The greatest looming mystery for the Pacers also offers their greatest potential for improvement. It's an experiment that did not succeed in limited trials last season, but will be more fully explored in the next one with a slightly revised formula.
"If we can pull that off," Victor Oladipo said Thursday, "it will be scary."
Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis do indeed offer a combination that could work splendidly, but "could" remains the operative word. Last season, when they played together for 268 minutes over 51 games, the Pacers' rebounding improved but their overall performance declined significantly.