference even when he wasn't touching the ball. For example, with Toppin at the weak-side wing, notice how he doesn't just stand at the weak-side wing. Instead, as Haliburton dribbles off the pick, Toppin lifts high behind the action.

In that way, if Haliburton had gotten stopped at the basket and needed to spray the ball out to the perimeter, the closeouts would be longer and Brown would have more space, away from Wembanyama's reach, for the reattack.

Conversely, when the ball was moving toward Toppin's side of the floor, he would make a shallow cut underneath the pick-and-roll, forcing Wembanyama to make a choice about staying to bump or tag the roll while also removing his sprawling tentacles from Haliburton's driving lane.

Turns out, Haliburton still had to use the combination of his low, crafty gather and long strides to squirt past Jeremy Sochan at the nail, but that's quite a bit different from trying to navigate through or around someone who can occupy the entire semi-circle above the free throw line at once.

For the most part, that same principle applied no matter whether Toppin was in the corner or above the break. When the ball was moving toward his side of the floor, he made a run for it -- diverting Wembanyama away from the path of the ball-handler.

Meanwhile, all of that movement in the half-court was compounded by the fact that the Pacers were also running all over the Spurs in transition, tallying 34 fastbreak points, including knocking down a season-high of eight threes when playing in the open floor. To put that number into context, the Pacers led the league in fastbreak points last season, averaging 18.1 per game. On the second night of a back-to-back for San Antonio, Indiana nearly doubled that output. Eventually, with the Pacers moving Wembanyama all over the court and canning every shot in sight, the Spurs attempted to alter the rhythm of the game by pivoting to zone, but that only added to the three-point barrage, as the Pacers connected from deep on three of only four zone possessions.

And yet, during that stretch, as the lead for the Pacers grew to 63-47 with 6:03 still left to play in the first half, Haliburton's reaction to the change in coverage was fitting as a sign of the interplay he has developed with Carlisle in what was a milestone night for his coach. Without even looking toward the bench, Haliburton could be heard yelling "baseline," recognizing that San Antonio was in 3-2 zone. Rather than screening the inside of the zone and carving open a hole for the ball-handler to drive into, as they so often do (and did), this particular change-up involves screening for the ball and setting a flare screen for the wing on the outside of the zone at the same time as a cutter runs baseline into the ball-side corner, creating a 2-on-1 advantage. In this case, Jalen slipped the flare before Brown had made it to the corner, which neutralized that odd-man advantage, but with the Spurs sinking from the top on penetration, Haliburton still managed to shoot them out of the coverage, continuing his hot-streak from his 43-point scoring outburst against Charlotte.

All of which is to say that, from preventing Wembanyama from taking up space by constantly respacing the floor to letting go of the reins in transition and continuing to play even when pet plays don't go as planned, none of this is overly intricate. But the end result -- albeit against an opponent on zero days rest and in combination with other-worldly shooting -- was a final score of 152-111, flipping sides of history in erasing some of the memory of giving up the second-most points ever for the team last week against to Boston by tying the team's single-game scoring record a few days later. As Haliburton noted after the game, Carlisle is "a really smart guy" and "really understands the game of basketball." Part of that understanding, on a night that was capped off with uncapped water, isn't just being fire with pen; it's also knowing when to put the pen down, coaching a team that can be unpredictable without coaching.