Sad News: Indiana pacers player cant play again due to…
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The first thing to understand is that the Indiana Pacers’ track record in free agency has not been great. Throughout their nearly six-decade history, the Pacers have consistently been competitive and rarely been awful. However, they’ve always been in Indiana, which isn’t a region where top-tier talent tends to want to live or work. When the best player you’ve ever signed on the open market is arguably David West, that tells a lot about where you are in the hierarchy of superstar destinations.
Pundits and punters will engage in plenty of debate over the price Indiana paid Wednesday to make Siakam a Pacer — most notably, whether moving three first-round picks for a player slated for unrestricted free agency at season’s end represents a worthwhile gamble.
The devil, as always, is in the details. The Pacers will reportedly send the Raptors their own 2024 first-round pick (top-three protected); another 2024 selection, whichever one winds up the least favorable (read: worst) of the picks belonging to the Jazz, Rockets, Clippers and Thunder (a rat-king rights tangle that stretches back to 2019, winding its way through the deals that landed, among other things, Paul George in Los Angeles, Russell Westbrook in Houston and Derrick Favors’ salary in Oklahoma City); and the Pacers’ 2026 first-rounder (top-four protected, with those same protections rolling over into 2027).
As it stands, that would amount to the Pacers sending Toronto the 18th and 27th picks in this June’s draft, according to Tankathon — picks that could wind up closer to the end of Round 1 if Indiana improves and as the Clippers and Thunder vie for the West’s best record — and, at best, the fifth pick in 2026 or 2027.
That’s not nothing. For all we hear every year about the relative projected strength or weakness of a given draft class, teams can and do find gold late in the first round (like, for example, the Raptors plucking Siakam out of New Mexico State with the 27th pick in 2016). If things go south in Indianapolis in two years’ time, you can bet Pacers president of basketball operations Kevin Pritchard and Co. will wince at handing over a potentially valuable mid-lottery pick smack in the middle of Haliburton’s prime.
What this deal represents, though, is a different kind of bet for the Pacers. It’s a wager that this pre-prime version of Haliburton — the one who has led them to the NBA’s No. 1 offense and an 11-5 record against Boston, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Miami and New York — is good enough to justify pushing some chips into the middle of the table right now.
It’s also a wager that, after playing in some of the most spacing-cramped and shooting-devoid environments the NBA has had to offer over the past few years, they can make Siakam feel like he’s somehow teleported to a harmonic new plane of offensive existence.
