INDIANAPOLIS — Pascal Siakam doesn’t want to forget this season. He doesn’t want to shake it off or think of it as a meaningless anomaly.
With All-Star point guard Tyrese Haliburton out all season with an Achilles tendon tear and Myles Turner having moved on to Milwaukee in free agency, Siakam saw it as his job to be the Pacers’ standard bearer, to be more vocal and visible as a leader than he’d ever been before. He viewed it as his responsibility to make sure the Pacers still operated as close as possible to the same level they did over the previous two seasons when they reached the Eastern Conference Finals twice and the NBA Finals in 2025.
So when the injuries piled up right out of the gate and everything started going downhill quickly, no one wore the defeat more visibly than Siakam. And even once a substantial portion of the Pacers’ fanbase started fully embracing the idea of turning a lost season into a top-four draft pick and cheering on anything that looked like tanking, Siakam still played every game like it was worth winning and was disappointed that the Pacers usually didn’t.
He was by far the Pacers’ best and most productive player, leading the team with 24.0 points and 6.6 rebounds per game, scoring in double figures in all 62 of his appearances and scoring at least 20 points in 48 of the 62. But a big part of the reason why he wanted to be traded to the Pacers in 2024 was that the Raptors were entering a rebuild and the Pacers were winning.
So even though the Pacers’ 19-63 finish — the worst in franchise history — may ultimately serve them better than if they had won 10 more games because they enter the draft lottery with the best possible odds, Siakam isn’t taking any solace in that.
“I don’t want to cope with it,” Siakam said. “That’s definitely not my plan, figuring out what to do when I lose or when the season is bad. I don’t want this to happen again. I don’t think about coping. I don’t want to cope with it.”
He’d prefer it also if the rest of the team is as angry as he is.
“I hope we go into the summer, everyone just really, really mad about the situation,” Siakam said. “This was really, really frustrating. I hope we bring that rage into the summer, everyone getting better individually, find some time together, stay together, work together as a team. When we come back, we understand what it takes.”
Siakam spent all season talking about the importance of maintaining good habits and consistency. He saw some progress in that, especially in the last three weeks of the season. The Pacers were 4-7 in that stretch, but they had impressive wins over postseason teams Orlando and Miami, a 145-point performance in a win over Chicago and an overwhelming win over a fellow lottery team in Brooklyn where the Pacers weren’t playing many of their top players. During that 11-game stretch, the Pacers actually led the NBA in assists and were in the top 15 in several other key offensive categories including scoring and field goal percentage. That was a sign that players who wouldn’t have ordinarily been part of the rotation, including rookie guard Kam Jones, newly acquired forward Kobe Brown and two-way contract players Ethan Thompson, Taelon Peter and Jalen Slawson, were learning how to correctly operate in the Pacers system.
“Being on the floor, that’s the best teacher,” Siakam said. “We can show you all the clips. You can work out as much as you can and do all the drills, but being on the floor and playing real NBA minutes is the only way to learn. I think we’ve had opportunities with younger guys being on the floor, learning and being in real game situations where they had to grow and make mistakes. Hopefully that will really help you to understanding what we’re doing. … You look around and you see who you can look to next year or the years moving forward and I think that’s a good experience.
However, Siakam wasn’t trying to talk himself into the idea that the Pacers had done the best they could. There were defeats that couldn’t just be explained by injuries and blowouts that were worse than they should have been and month-long stretches where they couldn’t manage a single win.
So he doesn’t want to think — and doesn’t want his teammates to think — that the Pacers’ issues will fix themselves.
In 2026-27 they will presumably have a healthy version of Haliburton and will get a full season of Ivica Zubac, the center they acquired from the Clippers at the February trade deadline to give them their long-term answer at the position. They could also add a top-four draft pick from a loaded class, though they could also miss out on the pick if the lottery doesn’t swing their way because they conditionally included the pick in the trade that acquired Zubac.
For now, the only player they’ll be missing to start the season is forward Johnny Furphy, who suffered an ACL tear in February and presumably won’t be ready to go by October. They have most of the key pieces back from the team that reached Game 7 of the NBA Finals in 2025 before falling short, so the obvious expectation will be that they will be an Eastern Conference contender again.
But Siakam doesn’t want anyone thinking it’s going to be automatic, because he certainly doesn’t.
“It’s going to take a lot of rebuilding, some of those standards that you talked about,” Siakam said. “Making sure that we start over. That’s what it’s gonna take. As long as we all have that mindset and we go to the summer with that level of seriousness of understanding what it takes to win, what we’re gonna need to do to win, we’re going to be OK.”
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: Pacers Pascal Siakam wants this season to hurt: ‘Bring that rage into the summer’
Reporting by Dustin Dopirak, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
