Why The Indiana Pacers Should Be The New Blueprint For NBA Title Contention

If you’ve been following my coverage here at Sportscasting all season long, you’ve likely picked up on my formula for winning basketball in this current CBA structure. To be a great team in 2024-25, you need the right blend of talent, balance and depth. Now just one win away the from their first NBA Finals appearance in 25 years after winning Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals to take a 3-1 series lead, the Indiana Pacers are the perfect embodiment of this illustrious blend. Every team hoping to compete for the grand prize in the next few years should follow their lead.

Talent

Once upon a time, to meet the “talent” threshold necessary to be a heavyweight, a team needed three star-caliber players (see the Heatles). However, given the current salary restrictions put in place by the league, the sweet spot is now a duo rather than a trio.

For the Pacers, their leading man is Tyrese Haliburton. Coming into the postseason, Haliburton was wrongfully tagged as “game’s best closers and brightest decision-makers in the process.

After dropping a winnable Game 3 against the New York Knicks, Haliburton responded by pitching the perfect outing, tallying a triple-double unlike any other.

Tyrese Haliburton of the @Pacers is the first player in NBA history to have:

30+ points
15+ assists
10+ rebounds
5+ threes made
0 turnovers

…in any game, regular season or playoffs. pic.twitter.com/LApIICZmZK

— OptaSTATS (@OptaSTATS) May 28, 2025

If there are any more questions about Haliburton’s viability as a No. 1 option for a contending team, those thoughts should be written on a piece of paper and discarded in the nearest garbage can.

His partner-in-crime, Pascal Siakam, is one of the most under-discussed top 25 players around. Since ing Indiana, Siakam has rekindled his defensive intensity from his early days with the Toronto Raptors (highest Defensive Estimated Plus-Minus since his championship season in 2018-19), sped up his post touches to make them more palatable within the Pacers’ free-flowing offense (lowest time of possession since 2017-18, per NBA.com) and improved his 3-point shooting to enhance the team’s floor-spacing (career-high 38.9 percent 3-point shooting this year).

Between the two of them, the Pacers have enough top-end firepower to give themselves a chance against any opponent.

Balance

In my recent ranking of the best role players of the 2025 Playoffs, none of the Pacers’ complementary guys made the final cut. It isn’t because they aren’t great. Rather, it’s a byproduct of their shared splendor and willingness to adhere to their specific duties, which minimizes their overall individual impact.

Among Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith and Myles Turner, the Pacers’ trio has the perfect skill-set to give Indiana a well-balanced five-man lineup next to Haliburton and Siakam. As a reminder, here is my checklist for what a balanced five-man lineup looks like in 2024-25.

Haliburton is a good enough floor general to anchor a high-level offense on his lonesome (on-ball creation, check). But when he does need some relief, both Siakam and Turner are more than capable of generating their own offense. The same goes for ball-handling with Siakam and Nembhard (check).

As for spacing, four of their five starters are shooting over 38 percent from downtown on respectable volume this postseason. Haliburton is the only one who isn’t and he’s still a career 39.2 percent 3-point shooter (check).

As a team, the Pacers don’t get to the rim a ton (20th in rim frequency, per Cleaning the Glass). But four of their five starters average at least five drives per 36 minutes. So, Indiana has enough guys who can get two feet in the paint and put the defense in rotation. Turner is only at 1.8 drives per 36, but he’s still better at putting the ball on the floor than most centers in the association (check).

Indiana also has a good bit of size in its starting five. Turner is damn near 7 feet tall. Siakam is 6 feet 9 inches with a 7-foot-3 wingspan. Nesmith can guard up or down. Nembhard plays bigger than his 6-foot-4 frame suggests. And the weak link of the bunch, Haliburton, is still a 6-foot-5 point guard (check).

Nesmith and Nembhard are a pair of point-of-attack pests. Nesmith uses his strength and stays attached to ball handlers to avoid conceding advantages. Meanwhile, Nembhard leans on his quickness and savvy (he’s also a great pick dodger himself). So, you can put a check next to perimeter defense.

On the flip side, Turner and Siakam have enough length and verticality to bother shots around the rim (check). Lastly, all five of them are cerebral players who understand their roles within the team scheme and how to execute, as evidenced by them being the second-best five-man lineup to play at least 100 minutes this postseason (check).

Depth

Along with their formidable starting five, the Pacers also have a handful of reliable guys off the bench (tied for fourth in bench points per game this postseason). T.J. McConnell has been anchoring Pacers’ bench units with his ingenuity and relentless hustle since the start of the decade. Together, he and Bennedict Mathurin are the team’s premier rim-attacking non-bigs (top two in rim attempts per 75 possessions on the team).

They also have Obi Toppin — an aerial artist whose play-finishing fits well in Indiana’s run-and-gun attack. Head coach Rick Carlisle has also been able to harness his size (6 feet 9 inches) and verticality for small-ball lineups with Siakam, which serve as an off-speed pitch against certain matchups or during the non-Haliburton minutes.

Ben Sheppard was a steal late in the first round of the 2023 NBA Draft, combining a pure shooting stroke (40.9 percent from three this postseason) with irable defensive intensity. And while Jarace Walker’s minutes have been inconsistent to say the least, he’s still a former top-10 pick from the same class as Sheppard who is oozing with potential and flashes of brilliance. Heck, even Tony Bradley has come in to provide size and rebounding agains the Knicks.

That’s six bench players right there, not even counting Thomas Bryant (who’s also played meaningful playoff minutes for them at various points).

The Pacers Are Very Similar to A Former NBA Champion

Speaking of Carlisle, the basketball genius had his first stint as an NBA head coach during the early 2000s with the Detroit Pistons. While he didn’t get to captain their 2004 championship run, he did lead them to the Eastern Conference Finals the season prior.

This Pacers team isn’t all that different from the Pistons’ 2004 title team. Yes, they win in different ways than the Pistons did back then — they’re fast-paced and geared toward offense, while Detroit was a prodding unit that leaned more on its defense. But they’re still very similar from a roster-building perspective.

Those Pistons teams were led by a misunderstood star point guard in Chauncey Billups (who actually has a lot in common with Haliburton), and Mr. Big Shot was flanked by a bunch of guys who fit perfectly alongside him.

That team had the privilege of hoisting the Larry O’Brien Trophy, despite not boasting an obvious top-five player. The Pacers have a chance to follow in their footsteps, sitting just five wins away from their first title in franchise history.

And they’ve gotten this far by building a talented, cohesive, well-balanced group, a strategy every team sitting at home right now should be figuring out how to emulate.