INDIANAPOLIS — Tyrese Haliburton was given the microphone prior to Sunday’s game to give a Fan Appreciation Day address at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, but it also served as a formal declaration of the end of the Pacers “gap year,” which with Sunday’s result turned out to be the worst season in franchise history.
The Pacers All-Star point guard and franchise cornerstone didn’t play a second in the 2025-26 season but his absence defined it. His right Achilles tendon tear in Game 7 of the NBA Finals set the tone for a raft of other mishaps and tumult from the departure of Myles Turner in free agency to the bevy of early-season injuries. The Pacers needed 27 players to get through the season — 29 if you count guards Delon Wright and Cam Payne who were signed and cut in the preseason — including several who were signed on hardship 10-day contracts such as Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, Cody Martin and Garrison Mathews. They used 48 starting lineups with none of them playing together for more than nine games. Just two played together for more than five games.
But Sunday’s game — a 133-121 loss to the first-place Pistons that gives the Pacers a franchise worst 19-63 final record — is the last Haliburton will have to miss due to the Achilles tear. On Sunday, the Pacers used just one player — forward Obi Toppin — who was part of their active player roster during the 2025 run to the Finals. But for 2026-27, the Pacers have under contract four of their five starters from the 2024-25 team plus three of its most important bench players. They added a starting caliber center in Ivica Zubac through a trade to replace Turner and if the ping-pong balls go their way in May, they could also add a top four pick in what is considered loaded NBA draft.
So they have every reason to believe they have the pieces to be an Eastern Conference contender, so Haliburton told the fans to presume their descent into the lottery and postseason elimination to be a one-year detour.
“Don’t expect the Pacers to not be playing in April, May or June,” Haliburton said.
It was notable, though, that Haliburton didn’t make a guarantee or a promise. The insinuation was obvious, but he avoided language that suggested that he believed a playoff run would be automatic.
As much as the Pacers are ready to move on from this star-crossed season, they are trying to take away from it the lesson that there are no guarantees and that success is hard to achieve. After an Eastern Conference Finals run in 2024 and an NBA Finals run in 2025, they had every reason to believe they were in for a long stretch of playoff appearances. Even after Haliburton’s injury they maintained a belief throughout the summer they could be a postseason team in 2025-26.
The primary reason the Pacers didn’t make it was bad injury luck beyond Haliburton. Point guards Andrew Nembhard, T.J. McConnell and Quenton Jackson; wings Bennedict Mathurin (before he was traded), Aaron Nesmith and Johnny Furphy; and Toppin all suffered significant injuries in the season’s first month, with Toppin missing four months. The Pacers started 0-5, 1-13 and 2-16 before they finally won multiple games in a row. By that point the die of the season had effectively been cast.
There were, however, stretches of poor play when the Pacers were at least close to full strength, including in their 13-game losing streak in December and January that dragged them down to 6-31 and truly ended their season.
“We know that it’s not going to just take flipping a switch,” Siakam said Sunday in an end-of-season news conference before the game started. “Like, ‘Oh, we have everybody back and we’re going to right back where we were at.’ It’s going to take a lot of rebuilding. Making sure that we start over. That’s what it’s going to take. As long as we all have that mindset and we go into the summer with that level of seriousness of understanding what it takes to win, what we’re going to need to do to win, I think we’ll be OK.”
Siakam said he hasn’t seen signs of a complacent expectation of a return to normalcy in his teammates, but he knows it’s something the Pacers will have to fight against. Expectations for the league next season will be significantly formed by what happens in the playoffs over the next two months while the Pacers will be out-of-sight, out-of-mind. But the memories of the Pacers knocking off the Bucks, Cavaliers and Knicks before taking the Thunder to seven games will stick in the memories of NBA pundits and convince at least some of them to consider the Pacers a top four team in the East for 2026-27.
“I think that’s natural,” Siakam said. “Even from you guys, I’m sure you wrote some tweet somewhere or an article saying it was a gap year. We just expect it to be like, ‘Oh, we’re down and the next year we’ll be back.’ I think there’s a lot of that going around. That will be my message to everyone (to avoid that thinking). I know that the coaches have the same message. I don’t think we’re going to fall into that, but I think the message is that. It’s not going to be easy.”
Siakam’s view through the end of the season was that maintaining good habits and high competitive standards would help them maintain the right attitudes heading into 2026-27. There were times — especially during the 13- and 16-game losing streaks that they failed to meet those standards. However, the season’s final three weeks showed a lot of signs that the Pacers were making something out of a doomed season.
Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said he met with the team’s veterans after a 134-119 loss to the Spurs on March 21 — the 16th straight defeat — and challenged them to up their competitive level. For almost two weeks the Pacers shortened their rotations and gave more minutes to key veteran players to try to establish a higher standard. On March 23, they upset a play-in bound Magic team in Orlando for the first of three wins a five-game stretch. Over the season’s final week, the Pacers didn’t play their veterans but showed signs of growth in their younger players.
“I’m really proud of the group, particularly in this last set of games from Orlando on,” Carlisle said. “I thought we regained the competitive spirit that we had had for a lot of the year even though it was a struggle to win games. It’s been what we’ve stood for for the last 2 1/2, three years.”
That set a tone for growth not only in the Pacers’ veterans but in some players who were getting much more playing time this season than they would have in more competitive year. On Sunday, the Pacers started two players who are on two-way contracts in guard Ethan Thompson and forward Jalen Slawson, another in Jackson who started the year on a two-way contract, one they signed in December out of the G League in center Micah Potter and one they acquired as a throw-in in the Zubac trade in forward Kobe Brown. Four of those five players scored more than 15 points on Sunday.
In the season’s final 11 games, the Pacers ranked 11th in the NBA in scoring, 10th in field goal percentage and first in assists as they finished 4-7. It was a sign of how much the young players benefited from an out-of-the-ordinary amount of playing time and how well they took to the Pacers’ system of randomized offense.
“New roles, new opportunity,” Jackson said. “I think the key to growth is being comfortable being uncomfortable. Some of us might have been uncomfortable but I think the longer that we stay in those roles and the longer we were in those roles, you saw guys start to blossom. They started to find themselves.”
That helps because it should make for more depth in 2026-27 and a team more capable of withstanding at least some injuries. But the veterans who were part of the previous two playoff runs will largely determine what happens next season. They know what they’re capable of, but they also have an even better sense now of what they’ll have to do to be successful again.
“We didn’t have the greatest year this year, but we’ve got great vets and great guys around us like Pascal and Tyrese,” Toppin said. “We know it’s not going to be a walk in the park next year just because we’re getting everybody back. But we gotta go into this offseason knowing that we’re trying to get back on course of what we started three or four years ago.”
Dustin Dopirak covers the Pacers all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Pacers Insider newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Not just ‘flipping a switch’: Pacers look to move on from ‘gap year’
Reporting by Dustin Dopirak, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
