Frank Vogel chose to trust in his bench players on Tuesday night, but that trust is being put into question after the coach’s reserve units gave away two big leads in Indiana’s heinous Game 5 loss.
If the Indiana Pacers go on to lose this series — a likely outcome as they trail the Toronto Raptors 3-2 — Vogel’s decision to play a bench unit featuring none of his starting perimeter players and leave those reserves in for a long as he did will be cited as the team’s biggest mistake. There is no doubt that the awful play of the bench players was the largest factor in the team’s fourth-quarter collapse.