The Indiana Pacers enter tonight’s NBA Draft with zero first-round picks, which is the correct outcome for a franchise that has spent years making decisions that are each individually defensible and collectively catastrophic.
Think about what it takes to pull this off. You have to go 19-63 — worst record in franchise history, second-worst record in the NBA this year — and still not hold on to your lottery pick. You have to build a protection window so precisely miscalibrated that it only triggers when your team is exactly as bad as yours turned out to be. The pick was protected 1-4 and protected 10-30; it only conveyed to the Clippers if it landed in slots 5 through 9. Indiana, with the second-worst record in the league, needed a top-4 pick to keep it. They came in at No. 5.
One slot.
The protection structure was not designed to save Indiana from catastrophe. It was designed to save Indiana from moderate catastrophe, which is the only kind the Pacers seem capable of producing. A genuinely bad team gets a top-4 pick and keeps the asset. A genuinely healthy team doesn’t need the pick at all. The Pacers are the team that lands in the five-slot, every time, in every metaphor, in every draft; the organization has a preternatural gift for occupying exactly the space where no good thing can reach them.
Kevin Pritchard posted his apology on May 10th.
https://twitter.com/PacersKev/status/2053574007224488041
“I’m really sorry to all our fans. I own taking this risk. Surprised it came up 5th after this year. I thought we were due some luck. But please remember - this team deserved a starting center to compete with the best teams next year. We have always been resilient.”
Resilient is doing a lot of work in that sentence. So is surprised, frankly. The Pacers went 19-63. Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles in Game 7 of the NBA Finals and missed the entire season. Ivica Zubac, the player they acquired for Bennedict Mathurin, Isaiah Jackson, a 2029 unprotected first, and the pick that just conveyed, played five games for Indiana before fracturing a rib on March 26th. Five games. The man fractured a rib. That is not bad luck dressed up as a basketball transaction; that is the Pacers’ entire operating philosophy rendered as a medical event.
The specific cruelty of this situation is that the Zubac trade was not obviously stupid at the time. This is the distinguishing feature of an almost-clever franchise: their decisions arrive with receipts. The Pacers were rebuilding. They needed a center. The pick was protected in a way that seemed, on paper, to limit their downside. CBS Sports gave the trade a B for Indiana. Smart people wrote reasonable columns about it. That is exactly how the almost-clever trap works — it provides cover for everyone involved until the moment it doesn’t, at which point the cover evaporates and you’re standing in an empty arena on draft night with no picks.
A catastrophically bad franchise at least gets to blow everything up and start over with a generational asset. The 76ers tanked so hard they got Embiid and Simmons. The Cavaliers bottomed out and landed LeBron, twice, and Kyrie Irving. Those franchises earned their humiliation by leaning into it completely; they wrote checks the pain cashed later. The Pacers have never been willing to do that. They trade from a position of mild concern rather than honest desperation; they protect picks in ways that assume their futures will be mediocre rather than terrible; they are constitutionally unable to stare at a bad situation and say, out loud, that it is bad. The result is a rebuild that produces neither high picks nor competitive basketball, just an endless procession of medium outcomes that don’t compound into anything.
Tonight, while AJ Dybantsa goes first overall and franchises with coherent plans make their choices, and while Cameron Boozer adds a new chapter to his already fascinating draft story, Indiana will watch from a position of total irrelevance. The Clippers own their pick. The Pacers own a rib injury and a 29-word apology about luck.
Kevin Pritchard said this team deserved a starting center to compete with the best teams. Ivica Zubac played five games. The protection window opened at exactly slot five. The Pacers were due some luck.
They weren’t due anything. They earned this precisely.
