The Indiana Pacers made some big changes in the 2019 offseason, but will it translate to success on the court?
The Indiana Pacers‘ two-year run with a team that won 48 games and made the first round of the playoffs in two consecutive years has come to an end, with a mini-roster overhaul that keeps the foundation — Victor Oladipo and Myles Turner Featuring Domantas Sabonis — in place while completely changing the faces surrounding those three returning players.
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The Pacers lost Thaddeus Young, Bojan Bogdanovic and Darren Collison from their starting lineup.
They lost Cory Joseph and Tyreke Evans from the primary bench rotation and saw Wesley Matthews leave like the half-season trade deadline rental fans and the team knew he would be after Oladipo got hurt last season.
Indiana drafted Goga Bitadze, a prospect from Georgia who could be Nikola Jokic or Nikoloz Tskitishvili, and he’ll be competing for minutes with a stacked Indiana frontcourt of Turner, Sabonis, T.J. Leaf, and T.J. Warren, all better-established under a coach in Nate McMillan, who has proven a poor developer of young talent.
They traded what was functionally a bag of used basketballs and a tenderloin sandwich for Warren, then turned around and used the second-round draft picks they snookered out of the Suns to trade with Milwaukee and get Malcolm Brogdon.
Then, as much for insurance against Oladipo’s quad tendon never coming back to full strength, the Pacers went out and got Jeremy Lamb.
And oh by the way, they also landed T.J. McConnell just to say they have three guys named T.J. on the team, because it wasn’t confusing enough when they had Solomon Hill, Jordan Hill, George Hill, and Paul George.
You will never convince me that was anything other than a giant troll job by Larry Bird to flummox Pacers broadcaster and Bird’s former Celtics teammate Quinn Buckner on air.
But what’s a fan to make of all this confusion? Let’s look at the three biggest takeaways and lessons learned from this offseason.