SACRAMENTO — Ben Sheppard’s third 3-pointer came too easy for Kings fans to stomach.
The Pacers’ second-year wing did what he always does in transition, which is the part of the reason the late first-round pick so quickly became a trusted part of Indiana’s rotation as a rookie. When forward Obi Toppin got a steal on an errant throwback by Kings guard Malik Monk, Sheppard sprinted down the floor to the corner — in this case the left one — to keep the floor spaced for the break.
Toppin didn’t find him immediately, but after the Pacers made two passes and four Kings finally got down the floor on defense, Sheppard was still alone in the corner as those defenders failed to so much as notice him. Veteran point guard T.J. McConnell found him with a kickout pass from the paint, and Sheppard’s 3-pointer caught just enough of the back of the rim to splash the front of the net. The Pacers went up 16 points and the impassioned fans at the Golden 1 Center started booing their own team.
The Pacers aren’t very far removed from experiencing what the Kings did at their own home court. It happened most noticeably in their Nov. 15 loss to Miami at Gainbridge Fieldhouse when coach Rick Carlisle removed the starters en masse, but there have certainly been others this year when there might have been less pervasive booing and there have certainly been galling road defeats this season when Pacers fans may have wanted to boo through their televisions or laptops. Just two weeks ago, they fell to 10-15 with a stunning loss to a Charlotte Hornets team that already seems lottery bound at 7-21 and was missing seven key players including All-Star point guard LaMelo Ball.
On Sunday, however, the Pacers looked like a dramatically different team than they were then. They were ruthless in their destruction of a Kings team that has lost four straight, crushing them 122-95 with a 70-43 second half and a 35-17 fourth quarter. It was the Pacers’ first win this season by more than 15 points and their fourth straight victory, giving them their first four-game winning streak since they won six in a row from Dec. 26-Jan. 5 last season and bringing them back within a game of .500 at 14-15 for 2024-25.
While the Kings fans were showing their dismay in the fourth quarter, the Pacers were giddy. The starters howled on the bench while second-year forward Jarace Walker reprised All-Star Tyrese Haliburton’s off-the-backboard kick-out assist for a Thomas Bryant 3-pointer and seldom-used 37-year-old veteran James Johnson Jr. drove and dished to 20-year-old rookie Johnny Furphy for a ferocious dunk.
“It’s just vibes and energy for us,” Walker said. “Everybody’s up. Everybody’s happy for each other. Nobody’s sulking if they didn’t score. We’re becoming more of a connected group and that goes a long way when we’re trying to win games on the road.”
It’s been noted frequently over the last two weeks that increased practice time has helped the Pacers in that regard. Their absence from the knockout rounds of the NBA Cup after last year’s run to the finals opened up some time for them to spend in their home practice facility after a cramped schedule in November and early December. They were also fortunate enough to have two days in Sacramento without games between Thursday’s win over the Suns and Sunday’s game, so they had another productive practice on Saturday at the Stockton Kings’ practice facility.
But it also helped that the Pacers kept themselves in a mental space for the practice time to make a difference. The narrative that they were a one-hit wonder after last year’s Eastern Conference finals run gained steam throughout the season’s first 25 games and it was certainly pervasive enough for them to notice. But they never allowed themselves to believe it. They’ve been a tightly-bonded group throughout the last three years as the team has been rebuilt around Haliburton, and they leaned on that connection.
“I really like how everyone in here didn’t hit the panic button while everyone else was,” McConnell said. “I feel like people don’t realize last year, at one point we were 14-14. Long season. Obviously, we didn’t start the way we wanted to. We went on a couple losing streaks, but we’re well coached. That’s kept us together and we have a really together group. Everyone is for everyone in here. In the NBA, that’s all you can ask for.”
And, Carlisle said, their continued togetherness has made them easier to coach out of a hole.
“We have great guys and our guys have stuck together extremely well through the difficult times,” Carlisle said. “… There’s going to be rocky times in an NBA season. You look around the league and there’s a lot of upheaval. There’s a lot of teams that are struggling. You see some finger-pointing and things like that. Our guys haven’t gone there. We’ve just continued to talk about togetherness, a long season and daily improvement.”
They also continued to tell anyone who would listen that the players they lost due to injury were more important than they appeared to be on paper. Sheppard strained his left oblique on Nov. 17, forward Aaron Nesmith sprained his left ankle on Nov. 1 and guard Andrew Nembhard had a flare-up of tendinitis in his left knee that led the Pacers to put him on the shelf on Nov. 8. Those three combined to average just 25.8 points per game last season and their top four scorers — Haliburton, Pascal Siakam, Myles Turner and Bennedict Mathurin, who averaged a combined 73.0 ppg in 2023-24 — were all still healthy.
However, as Carlisle continually noted, Nesmith, Nembhard and Sheppard are three of their best perimeter defenders. They’re also three of their fastest runners in transition, three of their most selfless players, and three of their hardest competitors. The Pacers have players with more talent, but those three represent the team’s connective tissue, and they were struggling to find cohesion without them.
The Pacers are still without Nesmith, but the returns of Nembhard and Sheppard have made an immediate impact. Nembhard returned to the lineup on Dec. 1, initially on a minutes restriction. He is averaging 11.4 points on 55.2% shooting to go with 4.6 assists since, including 12.6 points and 5.0 assists in the last five games since he’s been playing all four quarters. He finished Sunday’s game with 12 points on 5 of 6 shooting including 2 of 2 3-pointers to go with four assists, playing just under 19 minutes in the first night of a back-to-back.
Sheppard, meanwhile, returned to play on Thursday for the first time since his injury. He scored just two points against the Suns, but Sunday he scored 14 points on a perfect 5 of 5 shooting including 4 of 4 from 3-point range.
“I felt good out there,” Sheppard said. “I’d say for the Phoenix game, my first game back, the game felt a little sped up for me. It felt like when I checked in today, I just came in more confident and brought energy and did everything my team asked me to do.”
What the Pacers ask Sheppard to do doesn’t seem to be much, as he’s never ball dominant on offense. But they do want him to sprint down the floor to the corner every time, take open shots when he has them and move the ball when he doesn’t, and then take on tough matchups on the defensive end.
“He’s just a very consistent, reliable system player,” Carlisle said, “who knows his job and embraces his job and loves being part of the team.”
The Pacers are a combined +49 when Nembhard has been on the floor in his eight appearances since his return — second-best to Haliburton’s +54 — and +17 in Sheppard’s minutes in his two games back. The pieces fit together better on both the first and second units on both ends of the floor with the ball moving better on offense and more stops being created on the defensive end. The Pacers rank 13th in the NBA in offensive rating (112.8 points per 100 possessions) and 21st in defensive rating this season (114.5) but in the last six games they rank fourth in offense (118.9) and ninth in defense (108.1).
“It’s quite obvious with how we’ve started playing when they came back,” McConnell said when asked how big of a deal their absences were. “We’re not looking to make excuses for ourselves, but it’s the reality of the situation. They weren’t healthy and I think we struggled because of it.”
They rarely struggled on Sunday and in the second half they were sublime, making 29 of their 43 field goal attempts (67.4%) including 8 of 17 3-pointers (47.%) while holding the Kings to 15-of-48 shooting (31.3%) including 6 of 21 (28.6%) from beyond the arc. The Pacers posted 1.28 points per possession in the third quarter and 1.57 per possession in the fourth while holding the Kings to 0.68 per possession in the fourth.
The Pacers had seven scorers in double figures with Siakam leading the way with 19 points to go with 10 rebounds for his second straight double-double. They posted a season high 36 assists against just 12 turnovers with 20 assists to five turnovers — which led to zero Kings points — in the second half.
“I think we’re just locked in right now as a group,” Haliburton said. “We’re playing really good team basketball right now. We’re connected on the defensive end. When we get stops, we can get out and run. I think just off our chemistry that we’ve built over the last couple years, we know how to play the right way but we gotta get stops to be able to get out in transition and play with advantages. I think we’re just doing a great job of moving the ball. When you’re getting stops like that, the energy is just right and that’s how it feels right now.”
The Pacers are making a point to remind themselves that their upcoming schedule will make sustaining this more difficult. The first two wins of this streak came against Philadelphia and New Orleans team that have been decimated by injuries this year. Sunday’s win came against a Sacramento team that had what Carlisle called a “nightmare scenario” schedule wise, playing their third game in four days on the second night of a back-to-back after losing two home games to the Lakers in the previous three days.
On Monday, the Pacers will be the team on the second night of a back-to-back, playing the Golden State Warriors in San Francisco while the Warriors will have had a day of rest. After two days off for Christmas, they’ll get back at it Thursday at home against the Western Conference leading Oklahoma City Thunder. They’ll travel to Boston the next day to play the defending NBA champion Celtics and then play them again on Dec. 29 before returning home to play the NBA Cup champion Milwaukee Bucks on New Year’s Eve.
“These are tough games,” Haliburton said. “We’ll take wins any way we can get them. We’re just trying to play the right way.”
