Will other teams conjure the same magic as the Magic? (Patreon)

Analyzing whether Orlando provided a blueprint for how to lockdown the Pacers

By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper

In a break from what had been the norm, the Pacers suddenly struggled to play at breakneck speed without being loose with the ball. Entering into Sunday's match-up with the Orlando Magic, Indiana ranked top-five in both pace and lowest turnover rate. By halftime, in giving up the ball more frequently than ever, one of the league's speediest teams had mustered to score just 80.0 points per 100 possessions, which was their lowest first-half yield of the season, despite playing at their second-fastest pace. For the first time, they were held to under 45 points at the end of the second quarter. Stretches like this, which can only be described as a mixture of slapstick, hectic, and frantic, explain why. After managing to get one of very few stops against Paolo Banchero on a backdown, the Pacers proceeded to stop themselves, tripping over each other in the open court while also coming up short both around the rim, where Obi Toppin failed to leverage a mismatch, as well as on the perimeter, where Buddy Hield ran into the far-reaching powers of Franz Wagner.

It was that kind of night, in that many of their tactics that worked in Philadelphia, before they had four nights off, suddenly did not against the Magic, bringing into question whether some type of  deficiency was exposed for the Pacers or if the Pacers were simply that inefficient.

As is the case with most things, the answer likely lies somewhere in the middle. After all, in addition to the aforesaid faux pas, in which Wagner poked the ball away from Hield, Aaron Nesmith fumbled a pass from T.J. McConnell with no one in his vicinity, and Tyrese Haliburton, breaking a stretch in which he had thrown 149 passes without committing a turnover, tossed the ball outside of Nesmith's reach immediately following a timeout. Neither of those mistakes, nor when McConnell threw a hit-a-head pass out of bounds or when Smith haphazardly lost possession when making a simple outlet pass, had much, if anything, to do with Orlando's length. That said, there were a number of occasions in which that very same length spooked the Pacers out of taking open shots in favor of driving into what effectively functioned like spinning turbines in the paint. 

In a word: Shoot!  None of the players for Orlando even had a hand up on most of those closeouts. To a certain degree, that's where the fact that Jarace Walker's physicality doesn't often match his physique actually comes in handy. When he gets chased off the line, he can pass on the move, daintily stopping-and-popping from in-between range to throw a pinpoint lob pass over the top of the defense.

Of course, there's a difference between throwing a lob with a guard on the back-side of the action, especially when the guard is late to rotate during garbage time, by comparison to trying to do so when Jonathan Isaac is closing to the rim with his arms resembling rotating blades in a fan -- as was the case in the above example with Jalen Smith.

Still, Jalen Suggs is the same height as Tyrese Haliburton, albeit with a shorter wingspan, and his defense at the point of attack is arguably what got the ball rolling for the Magic (or rather, not rolling for the Pacers). In Philadelphia, when the Sixers started to dial up the pressure, the Pacers went to their go-to play against top-locking, in which Haliburton rejects the stagger and immediately becomes a stack-screener, leaking out to the wing to act as connective tissue. Granted, Mathurin missed the shot from the corner, but the action went off as intended as far as starting Haliburton away from the ball and finding a means for him to get it back, in spite of the extra attention. (Also, shoutout to Tyrese Maxey for loosing track of his fellow Tyrese while switching from the ball-handler to the stack-screener.)

Anyway, the same was not the case with Suggs as his shadow. Just look at this possession from the first quarter, in which Suggs not only was a full-court pest, but also applied counter pressure to him as the screener and then denied him from getting the ball back until there was under five seconds on the shot-clock.

In the end, Haliburton was still able to get off a clean shot, and he deserves credit for the (literal) strides he's made in terms of staying active and sliding into passing windows when he doesn't have the ball, but that also required a lot more exertion, beginning in the first quarter, than what was eventually necessary against Maxey during the second half.

Meanwhile, playing two point guards at the same time also didn't have quite the same effect -- at least not when McConnell was the other point guard. In Philadelphia, when McConnell was on the floor with Haliburton, Joel Embiid eventually took to guarding McConnell so he could sag off and avoid defending in space while basically playing a one-man zone around the rim. To counter, the Pacers used McConnell as the screener, which forced Embiid out of the paint at a point in the game when his willingness and energy to leave the paint looked about a like a teenager getting out of bed in the morning on the first day of school. As a result, with the exhausted big man reaching for the snooze button in the form of a point switch, all it took from Haliburton was a quick screen rejection for him to find Obi Toppin in the dunker's spot for an easy two.

Again, the same was not the case against the Magic, in part, because that cross-match wasn't a thing against the Magic. Instead, with the center defending a center, McConnell is parked in the corner. To his credit, when Haliburton rejected the screen and put the defense into scramble mode, as he so often does, McConnell shot the ball, but the shot wasn't exactly close.

Moreover, when he wasn't shooting the ball, he also wasn't spacing the floor. No one paid him any mind when he was in the weak-side corner, which resulted in another kamikaze drive.

Likewise, if he was standing in the next nearest gap to the pick-and-roll, his defender had no qualms with leaving him to jump-switch onto the ball.

Overall, this brief stretch of minutes obviously wasn't the only reason why Haliburton started the game 0-of-5 from the field with two turnovers in the first quarter, but it certainly speaks to why, as was also the case with Haliburton as the screener, what works in one game may not in the next. In that regard, when looking ahead at what might carry over from Orlando's top-rated defense locking down Indiana's top-rated offense, some aspects will likely be unique to this match-up and, maybe, even just to this game. The Pacers won't run into each other and throw hit-a-head passes out of bounds every night. When Andrew Nembhard is healthy, they'll have other options to mix-and-match the point guard rotation, and it's also possible that, with a quick trigger on the perimeter, they won't get as tied up driving into that same web of length -- that, notably, not every team has.

To that point, the larger concern isn't necessarily the largeness of who they're trying to circumvent on offense, but rather the weight of being so reliant on outscoring their short-limbed defense, especially when Haliburton is carrying the extra burden of added full-court pressure.

In the long run, the question shouldn't be whether other teams can conjure the same magic as the Magic, but rather whether the Pacers can consistently come up with tricks to overcome their own defensive limitations.