2018-19 Finish: 34-48

Season Highlight: Luka! Honestly, there may not be a brighter light in the league right now. Having a guy this young, be this good, on a fairly cheap rookie contract for 3 more years is an amazing start for a team that could use some good news to build around. Even the team not winning as many games as they would have liked and some injuries couldn’t keep fans out of the stands with this guy filling up the stat sheet all year long.

Season Lowlight: Nobody is saying Indiana. Sheed leaving has to be the lowlight of all lowlights. It is easily to highlight the team’s on court struggles or the inability to get the right players around Luka and Nurkic, but Sheed has run this team for years and years – he made it his own and brought a lot of personality to the position.

Best Trade: The Detroit Pistons send Kentavious Caldwell-Pope to the Indiana Pacers. The Indiana Pacers send Meyers Leonard to the Detroit Pistons.
The Detroit Pistons receive 11 GM points. The Indiana Pacers trade -11 GM points.

Leonard was part of a logjam of average bigs behind Nurkic on the Pacers. Flipping him for KCP seemed like a great deal – especially now that KCP looks to resign on a reasonable deal as Meyers is serving the last year of his bigger-than-it-should-be contract. Really liked this move both for team fit and going forward value.

Worst Trade: The Indiana Pacers send Bojan Bogdanovic and Shaquille Harrison to the Philadelphia 76ers. The Philadelphia 76ers send Dwight Powell and Elie Okobo to the Indiana Pacers.

Okobo is supposed to be a solid prospect, but didn’t impress in his rookie season. This is mainly Bojan vs Powell to me – and I don’t rate Powell all that differently than any number of rotation bigs that can run the floor and rebound at a decent rate. Bojan has proven himself to be a solid scorer, capable of being a top option with bench units or a 3^rd option in a main lineup – even on upper tier teams. Then you factor in the existing logjam up front for the Pacers and this doesn’t make much sense. The one saving grace in this move, assuming the Pacers are willing to pay Powell what he wants, is that Bojan looks like he would have bolted for greener pastures – so maybe this was the right move for the long-term afterall.

Other Notable Trades:

The Indiana Pacers send Taj Gibson and Jonathon Simmons to the Utah Jazz. The Utah Jazz send Patrick Mills and Markieff Morris to the Indiana Pacers.

The Pacers really only executed 3 trades of any note last season and this was the third – maybe that lack of transaction activity . Morris will likely leave in free agency and the team would probably prefer that Mills and his ~25 mil over the next two years could just do the same. This trade isn’t of huge consequence, but doesn’t do them any great favors heading forward.

Free Agency:

As previously mentioned, KCP will likely return and Markieff will likely be back. Mike Scott is busy beating people up, but maybe he could be bothered to play next year if the team wants him. Free Agency should be pretty much a non-factor for the Pacers at a large level… the team has a solid 56 mil tied up in Nance, Plumlee, Powell, Mills and Galloway – a group of guys that would struggle to make a decent bench unit… and this is really impeding the team from putting big pieces around Nurkic and Doncic’s bargain deals.

Star:

Luka Doncic – I wanted to go elsewhere after already making Luka the highlight of the season… but I just can’t. There are other reasons for optimism on this team, including a solid NLL Sophomore season from Malik Monk… but Sheed placed an enormous gamble by trading up to #1 in order to get Doncic (and taking him over Ayton), but he was clearly right at this point and it was a masterful final major move from the former GM.

Goat:

When looking at a team with this kind of record, usually one guy will jump out at you really easily. Ultimately I’m going to go with the aforementioned quintet of highly paid bench players. It’s not that every one of them was specifically horrible – but the collection of them soaking up nearly two max salary slots while almost unanimously playing below replacement level… it’s hard to build a successful team (on and off the court) with that.

Draft Grades (from Insider):

#26 Mfiondu Kabengele

This guy was one of the top centers in the draft.  He’s also Dikembe Mutombo’s nephew.  He looks to be a good shot blocker and rebounder.  Not a bad pick for late 1^st round at all.

Grade: A

The Future-

Doncic is in place, outside of a no-brainer blockbuster, you don’t mess with that piece. Nurkic seems like the only other solid starter. There are many other solid role players on this team, but they need to find a true second and third option to go next to Luka. Nurkic may be able to soak up one of those slots, but barring a huge leap from Monk they don’t really seem to have a likely person to get there.