NEW YORK — Back in January, Tyrese Haliburton told me that the Indiana Pacers had been given a heavy dose of their own medicine. They’d picked up 94 feet during their run to the conference finals last season, and now their opponents were applying the same sort of ball pressure with regularity.
The key, he said then, was to “attack pressure with pressure.” You can set screens higher and you can vary who is bringing the ball up, but you cannot let the opponent bait you into slowing down. You need to fight to get into your offense quickly, get downhill and force the defense into rotation.
The Pacers were not always great at that. Six weeks into the season, they were 9-14, with an offense that ranked 21st overall and was weirdly underwhelming in transition. But then they course-corrected. They got healthier and ironed out their turnover issues, and Haliburton returned to his all-NBA form. They won 70% of their games in the last four months of the season, knocked out the 64-win, top-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers in five games and, entering Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals at Madison Square Garden, were one win away from the NBA Finals and drawing statistical comparison to the Showtime Lakers.
Which is why their poor showing against the New York Knicks’ ball pressure on Thursday was so surprising.
“I thought they picked their pressure up today,” Indiana wing Aaron Nesmith said after the 111-94 loss. “And we gotta find a way to fight that pressure with our own and hit first.”
Game 5 was the Pacers’ least efficient game of the playoffs. They turned the ball over 20 times — their most this postseason and six more than their total in any of the previous games in this series — and rarely looked like the fun, free-flowing team that had piled up 130 points against the Knicks two days earlier.
“We just weren’t us,” Pacers wing Bennedict Mathurin said. “We weren’t the Pacers. We didn’t play with force. We weren’t relentless.”
They made poor decisions in transition. They threw errant entry passes in the halfcourt. They missed layups and attempted far too many contested, off-balance floaters. It was uncharacteristic of Indiana, and New York had a lot to do with this. The Knicks are not typically the most aggressive defensive team, but, just like at the end of Game 3, they dialed up their ball pressure when the situation demanded it. Mikal Bridges was primarily responsible for hounding Halliburton, and there was a collective effort to make the Pacers’ ballhandlers feel them. In the fourth quarter, reserve guard Landry Shamet forced two turnovers in less than a minute. The crowd chanted his name.
“We just didn’t bring the fight to them the way they did to us,” Indiana forward Pascal Siakam said.
Haliburton followed up his Game 4 masterpiece with eight points on 2-for-7 shooting, two rebounds and six assists in 32 minutes. He attempted only two 3s. Part of what makes him special is his willingness to get off the ball quickly, so a teammate can attack with an advantage. He may have been too willing to get off of it on Thursday, though, given how quickly those advantages disappeared.
Haliburton said he had a “rough night” and needed to “be better setting the tone, getting downhill.” He praised New York for mixing up its pick-and-roll coverages and being more aggressive, but took the blame for what had gone wrong.
“Put it on me,” Haliburton said.
The Knicks did not have a lights-out performance offensively, but they took care of the ball better than the Pacers did. As Indiana guard Andrew Nembhard noted, the Knicks also won the rebounding battle “pretty heavily, and that kind of plays into our whole attack.” The Pacers want to run, which means they need to come up with steals and defensive rebounds.
“That wasn’t a great defensive game for us,” Haliburton said. “Our pace definitely goes down when we’re taking the ball out of the rim the whole game, so we gotta get stops. That’ll jumpstart our offense, allow us to play faster.”
Indiana coach Rick Carlisle said that “there were a multitude of things that were going wrong.” The good news is that they’re all connected: Get better on the margins, and offense will come easier; fix the offense, and you can set your defense.
“I think we just had lapses, pretty much every possession,” Nesmith said. “One guy didn’t box out, one guy let themselves get backdoored, there was no press-ups. There was always something, every possession, whether it was offensively or defensively, so I think that’s completely on us.”
New York saved its season by defending with physicality and making the Pacers uncomfortable. It was nothing they hadn’t seen before, but they did not handle it the way they’d like to. After getting “punched in the face like this,” Nesmith said, all they can do is respond in Indianapolis on Saturday. He said there is “no doubt in my mind” that this will happen.
For a team that missed an opportunity to punch its ticket to the finals, Indiana seemed remarkably calm, cool, collected and confident. This is a reflection of its coach’s consistent messaging. After the crazy comeback in Game 1, Carlisle began his pass conference by saying, “This is Day 1 of 13 days.” After taking a 2-0 lead, he said, “It’s Day 3 of 13 days.” Thursday was Day 9, and the series was never supposed to be easy.
It’s also a reflection of the arc of Indiana’s season. “We’ve had a lot of low points,” Siakam said, and in early December the Pacers did not resemble the they’ve been for the past five-and-a-half months. Siakam said he’s proud of how, “when things were going bad,” the team stayed connected and played hard. This was a bad game, but hardly a low point.
“We’re up 3-2 in the conference finals,” Siakam said. “It’s amazing.”
The Knicks stepped up their game and their intensity level on Thursday, and Indiana played well below its standard. In Game 6, the Pacers must be prepared for New York to have the exact same approach. And they must do everything in their power to play to their identity in spite of it. This is not the first time that they’ve had to find themselves.
“If we play Pacers basketball, everything will take care of itself,” Mathurin said. “We’ve been winning, we’re going to keep winning, but we have to be aggressive. We have to be the aggressor.”
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