LOS ANGELES — Whenever he’s asked how the Pacers have turned their season around, the Rick Carlisle‘s explanation so often centers on his team’s resilience.
It is perhaps the quality Carlisle most admires in his players — the fact they continually dig their way out of sizable deficits and generally respond well and recover after even embarrassing defeats. They leaned on that after a 10-15 start, and since Dec. 8 they’ve only lost back-to-back games once, winning 19 of 26.
But after Saturday’s 124-117 loss to the Lakers in a game in which Los Angeles was missing both LeBron James and newly acquired superstar Luka Doncic, Carlisle had reached the limit on his ability to tolerate watching his players have to summon so much of that resilience because of crises of their own making.
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“You cannot survive doing this and having these kinds of poor starts,” Carlisle said. “We gotta look in the mirror. I’ve gotta look and consider everything. We gotta be better at the beginning of the game. We’ve gotta go harder and we’ve gotta fight harder.”
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Saturday’s was the Pacers’ worst start on this four-game western road trip but not by much. They found themselves down 44-22 at the end of the first quarter and by as many as 25 points early in the second, but that wasn’t uncharted territory. They were down 42-22 at the end of the first quarter to the Clippers on Thursday in Inglewood. They also lost the first quarter 27-18 to Portland — falling behind by as many as 11 points. In Utah on Monday, they fell behind 28-13 to start the game and had to rally to finish the first quarter down 32-24.
They still managed to come out of the trip with a 2-2 split thanks to dramatic comeback wins against both the Jazz and the Clippers, and they rallied back to get within four points of the Lakers in the third quarter and five in the fourth before the Lakers were able to put the game away on Saturday. Thanks to the comeback wins, the Pacers return home with a 29-22 record which keeps them in fourth place in the Eastern Conference with a 1 1/2 game lead on the fifth-place Bucks going into Milwaukee’s Sunday game against the 76ers.
Still, the numbers from the Pacers’ bad starts this week are jarring.
If those four first quarters had amounted to a full game, the Pacers would’ve lost it 145-86.
This hasn’t been a year long trend. Before the road trip began, the Pacers had a +5.4 net rating in first quarters for the season which was its best rating net rating in any quarter. But this week their first quarters were so bad the net rating edge has nearly disappeared and is now down to +0.3.
“We’ve gotten off to slow starts this whole trip,” point guard Tyrese Haliburton said. “We’re probably letting our offense dictate our defense a little too much, shots not falling. It starts with me.”
Indeed it does, as Haliburton’s first quarters this week have been brutal. The Pacers’ franchise player was scoreless on 0-of-4 shooting with zero assists, posting a -18 plus-minus figure in 7 minutes and 58 seconds on the floor in Saturday’s first quarter. He scored a combined five points on 1-of-13 shooting in first quarters this week with a 3-pointer in Monday’s game against the Jazz being the only shot he made. He’s been a little more successful distributing the ball with five assists, but still, he’s never been able to find an early rhythm and the Pacers have suffered because of it.
On Saturday, Haliburton was more aggressive than he has been in other first quarters on this trip, but neither he nor anyone else on the Pacers could get shots to fall and they couldn’t get easy attempts near the rim either.
Lakers coach J.J. Redick said in his pre-game news conference keeping the Pacers away from the rim would be their most important part of Los Angeles’ game plan, and they successfully used their frontcourt length to clog the paint and forced the Pacers to take jump shots. The Lakers outscored the Pacers 22-6 in the paint in the first quarter with just one of the Pacers’ three field goals in the lane coming within 5 feet of the rim. The Pacers got open looks on the perimeter, but couldn’t make those.
The Pacers made just four of their first 17 shots and finished the quarter 7-of-23 from the floor. Third-year wing Bennedict Mathurin scored nine points on 3-of-4 shooting in the period and veteran backup point guard T.J. McConnell was 2-of-4. The rest of the team was 2-of-15. Haliburton and All-Star power forward Pascal Siakam were both scoreless after the first on 0-of-7 shooting. Mathurin was the only member of the starting five to score a point.
The Pacers had a five-minute drought without a field goal and allowed the Lakers to to go on a 13-0 run in that stretch, turning what was already a 19-12 advantage to a 32-12 chasm.
“I felt like we were getting exactly the shots we wanted,” Haliburton said. “Just missing. I felt that way for four games. Especially in the first quarter, I’m really comfortable with the shots we’ve been taking as a group. They just haven’t been falling for whatever reasons. It is what it is.”
But Carlisle didn’t consider missing open shots to be anywhere near the Pacers’ most damaging sin. The bigger problem was that missed shots led to bad defense.
When news broke James and Doncic would both be out, Carlisle researched the all-time scoring highs of each of the Lakers’ available players to remind the Pacers they would still be dealing with potent NBA scorers even if they didn’t have to guard the NBA’s all-time leading scorer in James and last year’s NBA scoring champion in Doncic. Carlisle got the impression the players took him seriously, but they couldn’t stop the Lakers anyway. Los Angeles made 17 of its 24 field goals, turning the ball over just once and posting an astronomic efficiency figure of 1.69 points per possession.
From the opening possessions, guard Austin Reaves embraced the idea of being the Lakers’ featured scorer for the night, finishing with a career-high 45 points. Forward Rui Hachimura added 24 points on 8-of-13 shooting to go with nine rebounds. Guard Gabe Vincent scored eight points with a pair of 3-pointers in the first quarter and ended up with 12 points.
Defensively the Pacers never solved Reaves, allowing him 25 second-half points, but the rest of the Lakers scored just 33 second-half points. Still, the first-quarter deficit turned out to be too much to recover from. When they cut the deficit to 70-66, they immediately gave up a 15-4 run and didn’t cut the deficit back under eight points until a Haliburton 3-pointer with 1:35 to go. They got the deficit back down to five with 15 seconds but they didn’t have enough time to erase their first-quarter mistakes.
“When you don’t start well, you’re always leaving too much to chance,” Carlisle said. “… You have that kind of a horrible start and get down by 22 points, it’s a massive hole on the road. We’re a long way from home. There’s plenty of reasons why we gotta avoid this.”
