After a dream season, the Indiana Pacers still have many roster spots that could use an upgrade. Here’s a look at the directions they could go with the 23rd pick in the 2018 NBA Draft.
There’s almost certainly a segment of the Indiana Pacers fanbase that thinks everything that happened this season was terrible.
Sadly, the NBA has taken on the old Tiger Woods adage that if you come in second, you’re just the first loser. By this logic, other than the two or three teams that actually have a prayer of winning it all, everyone else should be accumulating as many losses as possible.
It’s an approach that’s antithetical to everything about sports that we should hold near and dear to our hearts, it’s completely ridiculous…and also isn’t.
Of course the Pacers would take this season over a 28-54 finish 100 times out of 100. Victor Oladipo established himself as a superstar, and the team now feels it has a real, honest-to-goodness young core to build around moving forward.
Building around that core also just got a whole lot more difficult. Instead of adding, say, Michael Porter Jr. or Trae Young to take the place of the pedestrian Bojan Bogdanovics and Darren Collisons of the world, they’ll be looking at a very different group of guys. Indiana has also never been a prime free agent destination, so the draft is the lifeblood of what they do.
With that it mind, here are the top five realistic options for the Pacers at the 23rd pick in the 2018 NBA Draft: