Training Camp Off to Extremely Competitive Start

Tyrese Haliburton draws plenty of praise for his vision, so perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that he saw what head coach Rick Carlisle had to say after the Pacers' first practice of the 2022-23 season.

Carlisle told reporters that the "blue" team -- the nominal second unit -- was "dominant" in Tuesday's practice. Haliburton, the Pacers' starting point guard and a member of the "white" team, took that as a challenge when the team returned for the second day of training camp on Wednesday.

"I was getting on Rick earlier because I saw he had something to say about the second team dominating yesterday," Haliburton said. "Well, I want you guys to ask him what happened today."

A short while later, Carlisle confirmed that Haliburton's unit had exacted revenge in the second day of practice.

"The white team dominated today," Carlisle said. "Good to see. Blue wiped everything out yesterday and today white turned things around."

"Competitive" has been perhaps the loudest buzzword echoing across the Ascension St. Vincent Center over the first two days of training camp. The Pacers have embarked on what Carlisle dubbed "a new era" built around a talented but youthful roster (12 of the 18 players in training camp are 25 or younger). If the start of camp is any indication, this particular group features plenty of fiery personalities.

"The whole time, there's a lot of smack-talking from both sides," second-year forward Isaiah Jackson said after the first day of practice. "On defense, offense...we're just competitors. We like to win and when we win it feels good."

While Carlisle will shuffle lineups throughout the course of the preseason, he has stuck with set groupings over the first few days of camp. The "white" group has featured Haliburton, Chris Duarte, Buddy Hield, Jalen Smith, and Myles Turner, while the "blue" team has consisted of T.J. McConnell, Bennedict Mathurin, Aaron Nesmith, Terry Taylor, and Jackson.

Entering his eighth season in Indiana, Turner is easily the longest tenured player on the roster (McConnell and Goga Bitadze are the only other players who were on the roster prior to April 2021). This has been his first real opportunity to play with most of his teammates, including Haliburton, Hield, and Smith -- all of whom were acquired via trade in the second half of last season, when Turner was sidelined with a foot injury.

Turner spoke glowingly on Tuesday about the "young energy" emanating from this year's locker room.

"It's like a different (sense of) jubilation where you come in like you've never seen this type of stuff before so you have that energy you bring to the floor," Turner said. "It's refreshing. I think sometimes when you're in this league for a while it starts to feel like a job...but with these young guys bringing this energy, it's fun to be a part of."

While the majority of the team is young, there are still some strong veteran presences, including Turner, McConnell, and Hield as well as sixth-year center Daniel Theis, who joins the team fresh off a summer that saw him play in the NBA Finals with the Celtics and then help lead Germany to a bronze-medal finish at EuroBasket 2022. The team also brought in 13-year veteran James Johnson and eight-year veteran Langston Galloway for training camp.

Those veterans should help to push the young talent on the roster and facilitate their development, which is really the ultimate goal for this season.

Carlisle and his staff have focused heavily on the defensive end over the first few days of practice. He said they have pushed the players "to play to exhaustion" and has been pleased with the level of effort and physicality he's seen so far.

"I'm not necessarily in favor of it all being friendly," Carlisle said of the competition in camp. "We've got to have a nastier attitude, about defense especially. We're showing some good signs in the first two days, but it's going to be all about sustaining it and continuing to get better."

Haliburton's response after the blue team "punched us in the mouth" is illustrative of the type of competitive fire that figures to fuel this year's training camp. Each practice, each drill, and each rep will be attacked with full intensity.

"Everybody's young, hungry, ready to learn, ready to get better," Nesmith said. "And that comes with high-level competitiveness. No one's going to get better if we aren't being competitive out here. We're not going to win games in the regular season if we don't push ourselves in the gym now.

"We're working towards being the best team we can be and it's been a lot of fun to talk smack and fight every day with these guys."