Ironic Twists of Fate: The Pacers and The Kings

Maybe the respective teams and fanbases have moved on, but...

This was going to be a blog post about analyzing my predictions from before the season, but my prediction that the Pacers would be the best non-Celtics/Bucks/Knicks/Sixers team really stuck out to me as the worst prediction, so far. So, down the road, I will probably go over the others, but this one felt especially applicable given the Pacers struggles so far this season.

Despite Kings and Pacers fans being primarily sequestered to their respective markets, one of the most controversial trades in recent years was when the Pacers and Kings agreed to exchange Tyrese Haliburton for Domantas Sabonis. These two teams found themselves at different points in their respective team construction timelines, and thus it made sense in a lot of ways. It was also a rare player-for-player trade (I know there were others in the deal), since most trades these days involve sell-offs for draft picks and bad contracts.

Kings fans were sad about losing their favorite recent draft pick, who famously wanted to be there in Sacramento. Pacers fans weren’t so sad about losing Sabonis, seeing that their time together had run its course. But the most angry group of shareholders were draft gurus and analytics nerds, who yelled about the malpractice of giving up a bluechip prospect in Haliburton for a lumbering, undersized center in Sabonis. Some of the points made were valid, but the trade happened and people had to live with it.

Since then, there have been some uncanny similarities between the teams, where the Pacers seem to be one year behind the Kings’ trajectory. Let’s look at the similarities, and see what it says about the Pacers season, and how they can get back to their higher-quality basketball from last year.

NOTE: Sorry, Kings fans, I know it’s been a hard season this year. I don’t mean to rub anything in. Go Kings!

The Offensive Juggernaut Seasons

The Kings in 2022-23

After a full offseason with Sabonis as their center and hiring Mike Brown as a coach, the Kings came into the 2022-23 season at full-throttle, lapping the rest of the league with their offensive production. They ranked 1st in offensive efficiency that year (and the highest ever recorded for a team in NBA history up to that point) behind efficient shooting, a good turnover rate, and getting to the line. Fox and Sabonis led the team’s playmaking, while newcomers Kevin Heurter and Keegan Murray were shooting threes with confidence. Eventually, they admirably fought the Warriors in the first round of the playoffs, taking them to seven games despite being a very bad matchup against Steph and Draymond. But this season felt like validation for the trade, and the curse of Vivek was finally broken.

The Pacers in 2023-24

For the Pacers, their version of that came in the following NBA season, where Tyrese Haliburton began the season looking like a modern-day version of Steve Nash if Nash had shot more threes like he wishes he had. For the 2023-24 season, they ranked 2nd in offensive efficiency, and that’s despite Haliburton getting hurt and producing at a much lower rate over the last half of the season.

What helped was a mid-season trade for Pascal Siakam, where he was able to uphold some of the creation burden during these struggles from Hali. In the playoffs, their offense held up, and they were able to impress by beating injured Bucks and Knicks teams, then giving the eventual-champion Celtics more scares than anyone else.

The Unwanted and Unexpected Regression

For both of these teams, it felt like something amazing had clicked. The conversation wasn’t around an offensive regression, because their offense was treated like a known constant. We just wondered if they could prop up their defense to be league average.

The Kings in 2023-24

The Kings offense dropped to 14th in the next season, mainly as shots fell less consistently. Fox, Murray, Heurter, and Monk both saw significant decreases in their TS%, as you can see below:

Fox:     .599 → .567
Murray:  .597 → .569
Heurter: .617 → .564
Monk:    .587 → .564

Also, they went from the 4th highest free throw rate in the NBA in 2022-23 to the 6th lowest, making them more reliant on their slumping shooting, which never came around.

Mike Brown et al were able to improve their defensive output, turning them into an about-average defense, but with the drop in offensive effectiveness, they ended up unable to reach the playoffs again, losing in the play-in to the Pelicans.

The Pacers in 2024-25

This year’s Pacers are in a similar boat on the offensive end, having dropped to 14th as well (again, kind of uncanny the similarities). For the Pacers, they were dominant on 2P% last year, finishing first in the league at 58.8%. This year, they’re at 55.7%, good for 9th in the league, which is still good but not quite the same. But more significantly, the Pacers are 29th in offensive rebounding now, when last year they were 15th.

Now, this might not seem like a big deal, but the Pacers clearly care. They let Jalen Smith go to the Bulls after Isaiah Jackson gave promising minutes in the playoffs as the backup center. They brought in former #2 pick James Wiseman as the third string, and both Jackson and Wiseman are out for the season. So, as quickly as they could¹, they traded for Thomas Bryant from the Heat to finally get a backup center again.

During last season and this season, this is how their offensive rebounding would go with Myles Turner on and off the court (these are percentiles):

       23-24      24-25
On:  17th %ile |  2nd %ile
Off: 84th %ile | 26th %ile

So, yeah. With Myles as the center this year, there clearly needs to be an improvement in the team’s ability to get some value on the offensive boards. But the fact that they relied on the bench to prop their rate up to league average last year shows that it played an important factor to their team’s offensive success.

The good news is that this feels very fixable. They’ve had some injuries to their backup bigs, but if they can bring that up to help them to a top 10 offense, then the Pacers may be able to avoid this slump continuing for the remainder of the season.

Where do the Pacers go from here?

Well, here’s a few ideas:

• They have a negative net rating against the bottom 10 teams (in net rating) in the league, with recent losses to Detroit, Toronto, Brooklyn, and Charlotte. They can start there, by taking care of business.

• Then, Tyrese Haliburton needs to stay on-track. Over his last 13 games, he is averaging 21 points and 9 assists on 48/41/87 shooting, so he’s returned to being the very-reliable shooter and elite playmaker he was before, even if he’s not quite at the same scoring level he was early last season.

• Finally, like I said before, just get a darn rebound. Their defensive rebounding is also worse-than-average, at 22nd in the league. I don’t think they’ll ever be a top rebounding team with Turner at the center, but being bottom 10 for both feels like it has disaster potential (and so far, it has).

Pascal Siakam and Jarace Walker are two of my guys I always keep track of, and I think that the whole team is a lot of fun when things click. They’re only 1.5 games out of the 6th seed now, so maybe they’ve already figured a thing or two out so far. But they’ve got work to do to avoid the disappointment Sacramento had last year.

1. Meaning waiting until the December 15th trade restriction to end