Indiana Pacers: 3 takeaways from Game 4 vs. Cavaliers

1. LeBron is exhausted

LeBron James played a whopping 46 minutes of action last night. That is barely manageable for the average super athletic 20-something in the NBA, let alone a 33-year-old iron man who continually plays deep into the playoffs season after season.

If you watched the highlights alone, but particularly if you closely watched his body language during the passing moments in the game, the man is flat-out exhausted. And not just from this season, this is the corollary of years and years of shouldering it all for his team, now for 15 seasons.

If the Pacers can continue to make LeBron do an unmanageable amount of heavy lifting for his teammates, they can make the game margins large enough that it won’t even matter that LeBron has been uncharacteristically efficient shooting the ball this season. His clutch factor won’t be a factor, because the game won’t be that close.

That is the Pacers’ key to victory moving forward. This is a star-driven league, and it will fall on Oladipo in the end.

Next: Full two-round 2018 NBA Mock Draft

Let’s see if the Pacers have got what it takes in a critical Game 5 on the road.