What a season that was.
Even with the upsetting ending – a Game Seven loss in the NBA Finals to the Oklahoma City Thunder, devastatingly punctuated by the serious injury to superstar guard Tyrese Haliburton – the Pacers just posted a year for the ages. They won the Eastern Conference and also garnered the appreciation of the basketball world in the process for the aesthetic, fluid, and unselfish brand of play they offered along the way. They really were one stroke of luck away from winning it all, for the first time in franchise history.
Without Haliburton, the path to competitiveness is unwalkable. Yet the Pacers have both the opportunity and the requirement to keep adding to their team, try and find the positives from the situation (for example, more game time for Jarace Walker), and improve in anticipation of his return to full health.
The good news is that they are well-positioned to do that. Because of the way in which they built their team – never bottoming out in the draft, not going the three-star model, nor investing all their draft capital in trades for incumbent stars – they are both competitively priced and sufficiently stocked with assets. Rare is the competitive team so well-positioned to still improve in the near future. (Oklahoma City, of course, is the notable exception. But the Pacers probably do not want to hear about them at the moment.)
With this in mind, there follows a look at the Indiana Pacers’ roster and spending options heading into the 2025 NBA offseason.
