After 10 years and a rebuild, Pacers remind Indy how it feels to advance in NBA playoffs

INDIANAPOLIS -- Myles Turner admitted that he would have liked to contributed more Thursday. On the night that he finally got the taste of winning a playoff series nine seasons into his career, he wished he could point to a better stat line than five points on 1 of 6 shooting and five rebounds in a performance riddled with foul trouble.

But it was clear as he held court with the media in front of his locker, dressed in black from head to toe including dark sunglasses, that his individual struggles in Game 6 of what was for him an otherwise excellent series hadn't done much to dim his sense of pride and satisfaction in what the Pacers had accomplished for themselves, their organization and their city.

The Pacers' 120-98 win over Milwaukee in Game 6 gave them a 4-2 win in the series, allowing Indiana to celebrate an NBA playoff series win for the first time since the 2013-14 squad beat the Wizards in six games in the Eastern Conference semifinals before falling to LeBron James' Miami Heat in six in the conference finals.

Just two years ago, the Pacers finished 25-57 amidst a roster rebuild that for a while seemed certain to include a trade that would send Turner out of Indianapolis. But the Pacers decided to extend Turner’s contract, and now they're moving on to the Eastern Conference semifinals to face the No. 2 seed Knicks in a matchup that evokes memories of some of the franchise's finest hours. The series begins Monday at Madison Square Garden when the Pacers will be one of the NBA's last eight teams standing after two seasons in which they missed the postseason entirely.

"It was bittersweet just because of the way things unfolded for myself tonight but I was very excited for our group," Turner said. "And for the city just because I've seen the highs and lows of this, and I know the fans have seen the highs and lows of this over the past 10 years as well. To finally get a little bit of fruit of your labor with this is incredible. We still have a lot of work to do, but for me personally, it means a lot to finally advance, being in the NBA as long as I have."

The highs of the 10 years since that 2013-14 team's run included five previous trips to the playoffs from the 2015-16 season through 2019-20, all of which Turner was a part of. The Pacers took the Raptors to seven games in 2016 and James' Cavaliers to seven in a thrilling 2018 series but fell short both times. They were swept in the other three seasons.

"When we had to basically squash this thing 2 1/2 years ago and start over, when you start using the 'R' word, it can get ugly," coach Rick Carlisle said. "There are teams that were rebuilding for nine years."

The Pacers didn't have to wait that long in large part because one of their first major deals netted them a worthy franchise cornerstone in Tyrese Haliburton. It took less than a year for them to see that Haliburton's combination of talent, maturity and ability to connect to others and elevate teammates would accelerate the process.

Team president Kevin Pritchard, general manager Chad Buchanan and Carlisle allowed the 2022-23 team to make a postseason case before pumping the brakes late in the year rather than embracing a full-on tank to maximize their chances at landing the Victor Wembanyama lottery ticket. They immediately started identifying pieces they believed could be long-term fits with Haliburton, extending Turner in January of 2023 to be his pick-and-roll/pop partner, then also extending forward Aaron Nesmith as their 3-and-D glue guy. And even early in the process, they placed a premium on chemistry, noting how good the atmosphere was in the locker room.

"Kevin and Chad have done a great job of not only collecting a great group of young, talented players," Carlisle said, "but great people."

They landed guard Bruce Brown in free agency and forward Obi Toppin in a trade, then in January of this year, they packaged Brown with forward Jordan Nwora and draft picks to land a two-time All-NBA forward in Pascal Siakam, a go-to inside-outside scorer with a championship ring.

"One of the reasons we acquired Pascal Siakam was to have a chance not only to get to the playoffs," Carlisle said, "but to advance in the playoffs."

And when they finally got back to the playoffs, they did advance, and in a way that spoke to the team that they have been all season.

They opened this series with a true clunker in Game 1 in which jitters and their lack of collective playoff experience got the best of them, but they got their legs under them in the second half of that loss and then responded with a tide-turning win in Game 2 on the road. They went to Indy for the franchise's first home playoff games since 2019 and gritted out an overtime win in Game 3 and shot the lights out to win Game 4.

They failed to meet the moment in their first opportunity to close out the series in a Game 5 blowout defeat in Milwaukee, but they managed to take the right lessons from that loss and rode an electric home crowd to a double-digit win in Game 6, building a double-digit lead in the first half and then stemming every Bucks run in the second half with a big play in a big moment. They hounded the Bucks with full-court pressure defense, creating 12 turnovers and turning those into 22 points while also holding them to 42.2% shooting from the floor and 7 of 27 shooting from beyond the arc. On offense, they played at their pace, scoring 21 fast-break points and 60 points in the paint, shooting 54.1% from the floor and hitting 13 3-pointers.

"What happened last game is we didn't show up competitively," said veteran backup point guard T.J. McConnell, who had his best game of the series on Thursday night with 20 points, nine assists and four steals. "We kind of came together and said, 'That effort is just not gonna get it done.' In a mature way, we came out and just really competed."

The Game 5 loss spoke to the inconsistency that has plagued them all year as they've frequently lost games to teams they seemingly had no business losing to and have failed to capitalize on momentum-building wins and build long winning streaks. Their six-game winning streak that started immediately after Christmas was their only streak longer than three games all season, and they lost 11 games to teams that failed to even make the play-in round.

But the Game 6 win spoke to their resiliency and ability to take lessons from defeats without dwelling on them. They went 23-12 after losses during the regular season, with one four-game losing streak and two three-game skids being the only slumps that lasted longer than two games. They now haven't lost consecutive games since road games to the Pelicans on March 1 and Spurs on March 3.

"It's who we are as competitors," Haliburton said. "Usually, the games after losses, we can't wait to get to them. I think that's important for us. We just feel like we always respond. Part of that could be due to us being young and hard-headed and wanting to compete."

Now their season continues against a Knicks team with momentum after a tough series with the 76ers and five straight wins to end the regular season at 50-32. However, the Pacers beat them twice this season including once at Madison Square Garden, and Indiana now gets to enter that series having been through the fire of a playoff series.

They were fortunate to play six games against the Bucks without ever having to face two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo -- conservatively, one of the best five players on the planet -- but no one is putting an asterisk on winning a playoff series against a team that still included All-Stars Damian Lillard, Khris Middleton and Brook Lopez. Their baseline organizational goal for this season was to reach the playoffs and make some kind of noise and they've already achieved that, but the manner in which they won that series gives them reason to believe they can take more steps right now.

"It's hard to go through a playoff series against an experienced team like this as your first time in the playoffs and we had a lot of guys that were first-timers in this," Carlisle said in his post-game press conference before Game 6 of the Knicks-Sixers series had reached halftime. "But they learned the things that you need to learn along the way. ... I've said for two years now we're a franchise with big dreams. We don't know exactly where this is going to go from here, we don't know who the opponent is, but you have to have big dreams and aspirations to continue to grow and continue to push yourself."

On Thursday night, though, the Pacers got to take a breath and consider the path that led them back to the Eastern Conference semifinals and the people who had got them there. That of course included Carlisle, who last won a playoff series in 2011 when his Dallas Mavericks won the title. It included first-timers such as Haliburton and second-year guard Andrew Nembhard as well as Siakam trying to apply lessons learned from Toronto to a new franchise.

And it of course included Turner, the longest-tenured Pacer who despite Thursday's rough sledding averaged 19.2 points per game in his first playoff series in four years, shooting 48.2% from the floor and and 43.9% from 3-point range, grabbing 7.2 rebounds per game and dishing out 2.8 assists. After nine seasons and four coaches, he finally got to learn what it felt like to move on.

"The whole city and state is behind Myles Turner," Carlisle said. "This is nine years. He's never advanced in the playoffs, and he was the foundation of this."

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Two years after a roster overhaul, Pacers advance in NBA playoffs