Indiana Pacers: 3 candidates for a breakout season in 2019-20

Myles Turner

Myles Turner is currently playing for USA Basketball in advance of the FIBA World Cup and that means he’s getting a chance to learn some things about big-man basketball from national team coach Gregg Popovich.

Popovich is the same guy whose tutelage developed Tim Duncan into arguably the greatest power forward ever to play the game and whose coaching made David Robinson a two-time NBA champion.

Turner’s weakness in Indiana has always been his tendency to disappear on offense. He’s only cracked 1,000 points in a season once, in 2016-17.

He’s too timid when trying to attack the basket, never shooting more than 30 percent of his shots from three feet and in, according to Basketball Reference, and he is a mediocre finisher for a guy his size.

He took way too many shots from the short mid-range between three and ten feet out and hit a woeful 44.5 percent of them.

But Turner is also a 38.8 percent 3-point shooter. If he ever gets into a modern NBA offense rather than the Dark Ages long-two mess Nate McMillan runs, Turner could evolve into something like an upgraded version of what Brook Lopez did with the Milwaukee Bucks last season.

Turner is the only one of the three players we’ve discussed here whose leap is entirely dependent on his coach’s willingness to let him be the player he can become; Bitadze’s question is one of raw talent while Holiday’s is one of proving that he’s adjusted to the pro game.

We already know what kind of player Turner is. The only question is do the coaches, and will they let him shoot more from long range and become a true scoring stretch 5?

If so, not only does that answer the question of how Turner and Domantas Sabonis will share the floor, it also means a nice bump to the offensive rating of a team that was 18th in that stat last season and hasn’t cracked the top 10 in the league since 2012.