T.J. McConnell is looking around the room in Chicago, looking so helpless and distraught that somebody needs to go hug him right now, as the NBA announces the biggest gut punch to the Indiana Pacers since, well, since Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals. Not that long ago, no. But what happened to the Pacers in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals was the biggest gut punch in franchise history.
So let’s call what happened Sunday, when the Pacers fell completely out of the 2026 NBA Draft lottery, the second-biggest gut punch in Pacers history.
And this is a franchise that has been punched in the stomach time and again, whether it’s Paul George’s broken leg and subsequent trade demand, or Victor Oladipo’s torn quadriceps tendon and subsequent trade demand, or what happened last season in the opening minutes of Game 7, when star guard Tyrese Haliburton suffered a torn Achilles’ tendon, gutting the Pacers’ shot at the 2025 NBA title – and devastating their 2026 season as well.
Alas, all that losing this season – the Pacers went 19-63 – had a silver lining: A decent shot (14%) at the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 NBA Draft and a better than 50-50 shot at a pick in the top four (52%). All of that came with a caveat, which everyone knew. The Pacers had acquired Clippers center Ivica Zubac at the 2026 NBA trade deadline, sending to Los Angeles assets including Bennedict Mathurin and, perhaps, their first-round pick in the 2026 draft.
The Clippers would get that pick, this year, only if the NBA draft lottery was cruel to the Pacers, only if it punched them in the gut.
And what do you know.
The Pacers lost so well this past season, so much, so awfully – almost everyone on the team was injured at some point, several for weeks at a time – that they were locked into the top half of the 14-pick lottery. They could pick no worse than No. 6 in a draft that ESPN’s Jay Bilas says has the best depth at the top, the most potential stars, since 1996.
The Pacers would keep the pick, this year, if it was in the top four. The Clippers would get the pick only if it fell to fifth or sixth.
The envelopes are opened, starting with the No. 14 overall pick (Charlotte), down to 13 (Miami) and so on until we learn the No. 8 pick will go to the Atlanta Hawks. Here it comes. Big breath.
The No. 7 pick goes to … Sacramento. Whew. Just two more punches to dodge.
The No. 6 pick goes to … Brooklyn.
Whew.
One more punch to dodge, and the Pacers will be a frontrunner – maybe the frontrunner – for the 2027 Eastern Conference championship.
And the No. 5 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft goes to…
No.
No.
The ABC camera shows T.J. McConnell, the beloved Pacers backup point guard representing the team at the draft lottery, sitting on stage, the loneliest person in America. He’s pursing his lips and looking around. He’s looking left, then ahead, staring blankly. He looks down. He doesn’t want to be here. Not anymore.
Not after this.
Doyel before lottery: Why aren’t Pacers sweating 2026 NBA Draft lottery? Simulator says…
Acquired from Indiana
Kevin Pritchard and Chad Buchanan were all over this 30-minute ABC reality show, too. Pritchard is the Pacers’ president of basketball operations. Buchanan is the general manager. They call the shots about the roster, make the decisions, and together they built a team that stunned the city, and the league, by reaching the 2025 NBA Finals.
Most of the players on that roster will be back next season, two years later. That’s how well that roster was put together: It was sustainable, that success, until Haliburton went down with a torn Achilles. Even so, it’s sustainable again this season with four starters and several key reserves under contract for the upcoming season. The only starter from Game 7 who is gone is center Myles Turner, and the Pacers upgraded that position by acquiring Zubac in the trade that….
Yeah, well.
Pritchard and Buchanan didn’t deserve what happened Sunday. Nobody on this team, or in this market – not you, and frankly, not me either – deserved what happened Sunday.
But for Pritchard and Buchanan this felt particularly egregious, callous, cruel. Because they were sitting in a table at the NBA Draft lottery, just the two of them together, directly behind BYU’s A.J. Dybantsa, considered the most talented player in this draft class, and behind Kansas’ Darryn Peterson, considered the second-most talented player in the class.
Pritchard and Buchanan were also near North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson, which meant that almost every time the ABC cameras decided to show one of the top players in this class – Dybantsa, Peterson or Wilson (Duke’s Cam Boozer wasn’t far away either) – there were Pritchard and Buchanan, looking over their shoulders, almost in the TV shot.
But not quite.
There were Pritchard and Buchanan, so close to Dybantsa and Peterson they could touch them. Almost.
But not quite.
When the No. 5 pick was announced – the Ping Pong balls had been selected earlier but kept mostly secret, allowing the NBA to pull out a made-for-TV team placard from a giant envelope for each pick – the envelope was opened and the card was pulled and it was … who?
Not the Pacers?
This is good, right? Any logo but the Pacers being pulled from those envelopes representing the No. 7 pick (Sacramento, check), No. 6 pick (Atlanta, check) or No. 5 pick meant … the Pacers are in the top four! This is great!
So who fell to No. 5?
Oh. That’s the Los Angeles Clippers’ logo. The Ping Pong balls were pulled from that despicable air machine earlier, remember, meaning the league had time to get the correct logo for each pick. And sure enough, there below the Clippers’ logo at No. 5 overall, is the fine print on that placard:
Acquired from Indiana.
Oh.
Formidable? Yes. Great? Not quite
The Pacers have options for the 2026-27 NBA season. This doesn’t have to be debilitating. They return four starters from that 2025 NBA finalist, as we’ve said, and made an upgrade in the fifth spot. They’ve lost their most potent scorer off the bench (Mathurin), but return McConnell, Obi Toppin, Ben Sheppard and Jarace Walker to supplement a starting five of Haliburton, Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith, Pascal Siakam and Zubac.
That’s the making of something formidable.
But something great? Something sustainable? Not quite.
Let’s be clear: The Pacers reached Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals and challenged the OKC Thunder in a way nobody else has because of their style of play, movement, pace, unselfishness. All of those things are true, and repeatable.
Tyrese Haliburton’s heroics? One ridiculous game-winning shot after another in those 2025 NBA playoffs? Not repeatable. Not likely, anyway. We’d love to see it again, of course, but that was lightning. Does it strike twice in the same place? Sometimes. Not often.
Either way, the results of the 2026 NBA Draft lottery were going to follow the Pacers – shape the Pacers – for the next decade. Either they acquired someone like Dybantsa or Wilson or Peterson or Boozer, a potential superstar to join Haliburton and perhaps take the torch from Haliburton someday down the road…
Or they got nothing.
The Pacers got nothing. They are back to being the same franchise they’ve been forever, a franchise that gets no breaks, a franchise that has to make its own luck and overachieve to make any noise at all. The Pacers are used to that. We’re used to that, you and me.
We know the roles we’re supposed to play. We’ve played them for years, from Pritchard and Buchanan making winning moves on the margins to coach Rick Carlisle unleashing 48 minutes of physical and psychological warfare on the opponent to Haliburton being the leader and Siakam the savvy veteran scorer and Nembhard and Nesmith the glue.
The fans, happy to support a team that plays like this. The media, covering this team differently than, say, the Los Angeles media covers the Lakers and Clippers because we know the Pacers are playing with a different kind – a much harder kind – of financial reality.
We can do this again, all of us. But it could’ve been different. If things were fair, it would’ve been different. But this wasn’t fair. The Pacers falling out of the top four in the 2026 NBA Draft was not fair.
T.J. McConnell was alone up there on stage, looking helpless and distraught, but not really. We were up there with him. All of us.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Doyel: Pacers get nothing in NBA Draft lottery … and it’s not right
Reporting by Gregg Doyel, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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