Indiana Pacers: 3 bold predictions for 2019-20 season

McMillan, Pritchard will be fired after another 1st-round exit

The Indiana Pacers will sneak into the playoffs because the East is terrible, winning somewhere between 42 and 45 games for no better reason than if Paul George and the Fort Wayne Mad Ants Featuring Monta Ellis could win 42 games in 2016, this squad can do the same four years later.

They will run into Milwaukee or Philadelphia or Boston and they will get swept.

And fans will notice that McMillan hasn’t won a playoff series as a head coach since 2005, he is 1-7 in series and 17-32 (a .347 win percentage, or 28-54 over an 82-game season) in the playoffs and he once got outcoached by Tyronn Lue.

Fans will also notice that Kevin Pritchard is better at making excuses for mediocrity than building a winner without Paul George and Danny Granger on his roster. There will be calls for wholesale regime change.

And that’s how we’ll see the first woman in charge of a front office in the men’s NBA in history.

Kelly Krauskopf will step into the void. She will hire a coach who understands modern basketball. And the team will finally break out of that first-round pit they’ve been mired in for the past four seasons.

But this year? I can only hope that the basketball gods prove me hilariously wrong, because I am praying to them as a fan to make me look dumb as a writer.