The Indiana Pacers Unconventional Path to the NBA Finals: Building Through Trades and Patience

The Indiana Pacers are just three wins away from their first NBA championship, and their journey to the Finals has been unconventional. Unlike most recent champions who drafted and developed their franchise cornerstones, or signed big-name free agents, the Pacers have relied heavily on trades to build their roster. In the winter of 2022, Sacramento Kings guard Tyrese Haliburton received three career-changing calls within 30 minutes. The first was from his agent informing him that the Kings might trade him. The second conveyed information that Indiana might be the destination. The third was from the Kings’ top basketball executive, confirming the trade to the Pacers. Haliburton’s call to Pascal Siakam, an All-Star forward who had helped the Raptors win the NBA title in 2019, was crucial in bringing the two players together in Indiana. Haliburton asked Siakam if he wanted to be in Indiana with him as his co-star, and Siakam agreed. Less than a week later, the deal was done. The Pacers’ success in building their roster through trades is unique in the NBA. Unlike teams like Boston, Denver, Golden State, and Milwaukee who drafted and developed their franchise cornerstones, or the 2020 Los Angeles Lakers who signed LeBron James as a free agent, the Pacers have struck gold by trading their way up. Of the 10 players Indiana has typically leaned on during this postseason, half were acquired via trades, including three of the top four scorers in Siakam, Haliburton, and Aaron Nesmith. Since the Miami Heat built a superteam through free agent signings and won consecutive championships in 2012 and 2013, the only NBA champion to have relied that much on trades were the 2019 Toronto Raptors, who traded for four of their top five leading scorers. Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan said there’s no one right way to build a championship team. “This has been successful for us with this group,” he said. “That’s not to say that it’ll continue to be successful.” The Pacers’ success is a product of drafting good players and trading for them. They study players’ backgrounds to understand their motivations and interests and look at who would fit coach Rick Carlisle’s style of play. They also identify which of that group they can actually trade for under the restrictions of the league’s collective bargaining agreement. Siakam fit the criteria, an impression that Haliburton’s phone call confirmed. The Pacers couldn’t rely on catching Siakam’s eye during a brief free-agency pitch. So instead, they traded for him to give him a monthslong preview of what life would be like as a Pacer. Buchanan said they value guys that maybe have been overlooked at some point in their career and have this kind of edge to them. “You put a group of guys like that together, there’s a common kind of fiber with them, and they all kind of feed off of that,” he added. A key reason the trade-heavy route is the path least traveled is that although a top draft pick or a star free agent can turn a franchise around immediately, trades take time and require patience from the owner. In a league in which executive turnover is frequent, Kevin Pritchard has been in place as Indiana’s top basketball executive since 2012. By the time Buchanan joined in 2017, Indiana was in a run in which it didn’t advance out of the postseason’s first round for five straight seasons through 2020, then missed the playoffs entirely the next three seasons. But last year, its second season with Haliburton and months after it acquired Siakam, the team advanced to the Eastern Conference finals, which set the stage for this season’s Finals run, the franchise’s first in a quarter-century. “We started 10-15 this year, and [Simon] was like, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’” Buchanan said. “He’s never one to get panicky, and that’s helpful for the team.” In the NBA, what is widely considered the least advantageous position a team can be in is “the middle” between the elite contenders competing for titles and the bottom-dwellers fighting for top picks. Indiana’s ownership has never shown an interest in enduring multiple rebuilding seasons full of losses in hope of landing high draft picks, however. Guard Bennedict Mathurin, who was selected sixth overall in 2022, was only Indiana’s second top 10 pick since 1989. Along with Mathurin,