It's been the personality of the Pacers all season long to relax amid success, so why should it be different now?
Having earned homecourt advantage with a split of the first two games of their playoff series with Toronto, the Pacers came to Bankers Life Fieldhouse on Thursday feeling pretty satisfied with themselves. No longer. Their 101-85 loss puts their collective back against the proverbial wall heading into Game 4 on Saturday.
"If we go down 1-3, the numbers for that are crazy," Solomon Hill said. "It's do-or-die next game. It's almost like I want somebody to pass out out there. The next off-day is the longest off-day, and that's the summer. We don't want those. We have to go out there and leave it all on the floor."
The crazy numbers are these: only nine teams in the history of the NBA playoffs have come back from a 3-1 deficit to win a series. The Pacers, as the seventh seed, don't want to put themselves in that kind of dark hole with another loss on Saturday. To do that, they'll have to shed the burdens they have donned the past two games, when they failed to take advantage of their 1-0 lead.
Most prominently, slow starts and a stagnant halfcourt offense.
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The Pacers have fallen behind after the first quarter in all three games of the series. To do so at home, before a sellout audience drenched in gold, seems counter-intuitive – unless you know this team's history with comfort zones. Whether it's playing with a sizable lead or achieving some status within the standings, they have not taken advantage.
They scored just 17 points in the first quarter on Thursday, hitting 7-of-20 shots, committing five turnovers and picking up the first of their three technical fouls. The second quarter wasn't any better, as they fell behind by 23 points and trailed by 17 at the break. They got within 12 late in the third period and maintained hope throughout much of the fourth, but never made the plays that had to be made.
Toronto got off 26 more shots than the Pacers because they controlled the boards (45-38) and didn't turn the ball over nearly as often. The Pacers committed 17 turnovers, sometimes on mysterious passes that seemed to have no target, which led to 26 points. The Raptors committed just 11 turnovers, leading to 10 Pacers points. That 16-point difference in points off turnovers happens to be the margin of victory, which isn't entirely a coincidence.
"We're not coming out aggressive enough; we're not coming out swinging," Hill said, stating the obvious. "We definitely have to come out a lot better.
"We've got to have that sense of urgency from the beginning. We have to go back in and see who has more heart on the team."
Heart will help, and should be more apparent on Saturday if this season's trend holds, but execution is a factor as well. The Pacers often struggled in their halfcourt offense to get a good shot, a habit that began on the game's first possession when Paul George had to fire a step-back jumper from 22 feet to beat the shot clock buzzer. George, who led the Pacers with 25 points and added 10 rebounds and six assists, hit just 6-of-19 shots overall.
The Pacers shot just 38 percent overall. Toronto wasn't much better (41.5 percent) but didn't need much quality given the quantity of their shots. For the Pacers to run better offense they'll need to turn the ball over less often, get more stops at the defensive end, score more in transition and move the ball better in the halfcourt rather than letting it get stuck on one side of the floor.
They'll also have to improvise more often. Teams know the opponent's offense nearly as well as their own in the playoffs, so plays that worked during the regular season are much less reliable.
"I try to tell my guys, whatever Coach is drawing up, they know," George said. "They know what we're running, they're going to be in spots. We've got to do a better job of attacking from the weakside, but the best offense is us playing randomly and just being in attack mode. There are too many times we're being passive. That's playing right into their hands."
"We have to just relax, execute and keep moving," Solomon Hill said. "We kind of watch the play as it goes instead of playing off of one another. "They know our plays. It's about doing things harder, doing things sharper."
Poise will help, too. The Pacers were called for three technical fouls – by George for arguing the lack of a foul call, Rodney Stuckey for kicking at a screen-setter after getting tangled up and Myles Turner for over-reacting to a foul call.
"You can't be worried about two All-Stars and three whistles, that's too many to be thinking about," C.J. Miles said.
George, however, issued a plea for more freedom of expression.
"It's the playoffs," he said. "You kind of got to let some stuff slide. We're playing for something that means something."
The flip side of the Pacers' tendency to relax too much when things are going well is that they have responded well to adversity. They followed an embarrassing homecourt loss to Charlotte before the All-Star break with an impressive victory at Oklahoma City after the break. They followed two straight homecourt losses, including a 20-point loss to Orlando on March 31, with six victories in their final seven games.
Now they face adversity again.
"Hopefully as a group we respond p----- off," George said. "That's the only way to overcome a loss like this. We missed a great opportunity. Simple as that, we missed a great opportunity. The only way to respond in Game 4 is to be p----- off. Do everything a lot tougher, play a lot harder. We've got to be the first team to be on the floor, diving for loose balls, getting loose balls. We can't let the opposing team be the first team to put their imprint on the game. That's what it comes down to. In the playoffs, whoever's physical is going to win the game."
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