Indiana Pacers: What went wrong against the Heat in the NBA playoffs

Indiana lost 4 straight games, which sent them home early

By Game 4, there wasn’t any uncertainty or anything anyone could do about the fact that Miami would sweep the Indiana Pacers in the 2020 first-round playoffs. On the morning after Game 4, Indiana head coach Nate McMillan was fired, (which also was the morning that protests and boycotts led by the NBA’s top team and Eastern Conference team, Milwaukee Bucks, made headlines across the NBA).

McMillan’s departure was expected after watching him pace on the sidelines in the playoffs, searching for answers as he watched his team get beat every night. Meanwhile, the Heat’s experienced head coach, Spoelstra, didn’t lose any sleep on whether or not his team could succeed in the playoffs, a place he’d been to often and succeeded. Spoelstra coached the LeBron-Wade-Bosh Miami Heat championship team. Although the Heat have had some time away from this Big 3 championship team, they were much better than the Pacers.

The fact of the matter is that everything went wrong in the Pacers-Heat series. Everything went wrong for the Pacers while everything went right with the Miami Heat. Everything went wrong for the fans who had this series in mind as one of the best series and a good matchup between two good Eastern Conference teams.

Hopefully next year the Pacers will have all hands on deck and perform better to match the Heat and the competition in the East. The Pacers should find their way if they keep their talent and hope for Sabonis’ return and the best in their others. But it wasn’t their year this year. They were shockingly disappointing this year, to say the least.