At this point, if you spend any amount of time on Twitter and follow basketball-related accounts, you've seen the clip of the Pacers bench players reacting at the end of last night's game, where they knocked the Celtics out of the new NBA In-Season Tournament. With the contracts that many of those players have (~$3 million and under in many cases), the bonuses that they're becoming eligible for now are not insignificant percentages of what they make. If you haven't, the first of multiple is at 2:28 here
It's been interesting to watch the reception from the players, coaches, media members, and fans throughout this fall's tournament, but it's hard to deny that it's here to stay when you see clips like that.
From a pure basketball standpoint, it's clear that the Pacers were treating the IST with the respect it deserves, and that's probably why they were able to yoink that game out from under the Celtics' noses. Admittedly, the last time these two teams played doesn't tell the whole story, but by that logic, last night's didn't either. The Tyrese Haliburton-less Pacers got, to put it lightly, their dicks kicked in by the Celtics on November 1st, a 51-point drubbing. Last night, the Tingus Pingus-less Celtics came out kind of sleepy at halftime and couldn't pull it together down the stretch.
It does beg the question, DO the Celtics care as much about the IST as the Pacers do? They're a team full of larger contracts for the most part, and they're the odds-on favorite to win the NBA Finals in June. Kristaps Porzingis is also being talked about as being able to come back this week, which makes me inclined to think that if they felt that winning this tournament was a MUST, he'd have come back last night and (hopefully) been the piece that allowed the Celtics to overcome Tyrese Haliburton's first career triple-double (how is THAT possible??)
But I mean, the Pacers truly lived up to their name last night, and even at halftime, when the Celtics were leading, they hadn't begun to run-and-gun like they are accustomed to, but they came out of the break steaming, and by the end, they poured it on when it mattered. It's a tough scene as a Celtics fan seeing former Celtic Aaron Nesmith turn into a modern-day version of Andrew Toney, but it never really made sense when the Celtics picked him in the first place, so I'm hoping that doesn't have long-term repercussions.
If Myles Turner survives the trade deadline (for like the 8th year in a row, it feels like), the Pacers are one of those teams I wouldn't be super psyched to see in a seven-game series in the spring. I think they're young, hungry, and they play a style of basketball that's hard to match them at if you're not doing it every night, and quite frankly, no one is scoring almost 130 points a game on AVERAGE because, well, that's never happened before.
Week off from the Celtics, more time to make sense of this tournament (even though it's clear they were just trying to get people invested in the first few months of basketball), and then B2B vs. the Cavs. We move.
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