BOSTON — For the first time this season, the Indiana Pacers have something brewing. And for the first time in a long time, the Boston Celtics are lost.
After the Eastern Conference finals ended in one of the most competitive sweeps in recent years, the Pacers looked like a team primed for a step forward. Despite the loss, Rick Carlisle’s team showed it could keep its perpetual offense in motion while playing physical playoff basketball.
Then both of these franchises returned with essentially the same teams and saw drastically different results early on. The Celtics were still on top of the world, while the Pacers sputtered out of the gate. But things are finally changing and the Pacers’ 123-114 win over the Celtics on Sunday showed that these teams are trending in opposite directions.
“We’ve got to be a team of punchers,” Carlisle said. “We can’t be reactors. We’ve got to be agitators. And tonight, we were much more aggressive and it was the only way.”
Indiana has won seven of its last 10 games, which included a close loss to the West-leading Thunder and then a blowout in Boston the next night. Aside from that rough 24 hours, the Pacers have looked like themselves again.
Andrew Nembhard’s return has helped to fortify the Pacers’ defensive chain that was fraying earlier in December. Indiana’s defense works when it has a reliable point-of-attack defender who can feed the ball in toward Myles Turner without other guys jumping in to help. Then the Pacers have a lot of length and speed around that primary defensive pairing to get the team racing out in transition once it gets the ball back. But in the recent losses to the Thunder and Celtics, the Pacers were just taking the ball out of the net way too much to maintain their edge.
That changed Sunday, when the primary objective was to be the aggressor.
Myles Turner with the putback SLAM 😳#NBAAllStar | https://t.co/T6jmxAY3iX pic.twitter.com/EyJna6pqzM
— Indiana Pacers (@Pacers) December 30, 2024
“That was a playoff-like intensity,” Jaylen Brown said. “Give credit to Indiana: They came out from the tip, you could see it. They were trying to pressure us, trying to get into me, trying to get into my body, trying to turn me over. As a team, you just gotta meet that challenge every single night.”
Ironically, Jayson Tatum said after the game the Celtics have to be the team that punches first. The Celtics’ formula to success last year was limitless versatility and rigidly adhered to principles. The Pacers are a laissez-faire vortex of movement and tempo, which needs to be grounded in some defensive intensity to work.
When Nembhard is out there, they just have it.
“His impact is immeasurable,” Turner said. “He goes out there and guards their best players and he’s putting pressure on the rim. He makes tough shots and he’s someone that is very valuable to our team.”
Just as the Pacers are turning things around, the Celtics have lost their spark. Derrick White said this is the toughest stretch the team has experienced since he came to Boston. Except for the first game Friday, a 142-105 Celtics victory when the Pacers were on a back-to-back after falling to the Thunder, they are getting the defending champs treatment.
They already saw it last year, as the whole league was on notice after Kristaps Porziņģis showed up to the first preseason game. But it’s just different when the opposing coach can write on the board “DEFENDING CHAMPS” and underline it five times.
“Our guys just decided that, whatever was happening, this is as tough a place to play as there is and you’re playing against the NBA champs, the world champs,” Carlisle said. “We were going to continue to attack and we were going to hit first as much as we could.”
The Celtics know that’s what they are going to see most nights. A regular game for them is a statement game for everyone else. The losses were so rare last season that they didn’t have to stress much. The biggest knock on them entering the playoffs was that they hadn’t faced enough adversity. But now they’re back in the kind of slog that was all too familiar to this team before its championship run.
“I think we have the humility because we’ve been through it,” Tatum said. “There’s parts of the season where we took it for granted, and I think we’ve learned from that. But I think we’re just at a point in the season where we’re not happy where we’re at and we all have to understand that we’ve played a part in where we’re at right now.”
Tatum said the Celtics have to get back to the basics, that they have to communicate and make sure they don’t leave guys on an island. That was most apparent when Tyrese Haliburton cruised past Al Horford in crunchtime to get an easy layup.
There have been an anomalous number of defensive breakdowns for the Celtics in recent weeks, regardless of Jrue Holiday’s and Porziņģis’ absences. The Celtics didn’t really feel changes in the depth chart last year. Whoever was out there, it didn’t matter that much. They were still executing on a string defensively and managed to keep their intensity high. Right now, it seems to be often one or the other.
“Every season has its own challenges, every season presents its own adversity, and you’ve got to meet it,” Brown said. “You can’t think that last year is this year, or this year is gonna be last year.”
Brown loved the playoff intensity of this second Pacers game but acknowledged that some comfort has slipped in defensively. White said it feels like they’re running uphill, so they have to get back to playing with joy.
“It’s gonna help us grow if we look at it with the right intentionality and the right perspective,” Brown said. “We can’t complain about it or we just gotta meet the challenge, and I feel like we’ll be better for it.”
As New York and Orlando creep up on them in the standings, the Celtics are about to embark on a gantlet road trip through Minnesota, Houston, Oklahoma City and Denver. These are teams that will test their defensive physicality and acuity.
“All the type of guys that are in that locker room, those are the type of guys I want to go to war with,” White said. “So I’m confident in that.”
Now that the Pacers have Nembhard back, their identity is starting to crystalize again. In crunchtime, they kept on running. They didn’t want to run the clock, something Haliburton conceded was counterintuitive. But this is just who they are.
“I think we set our precedent for how we want to play,” Turner said. “I think that’s our advantage is that we get to the fourth quarter and we start running on teams that don’t really want to run with us.”
Carlisle praised second-year forward Jarace Walker for playing to exhaustion. That’s a rite of passage on the team that runs everyone else ragged when it’s at its best. The Pacers are finally getting back to the team you don’t want to play. The Celtics look more vulnerable than they have in over a year. This is just another wave in the NBA season, but both of these teams have work to do to get back to where they expect to be.
(Photo of Indiana’s Myles Turner dunking on Boston’s Jaylen Brown: Bob DeChiara / Imagn Images)
