Throughout the bowels of Barclays Center on Wednesday evening, one question dominated conversation prior to tip-off between the Brooklyn Nets and Indiana Pacers.
“What’s wrong with the Pacers this season?”
It’s a fair ask, without an easy answer. Rick Carlisle’s team was coming off a Tuesday night loss to the Toronto Raptors that dropped them to 9-13, with worse underlying metrics than that.
Sure, making the Eastern Conference Finals with the league’s second-best offense, per Cleaning the Glass, may have been a rich result for the Pacers last season. But this? The league’s 20th-ranked offense powered by the least efficient season of Tyrese Haliburton’s career thus far?