Moments in whiplash

In-arena notes from up close and personal with the most confounding team in the NBA, the Indiana Pacers.

One wears number 0, the other dons jersey number 1. Right now, they sit near each other on the bench in street clothes as the Indiana Pacers lose game after game.

It’s Tyrese Haliburton and Obi Toppin, two basketball talents and, critically, energy-giving humans. People love being around those two. Their vibe, infectious. On the court, the way they play is jolly. They light up a crowd and ignite a fanbase, a team, and a city.

Right now, that spirit isn’t being poured into basketball games. It can’t be, they are hurt — Toppin for a while, Haliburton for even longer. The most you see Toppin or Haliburton during a Pacers game is usually during a stoppage in play. At home, you’re hit with commercials on the TV. For those sitting in Gainbridge Fieldhouse, in-arena entertainment is provided during a break in in basketball. That amusement is broadcast on the jumbotron and recently involved a fan choosing which Pacers player is being shown on the big screen in baby picture form. Who is this one? They were asked, presented three options as the answer. Other times, the distraction is a trivia question. Last month, for example: Name every Pacers player who has scored a career high in points in one game this season.

Look down on the court to see Haliburton and Toppin watching, entranced by the in-arena fun. That is the point, after all. Usually, after the fan chosen to be the contestant gets stumped, the invigorators will try to help them by either shouting out answers or pointing to their teammate that is the correct response. Aaron Nesmith and Quenton Jackson were the final two players missing on the “career high this year” question, for example. Toppin pointed at each of them until the fan answered correctly.

It’s pleasant for a minute or two. After a timeout in which a shot of Haliburton, no older than five years old in the photo, was shown on the jumbotron, the in-arena camera cut to Haliburton on the bench. “I was a cute baby,” he mouthed. The stadium quietly laughed.

A fun, lighthearted moment. Less than two hours later, Paolo Banchero would score with just a few seconds left to lift the Orlando Magic over the Pacers by two points, marking the 10th-straight defeat for the Pacers. That, in contrast, is not fun or pleasant. Not for a single minute. It is heavy hearted. Head coach Rick Carlisle entered the media room for his postgame presser and steered answers toward something he wanted to talk about: changes the team made in the second half that came as a result of what he described as “pretty nonsense” taking place earlier in the game and also during other recent outings.

These are moments in whiplash. The fun ones have nothing to do with basketball. The painful ones are all about the roundball, one the Pacers had complete control over during one of the most magical runs in sports history.

This is supposed to be a season of celebrating. Even with an NBA Finals defeat, 2024-25 was the best season in Pacers history. That group captured the hearts of the world and hooked the hearts of each other. For two months, they could beat anyone. Down any number of points, it did not matter. Haliburton would be shooting the ball with a few seconds left — after scoring, the Pacers won again.

His injury robbed them of a proper chance to become champions. Winning the Eastern Conference is still a big fucking deal, though. They hand out a trophy for that. It’s only happened in Indiana twice, ever. The first time the franchise did it, they lost in the Finals and made changes, going 41-41 the following year. It was still enchanting. Hoosiers got to watch Reggie Miller some more. There were playoff games again. Those were their guys.

This time, it’s all different. There is almost no euphoria. Pascal Siakam, by far the best player still standing for the injured, despondent-at-times group hit a game-winning shot against the Chicago Bulls in late November. Awesome, right? Something for fans to cheer for and a breakthrough worth celebrating. The near-champs, triumphant again thanks to clutch brilliance.

More often, it’s not that. Giannis Antetokounmpo, Brandon Ingram, Jalen Brunson, and Banchero have all canned heroic shots to sink the Pacers in the final 10 seconds of a game this year. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Joel Embiid, and Julius Randle have snatched their souls in dramatic fourth quarter performances — the Pacers lost every single one of those games.

Agony. Petty nonsense. Misery, losing again. Even without Haliburton, these guys rightly believed they’d be better than this.

Last season meant everything to this group. They love each other — something stated by some teams but only actually felt by few. You can see it every time the roster of 18 surrounds Siakam during lineup introductions while “Ye” by Burna Boy plays. All smiles. All ready to play ball again.

2.5 hours later, losing again. Last year, that never happened. From January 1, 2025 to the end of the 2025 NBA Finals, the Pacers went 49-22. Over one-third of their losses in that span were in the playoffs, and better than 18% in just the NBA Finals.

Now, they are 6-30. As I walk around the concourse during halftime of a recent Pacers home game against the Boston Celtics, I hear a fan talking to his friend and what appeared to be his friend’s dad about the current state of affairs for the basketball team they are watching. “It’s so they can get Cam Boozer or AJ Dybantsa,” he says, completely butchering the pronunciation of Dybantsa’s name.

That’s whiplash, in a sentence. A paying customer, wearing a Buddy Hield Pacers No. 24 uniform, in attendance to see his favorite team the day after Christmas. The game is halfway done and he’s bouncing draft ideas off of people he knows, reciting names he has read but clearly never heard vocalized. The trio, looking ahead to the next thing and not at all interested in discussing the Eastern Conference Champion team playing that night. The team he’s rocking a jersey of was down 75-61 at halftime.

You wonder about the emotions of the players. You wonder, What the hell happened to these guys? Understandably, injuries have derailed any chance of the Pacers staying competitive, even without Haliburton. Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith, Bennedict Mathurin, Toppin, T.J. McConnell, and Ben Sheppard have all missed extended time. Myles Turner is on the Bucks. That’s eight of their top nine players from last season. Only Pascal Siakam has been healthy and available this year, missing just one game.

He is easily the most frustrated player. After getting crushed by Milwaukee late last month, Siakam let his emotions out in the postgame presser. “Yeah, it’s hard,” he said of keeping his own spirit up. As I type this sentence, the Pacers still haven’t won a game since Siakam uttered those words. “Basketball means a lot to me and it definitely drives a lot of my life. [My life is] just basketball, basketball mostly, and then my family. So just not having fun out there…”

Photo credit Trevor Ruszkowski

The rest of the sentence isn’t important. Not having fun? Uh oh. That’s hard for anyone to hear. And that, once again, is the whiplash. Losing sucks anyway. Losing after literal basketball nirvana for a few months? Beyond compare.

“After I leave the game, if we win, it kind of commands how the rest of my day is gonna go. If I played bad or if we lost, it messes up everything for me. So I really care about it,” Siakam continues before later shifting the emotional focus to his teammates. “We gotta do more. I don’t know the solution. Like, I’m trying to find it. But I think we’ve all gotta question ourselves, ‘Is this important or not?’”

After Carlisle shared what he saw as petty nonsense, other Pacers players essentially described it as competitive bickering. They just want to win. Yet they aren’t, at all, and those emotions are now being described in almost a negative way. That’s how much this is all wearing thin.

“Guys are tired of losing,” Nesmith shared, matter-of-factly.

Duh. You can see those feelings. I felt bad for Jarace Walker, who looked at me like I inquired if he enjoys doing his taxes or sitting in traffic when I asked him how losing seven games in a row has felt.

“Not good,” he said. I feel bad. I know the answer already, mostly — I can see it and feel it, I know it sucks. But I need to put everything in their words, and those were his only two words. Yet what he really said came before that. The corners of his mouth, raising. His left hand, rested on his right bicep with his arms crossed, flips over and lifts slightly towards his face. He shows his teeth for maybe two seconds before answering. In my head, I think he’s about to say (perhaps rightly), “What do you think, idiot?”

Instead, he showed and explained his emotions quite well. And it’s flashes like that, coming after the greatest season in Pacers history, that keep happening with the 2025-26 Pacers. They keep showing up, happy to see each other. Then losing, then frustration. Rinse and repeat.

Siakam is usually level-headed. Winning is his center, though, and that has rarely happened.. The most revealing moment of the season came in the aforementioned game against the Celtics as Siakam was whistled for a foul with 30 seconds until halftime. He couldn’t believe it, and Boston was on a 27-11 run at the time. In frustration, instead of complaining, Siakam pretended for just a moment that he was going to launch the ball as hard as he could into the crowd. You can see it at the end of the video here.

He quickly pulled himself together, but not before kicking the ball around for a second and flipping it to the wrong official. A delay of game was called. Irritation came out as the Pacers gave away another game thanks to another dreadful 10 minutes of play.

How can something be totally explainable yet inexplicable? That’s the hypothetical that orbits the Pacers and their emotions. 6-30 makes perfect sense when you look at their injury list and corresponding hardship contracts. You already read the list of key players who have missed time for the Pacers, even beyond Haliburton. Yet for a team to be eligible for a hardship contract, four players have to be sidelined at the same time and each have to be out for two-plus more weeks. Indiana met that criteria six times by Christmas.

So not only were they missing the pieces that helped get them to the Finals, but there were new faces in the building almost every week. Those guys have to learn the plays, the terminology, the layout of the building, everything. So, of course the Pacers have been bad! Right?

Yet even in their healthiest games, the results have been losses. They just had all of Nembhard, Nesmith, Mathurin, McConnell, Siakam, and Sheppard for two consecutive games. The Pacers lost both, including a double-digit defeat against the Spurs.

There’s the contrast, again. It makes perfect sense why the league’s most injured team is 6-30. It makes no sense that a roster that just made the Finals lost a piece, albeit their best one, and went from the top of the East to 6-30. Surely, the available talent is better than that. But what available talent?

Those competing emotions are what you see all the time. The fun pregame interactions. A smiling group most of the time behind the scenes. Haliburton and Toppin, living it up and playing games with fans. That’s the upbeat group that nearly won it all last year.

Then, a reminder of the standings, of the scoreboard, of reality today. Between the painted lines, everything has gone wrong months after it was perfect. That’s whiplash. Haliburton will be back one day. Conflicting reflections won’t go away until then.