The Indiana Pacers have established themselves as a middle-of-the-pack team, no longer the team of the rise many GMs and analyst thought them to be at the beginning of the year.
If there's something the team has been through 31 games this season, it's being consistently inconsistent. Indiana has not won or lost more than two games in a row this season, flirting then and again with the .500 mark, now sitting a game under it at 15-16 after a 109-102 loss to the Boston Celtics.
All-Star swingman Paul George wasn't the happiest of customers post-game and addressed the issues straight on.
“Our identity is inconsistency,” George told Nate Taylor of the Indianapolis Star. “We’ve yet to spread from the pack (in the Eastern Conference) and we’ve yet to string some games together. We’ve yet to take a step back and look at the big picture and point out some things that we’re doing well over the course of this season. So really, we have nothing to really fall back on right now.”
Sharp-shooting lefty C.J. Miles was also critical of the team after pouring in 19 out the Pacers' 25 bench points.
“You still look around sometimes and it looks like we don’t enjoy the game enough,” Miles said. “You see big plays being made and sometimes you, like, see guys exhale instead of getting hyped about it, getting excited about it. I think we’ve got to get back to being passionate and remembering we’ve got one of the best jobs in the world, to play basketball for a living. At the most, we work for two and half hours a day. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not making it sound easy, but we’ve got to remember that this is the game that we first fell in love with that got us this far.”
Besides Jeff Teague‘s 31 points, the team's best effort Thursday came after George painfully rolled his left ankle after colliding with Marcus Smart in the fourth quarter.
“When I saw him get up by himself, I knew he wasn’t coming out,” Miles said of George. “He wants to win as bad as anybody. He’s the leader of our team. This is his team. Everybody in here knows that. He stepped up to show that he wanted to win the game. The guys followed suit. If he can play through that, why can’t I play hard, too?”
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