Let’s make some room in the NBA buzz machine for a worthy, overlooked team playing some of the best basketball across the league right now.
Yes, the Detroit Pistons are the game’s hottest team. The Cavaliers have reasserted themselves as an elite force in the East, and beyond. The Lakers were on fire, even before acquiring Luka Dončiċ at the trade deadline, and the Warriors have gotten back into a groove since their own trade-deadline addition of one Jimmy Butler. Even the Denver Nuggets are doing Denver Nuggets things, having found the form reminiscent of their 2023 NBA Championship run.
But it’s the Indiana Pacers, too often overlooked and undervalued, who deserve some serious respect.
Let’s start with their recent history. Unlike every team mentioned above, they are coming off a conference finals berth in last year’s playoffs. And it turns out experience matters: Few teams go from playoff afterthought to real contender in a single season, and runs like the Pacers made last year are often the building blocks for big things to come.
They have the right pieces, too, to be worthy of some respect. Pascal Siakam is a proven winner, NBA champion and reliable star. He might not have the offensive eye-popping performances of a Donovan Mitchell or the catchy moniker of a Jimmy Buckets, but he does have an actual NBA title on his resume. He’s a consistent, solid, reliable star who, like his, doesn’t always get the shine worth of his talents.
Tyrese Haliburton has shown flashes of being the kind of would-be superstar we associate with NBA contenders, and Myles Turner might be one of the most underrated players in the game. Ditto that for their head coach Rick Carlisle, a champion himself.
There’s also the uncertainties of some of the East’s teams not named the Cleveland Cavaliers or Boston Celtics. The New York Knicks, darlings of that city and jealousy guarded by their fans and media allies, still have real, glaring, worrying flaws. Their defense is poor, and, when you rank NBA defenses against top-10 offenses, New York is downright awful.
The Milwaukee Bucks have as much talent as questions, and a head coach with a history of underachieving in the playoffs.
The rest of the East is a combination of question marks and also-rans: the offensively challenged Orlando Magic, the faltering post-Butler Miami Heat, the up-and-down Atlanta Hawks, the bad-but-still-in-the-play-in-hunt Chicago Bulls, and a 76ers team that seems hellbent on pretending this season is somehow salvageable. It’s not.
But the main argument for the Pacers is their play of late, every bit as convincing as most of the other “hottest teams” in the NBA getting more love, attention and buzz.
Since mid-December, when Indiana was 10-15 and a hapless-looking play-in team, they’ve been phenomenal — if ignored. They’ve gone 23-9 since Dec. 13, the third-best record in the NBA over that stretch, with only the Oklahoma City Thunder and Cavaliers ahead of them.
They’re also the seventh-best offense over that time — no surprise for a top-10 offensive team this season — but, more importantly, markedly better on defense: Ninth in defensive rating, putting them, over a 32-game sample size, as a top-10 offensive and defensive team, key indicator of playoff viability.
That they’re very good on offense isn’t a surprise. That they’re also formidable of late defensively shouldn’t be.
The NBA media and fan ecosystem often operates in an echo chamber, fueled by NBA Twitter’s tendency to be self-reinforcing, and NBA media members’ propensity to worry about being wrong, mocked, ostracized.
Narratives matter in the league, and for good reason: Luka the Laker, Playoff Jimmy paired with Steph, Durant nixing a trade to Golden State, Nikola Jokiċ and his team finding their groove, the Pistons rounding into form after years of being brutally bad — it’s all interesting, worthy stuff.
But that sometimes leaves teams that aren’t as interesting, or sexy, or compelling off the court overlooked. Often those teams are far away from the coasts and their larger media following. Often they’re exactly like the Indiana Pacers.
This team made the conference finals last year. They’re one of the hottest teams in the game right now, over a stretch large enough to be a pattern, not a statistical blip. And, at fourth in the Eastern Conference, they’re not staring at some sort of longshot playoff hope (even though oddsmakers still have them as a 40-to-1 underdog to win the East).
Put them on your list of teams to watch, and to take seriously. They’ve earned it, again.
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