Rick Carlisle and the impact of early timeouts (Patreon)

Analyzing the far-ranging effects in the long run of having a short fuse

By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper  

Just as the NBA is notorious for not starting games on time, Rick Carlisle also has a bit of a reputation for stopping games before they've barely started. In his world, it's never too early to call a timeout. In fact, when the Pacers played the Atlanta Hawks on January 12, he wasted no time in putting a halt to (well) time, signaling for his team to return to the huddle after only 42 seconds had elapsed on the clock. At the time (sorry), the Pacers were only trailing by four points, down 4-0, but they had been indecisive with their initial pick-and-roll coverage, giving up an easy lob to Clint Capela. Then, Andrew Nembhard picked up an offensive foul while attempting to target Trae Young in the post, only to be followed up by another defensive breakdown, in which Capela scored at the rim yet again, crashing behind Myles Turner, who had released from the weak-side slot to cover up for the slipped screen.

Apparently, the combination of those errors was enough for Carlisle to decide that he needed to impress himself on the game -- or, at the very least, impress on his team what needed to be executed in the game. So far this season, Carlisle has called nine timeouts inside the first three minutes of action, with three of those early stoppages coming in the last five games.

And yet, the recent heavy use of early timeouts arguably doesn't reflect a building trend on behalf of Carlisle or his level of patience as much as what's been building about his team of late to spur on some of those quick, knee-jerk reactions. As such, after reviewing the surrounding context of every early timeout, here's what can be learned about his penchant for calling them, along with their overall impact.

Defensive Disposition

The reasons for calling timeouts are plenty. For young teams on the rise, teaching can be critical. Sometimes, tactical shifts are necessary. Players get tired. Substitution patterns must be maintained or abruptly altered, and there's always the allure of manipulating rhythm. Put simply, timeouts are like a protective barrier, keeping a team on the right track. When taken immediately out of the gate, though, they are typically more about goading than guiding.

Just take a look at this possession from the regular-season opener, in which no one picked up Deni Avdija filling and attacking from the wing in transition.

Generally speaking, that's the common thread that tends to be the impetus for the early timeouts: defensive disposition. Carlisle doesn't standby when his team starts the game standing by in transition. To that point, when Jalen Suggs went coast-to-coast for a layup without anyone stopping the ball, Carlisle called a timeout. When Collin Sexton did the same, as Myles Turner backpedaled instead of turning and sprinting, Carlisle called a timeout. When Isaac Okoro finished easily around Obi Toppin with a euro-step, Carlisle called a timeout. When Jrue Holiday moseyed into a step-back three, without any pressure being applied to the ball, Carlisle called a timeout. And, most recently, when Dillon Brooks got loose playing loose cannon against a defense that was overloading to Jalen Green, Carlisle called a timeout.

Needless to say, when the defense falls asleep in the open floor, Carlisle doesn't shy away from burning a timeout to provide an early wake up call. Of course, in the case of the transition three from Brooks, that was merely the spark in the powder barrel of listlessness which was apparent to start that game -- and continued to be apparent leading into the All-Star Break. Notably, on the prior two possessions, Pascal Siakam lost track of Jabari Smith on a pindown and then got caught in no man's land on the weak-side, neither helping nor closing out.

It was more of the same in Charlotte, too. When Siakam ran into contact on this off-ball screen, the bench could be heard yelling "help" before a timeout was called less than two minutes into the game. 

Again, the "why" for the early stoppages almost always seems to relate to disposition, perhaps only with the exception of this post-up from Jonathan Kuminga. For the most part, the Pacers typically double from one pass away at the wing so as to keep the ensuing rotations out of the double in front. As it applies here, however, that would mean helping from Steph Curry, who ended up getting hot in a hurry. Noticeably, Aaron Nesmith is hopping in and out of the paint as the low-man to cleanse from getting whistled for a three-second violation, but he never fully commits to trapping. As a result, it seems possible that this timeout was called more for the purpose of explaining or making a change in actual strategy, rather than as a driving force to play with more force.  

At any rate, just as it applies to the season as a whole, the hang-up is tied to the defensive end -- and will continue to be tied to the defensive end, unless some of the early goading that has been increasingly necessary over the last five games can merely be chalked up to playing from behind as a result of looking ahead to the needed break while playing with different lineups and different players. 

Immediate Action 

For every non-action there is an equal and similar non-reaction, or something like that? If the reason for burning the timeout directly relates to disposition, then the hope for the stoppage would be that it ignites a fire leading to immediate change, right? 

Well, that hasn't always happened. 

At the start of the season, Carlisle called a timeout in response to the aforementioned layup from Avdija. On the very next defensive possession, Mathurin and Haliburton both jumped at passes that were never made, as Avdija again coasted to the rim unabated. 

Likewise, after Suggs went coast-to-coast, the Pacers ended up taking three timeouts before the end of the first quarter in what turned out to be a lopsided loss in the wake of a long layover. Granted, the roster has changed quite a bit since then, but there hasn't necessarily been a consistent change in response. On February 6, this was the scene against the Rockets, less than a minute after the timeout was called following the three from Brooks -- which was the last straw before yet another straw was added to the metaphorical straw heap.

Meanwhile, in Charlotte, some of the issues with screen navigation and communication on switch or stays persisted throughout the remainder of the game, including on the very next possession following the timeout (ahem... hopefully, Siakam gets his legs back under him during the break or the Pacers used the break to reconsider what his legs should be doing). 

To be fair, none of this means that the message in the huddle wasn't received, only that the uptake hasn't always manifested in the form of rapid release or, with regard to the loss in Charlotte by comparison to some of the timely stops that were manufactured during crunch-time a game later in Toronto (hi, Ben Sheppard), even consistently as a slow burn. 

Under Pressure 

That said, just because the early timeouts have been called for defensive purposes, doesn't mean that there isn't also an effect on offense -- especially for a team that ranks second in time to shoot, according to advanced-stats website Inpredictable. Tellingly, when the Pacers have signaled for early timeouts, nearly every opponent has taken the opportunity to apply at least some form of token pressure --- with the only exceptions being the regular-season opener against the Wizards, when the Pacers had yet to run all over the league, and the most recent win over the Hawks, in which the ball was advanced to half-court before the timeout was called. Otherwise, the rest of the teams all attempted to choke out the clock. 

And that includes the two games in which Haliburton didn't play. 

For the Warriors, the extended pressure mixed with trapping backfired when a false sense of complacency on the back-side resulted in a wide open corner three for Nesmith, but other teams -- as it pertains to the effectiveness of deploying a full-court pest -- managed to take the Pacers out of what was discussed in the huddle, as well as their preferred play-style. Here, Suggs slows Haliburton down in the open floor and then applies counter-pressure to him as the screener and also prevents him from getting the ball back until there is less than five seconds left on the shot-clock and only after extinguishing several other options.

Put simply, there isn't a guaranteed advantage to drawing something up in the huddle -- at least not when the opponent can automatically set up to suppress what, as a team that aims to play random at breakneck speed, does best. 

Make Some Noise 

By the numbers, the Pacers have scored 0.778 points per possession immediately following timeouts inside the first three minutes of games -- which is a worse mark than their overall yield on after timeout plays (0.999), per Synergy, as well as their offense as a whole (1.078).

That said, there are some caveats. For one, in cataloguing after timeout plays, Synergy includes all possessions following a timeout, including timeouts called by the opponent. That means, some plays could be coming in live-ball situations, when the opponent misses a shot and the Pacers proceed to advance the ball in transition. In that event, when they have the option to run, they may not actually have the need to run through the options of what was discussed in the huddle. Additionally, the early timeout plays, which were hand-tracked and would specifically come with the Pacers inbounding the ball out of dead-ball situations, amount to a grand total of nine possessions. Needless to say, there is a lot of noisiness --as there can always be. Sometimes, players make tough shots out of broken sets. And, in other cases, players just misfire on the open shots that the play was designed to generate. 

For instance, it says nothing about what happened during the timeout that Nembhard passed up stepping through into this shot or that Toppin launched a shot off the top of the backboard.

Plus, timeouts that aren't mandatory are only 75 seconds in length. If the purpose for calling the early timeout is to emphasize the defensive execution (or lack thereof), there isn't exactly going to be a lot of extra time to draw up and explain a nuanced play, outside of what was already included in the game-plan, that's designed to exploit the specific situation at hand.

In that regard, this is the only possession that could maybe be considered as tailored to the opponent. Coming out of the timeout, the Pacers called what they refer to as "two sides," which has been explained at length in a past mailbag video. In essence, it's an Iverson set  with multiple options and scoring opportunities. A guard cuts from wing-to-wing, which then flows into an empty ball screen on one side of the floor, with the option to reject and attack baseline or hit the roller. If that's covered, a boomerang pass gets thrown back to the middle of the floor into a step-up screen for Haliburton to attack against a tilted defense. In this case, though, with Houston denying the back-side step-up screen, Nembhard attempts to relieve the pressure by passing to Turner, who would then toss the ball to Haliburton running by him.

Instead, with Alperen Sengun defending him, Turner catches the pass from Nembhard and immediately flows into what appears to be an intentionally designed fake hand-off, either to catch Sengun leaning or draw an early foul. Whatever the case, that isn't a routinely seen wrinkle out of that play, which suggests that it may have been discussed as an option to look for during the immediately preceding timeout. Barring that exception, the Pacers have mainly kept to their standard fare, which arguably could just as easily be called from Haliburton or the sidelines, in these situations. 

Coming up Short

One of the biggest arguments against burning a timeout early is the potential to not have one in reserve to issue a challenge or advance the ball in case the game gets tight and someone grabs a rebound without enough time to push the ball up the court. That has yet to be an issue for Carlisle this season. The Pacers are 4-5 in the games in which he's called an early timeout and all but two of those games have been decided by 10 or more points. As for the single-digit outcomes, he only took three timeouts when the Pacers edged the Rockets by three earlier this month, and he still had three at his disposal when they were trailing by four with 9:28 to play in Charlotte. 

As such, the counterpoint to those arguments is that, in some of these games, when they seemingly can't do anything right and their opponent can't do anything wrong, they may never get to the point of needing those timeouts in crunch-time if things get too out of hand early. Moreover, just as could be seen in the first quarter following the early timeouts, when they came out of the huddle only to be confronted by pressure, there's also the possibility that the seconds that are saved by advancing the ball could immediately get squandered by having to get into a half-court set against a set defense -- which, even when considering Carlisle's ability to be fire with pen, also disregards the potential drawback of interrupting the flow during crunch-time for a team that operates at full-throttle when hunting opportunities to do exactly that: playing at full-throttle.

For those reasons, there isn't evidence that Carlisle shorted himself in the long run of any of these games with his short-fuse. On the flip side, however, from the general lack of immediate uptake to the downside of playing against full-court pressure and also not necessarily drilling down on small potential gains in points per possession on after timeout plays when the early timeouts are generally being precipitated by defensive breakdowns, there also isn't exactly evidence as to the overall impact that has resulted from having no limits on how early is too early to call a timeout -- at least not without knowing how the players reacted during the stoppage in play. 

If anything, regardless of how the timeouts are managed from here on out, the more important question, especially with regard to three of the last five games and the games immediately following the All-Star Break, is whether the building trend of what has caused the increasing prevalence of the early timeouts can be stemmed before it starts, let alone has to be stopped.

(Special thanks to Casey, a patron of Basketball, She Wrote, who inspired the concept for this article with a mailbag question. Always feel free to send me these types of inquiries, which apparently can even get turned into full-scale articles during what was allegedly downtime for the NBA. Blog don't stop, baby!)