OKLAHOMA CITY — Before the NBA Finals came the phone calls.
In the winter of 2022, Sacramento Kings guard Tyrese Haliburton got three career-changing calls within 30 minutes. The first was from his agent informing him, to his shock, 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.
“I hung up, set my phone down, and started crying my eyes out,” Haliburton recalled shortly afterward.
Two years later, Haliburton picked up the phone and made his own call. Toronto was open to trading Pascal Siakam, an All-Star forward who had helped the Raptors win the NBA title in 2019. Before Indiana committed to dealing for a player who could be a free agent just five months later, it needed to gauge Siakam’s interest in staying long-term in Indiana and with Haliburton as his co-star.
Haliburton stepped away from a dinner in Atlanta and called Siakam, whom he knew only slightly.
“‘Do you want to be here?’” Haliburton asked Siakam. Over the next hour, he heard enough to believe Siakam did.
“We just very much aligned on wanting to win and that being the emphasis,” Haliburton said.
Less than a week later, the deal was done — one in a string of trades that has unconventionally built a Pacers roster that is just three wins away from the franchise’s first NBA championship, in a best-of-seven series against Oklahoma City that is tied at 1-1.
Unlike the league’s four most recent champions, 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 and whose glamour status made them the preferred trade destination for its other star, Anthony Davis, Indiana’s front office has struck gold by trading its 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.
“There’s no one right way to do it,” Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan told NBC News. “This has been successful for us with this group. That’s not to say that it’ll continue to be successful, and there’s other ways that teams have built teams to get to this point. The NBA changes, the dynamic of teams, and how you build teams is always changing.
“A year or two from now, it may be a totally different approach. And I think your job as a front office has got to be to understand what works for you, because what works for us may not work for another market, another team or another owner.”
Success in the NBA is a product of drafting good players, signing them as free agents and trading for them. Teams ideally try to use as many avenues as possible. Take Oklahoma City, which although it is a small-market team like Indianapolis, shrewdly netted future MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a future pick that became All-Star Jalen Williams in a 2019 trade, bottomed out in the standings to score a high draft pick to select Chet Holmgren and last year signed coveted free agent Isaiah Hartenstein.
The Pacers are unique in that circumstances have forced their fortunes to be determined heavily by just one tool.
Throughout the team’s history its owner, Herb Simon, has never shown an appetite to be bad enough to “tank” his way to a high draft pick. The Midwest city has also never been an attractive enough locale to woo elite free agents or disgruntled stars demanding trades. That leaves making trades. And each follows a process of information-gathering.
The Pacers, as all NBA teams do, study players’ backgrounds to understand their motivations and interests. They look at who would fit coach Rick Carlisle’s style of play. Both narrow the pool of candidates. So does identifying which of that group the team likes and 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.
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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.
“Obviously, some of these big markets built through free agency,” Buchanan said. “We can’t really do that. It’s not a formula for us to succeed with. We’ve had the trade market.”
Siakam “didn’t want warm weather, he didn’t want the beach or nightlife, he didn’t want [a] big market,” Buchanan added. “He didn’t care about that. Ty is the same way.
“One thing we value that I think OKC kind of certainly said this, too, is we value guys that maybe have been overlooked at some point in their career. They maybe weren’t McDonald’s All-Americans or five-star recruits or whatever it might be, and they have this kind of edge to them. Like ‘I want to prove people wrong.’ 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.”
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 that requires patience from the owner, Simon. 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.”
A Western Conference executive said Indiana’s dealmaking wouldn’t have been possible without a well-respected college scouting department that has identified draft picks who have developed into solid players, whom the team has then been able to flip into more assets. Trading away All-Star wing Paul George brought Domantas Sabonis, who was later used to trade for Haliburton.
Yet trades have also led to more trades. Three years after Indiana traded for guard Malcolm Brogdon in 2019, he was sent to Boston in exchange for Nesmith, a little-used player for the Celtics who has come up huge for the Pacers. Nesmith’s shot-making keyed Indiana’s wild Game 1 comeback in the conference finals against New York, and he has made a staggering 49% of his playoff 3-pointers.
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, the three other home-grown members of the Pacers’ playoff rotation were selected 11th, 26th and 31st.
Never bottoming out makes roster construction more difficult, but it also comes with advantages.
“There’s a lot of value to trying to compete, to win every year, because you’re setting a foundation for what your culture is, and that’s to compete and fight every game,” an Eastern Conference scout said. “It’s great to tank for those teams that do lose and end up with a high pick and get a great player. But there is some expense in terms of development, because players need to learn not just how to play, but how to win.”
And Indiana has won by doing it differently from most.
