Insider: Rick Carlisle holds off on drastic measures, Pacers respond with get-right game

INDIANAPOLIS -- Rick Carlisle could sense that Buddy Hield's slump was starting to wear on him.

Hield is and always has been a fearless volume shooter, one to believe that his next 3-pointer is going in regardless of what happened on his last one. Only 25 players in NBA history have made more than Hield's 1,773 career 3-pointers. This is not a man whose confidence is easily shaken.

But the Pacers coach could see the growing frustration of an extended slump. Hield was 0 of 3 in the first half after making just 19 of 68 (27.9%) from 3 in his last 10 games.

So with an 11-point lead at halftime against a short-handed Hornets team he knew the Pacers had the edge on, Carlisle called a play to start the second half that would give Hield an opportunity at a catch and shoot 3. While point guard Tyrese Haliburton took his time bringing the ball up the floor knowing he'd be met by a defender as soon as he crossed the timeline, Hield ran around the left side of the floor, then along the baseline.

Hornets rookie wing Brandon Miller had to navigate six bodies -- three Pacers and their defenders -- which complicated his path just enough to give Hield a split second alone on the right wing. That was all he needed to sink his first 3 of the night.

And that 3 begat another and another, and then opportunities going to the hoop. Hield went 6 of 7 from the floor, 4 of 5 from 3, in the second half to score 21 of his 25 points after the break, leading the Pacers to a 144-113 win over the Hornets at Gainbridge Fieldhouse to snap a four-game losing streak.

"Rick called the play to start the third quarter," Hield said. "You see one go down, sometimes that's all you need. I think he could sense that. My teammates, everybody, they knew I was in a funk. We all were in a funk."

Indeed they were, and they all needed the equivalent of just seeing a shot go down, of just being reminded of the feeling of doing the basic things well after a week of dysfunction. They needed a get-right game, and they got one.

It helped, of course, that the schedule provided them the perfect opponent for the occasion. The Hornets beat the Pacers on Nov. 4, but on Wednesday they barely resembled that outfit. They were missing star point guard LaMelo Ball -- who had 11 points, 11 assists and the game-winning steal in that game -- and center Mark Williams, who had a season-high 27 points that night. Charlotte has lost six straight, and as currently constituted they may be as bad or worse than any other team the Pacers play this season, even the hapless Pistons.

So beating the Hornets doesn't prove anything for the Pacers, who now sit at eighth place in the Eastern Conference at 14-12 in a far more precarious position than they were 10 days ago when they followed their In-Season Tournament finals appearance. It is a sign, however, that the Pacers have their feet back on the ground after the whirlwind 12-day stretch that included two games in Las Vegas, the four-game road trip that followed and their loss Monday against a more loaded Clippers squad than they were ready for at the moment.

"Coming off a high high at the In-Season Tournament and coming back to regular NBA basketball, it was a transition nobody was used to," Hield said. "That's the first time we all went through that. We figured it out, weathered the storm."

Hield credited Carlisle for not just getting his mind right, but the whole team's. Rather than giving the team a day off between Monday's loss and a home-road back-to-back, Carlisle scheduled a "taped-up" practice that would be more intense than what they usually have once camp is over and the game schedule starts. He wanted to see dramatically better defensive presence and effort than he saw Monday when the Clippers scored 151 points.

It was demanding, Hield said, but it helped get the Pacers heads out of the clouds.

"Rick has been in this business a long time," Hield said. "He's seen the good, the bad, the happy and the sad. He's transitioned through a lot, he's been through a lot. He just did a good job of making practice physical, even though we had a back-to-back, sometimes you have to have hard days like that where you just bring the team back together and start from the ground and build back up.”

After Monday's loss, Carlisle floated a number of drastic measures to try to fix a defense that was giving up the most points per game in the NBA. He said that if he needed to make dramatic changes in his lineup or rotations or if he needed to slow down the most fast-pace, explosive offense in the NBA so that the Pacers could actually stop somebody, he would do it. Even after Tuesday's practice, with which he was pleased, he said he was still considering a change in the starting lineup but would "sleep on it."

He woke up Wednesday and decided not to do anything drastic. The Pacers certainly didn't slow down, cracking the 140-point barrier for the second time this season. He played a 10-man rotation before the game was decided in the fourth quarter as he'd suggested he might, but that was as much because he was trying to ease backup center Jalen Smith back into play as anything else.

And he left the starters the same: Haliburton, Brown, Hield, Toppin and Turner. Though it's not a great defensive lineup, it has a +20.4 net rating -- the best of any Pacers' five-man lineup that has played at least 20 minutes together this season other than the third-unit group of T.J. McConnell, Ben Sheppard, Jordan Nwora, Jarace Walker and Isaiah Jackson that gets its work in garbage time.

"Our starting group is doing a lot of good things,” Carlisle said. “In many ways, they're one of our best lineups, so to break it up simply just to break it up, to me did not make sense."

For Wednesday night at least, keeping the group together paid off. They didn't start particularly well, but they worked through some mishaps and they were on the floor together for most of the third quarter when the Pacers outscored the Hornets 36-26. All five had plus-minus figures of +10 or better and Brown and Haliburton were over +30.

Haliburton worked through his own slump. The In-Season Tournament gave him a brighter spotlight than he'd had at any point in his career and earned him mention as an All-NBA candidate and darkhorse MVP pick. But the double-teams and ball-screen blitzes the Lakers hit him with gave everyone else in the league ideas. Not everyone has Jarred Vanderbilt to guard him and Anthony Davis for hedges, switches and double-teams, but teams still determined that it's better to bring multiple bodies in front of Haliburton and force the ball out of his hands even if it means risking somebody else making shots.

Haliburton had ups and downs against such approaches and had a particularly rough Monday, scoring just eight points on 3 of 12 shooting against the Clippers. He had a slow start Wednesday, scoring just two points in the first quarter on 0 of 2 shooting, but then had seven points in the second and finished with 19 points and 11 assists.

Haliburton put his teammates in position to pick him up. Hield was one of three players who hit four 3s, along with wings Aaron Nesmith and Bennedict Mathurin. The Pacers shot 61.3% from the field and 18 of 39 from 3-point range.

"You get a lot of attention," Carlisle said of Haliburton. "You get trapped, you're getting leveraged certain directions on the floor. If you're one of those guys, if you're a Haliburton, if you're a Chris Paul, if you're a Steph Curry, then you figure out how to enable your teammates, get the team functioning at a high level and you work your way into the game. That's precisely what he did tonight. It was masterful.”

Defensively the Pacers were OK, which counts as very, very good by their standards. The Hornets still scored 60 points in the paint and made 57.8% of their 2-point shots, but they were 8 of 30 from 3-point range and finished with a modest 1.14 points per possession. That's not great but if the Pacers could be that average on defense every night they'd be dominant.

"I'd say focus, presence, attention to detail," Nesmith said when asked what was better on defense. "The want factor, the care factor. You can go down the list. Everything across the board was better today."

It needs to be better than that going forward starting Thursday night, as the Pacers go to Memphis to face a 7-19 Grizzlies team that has reason to feel reborn now that point guard Ja Morant has returned from a 25-game suspension and scored 34 points Tuesday in his first game back.

One win over a short-handed team does not create the same kind of momentum for the Pacers, but they'll settle for getting right and feeling like themselves again.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Pacers vs. Hornets: Buddy Hield, Pacers break out of funk