Way too much whining.
How many of those players playing tonight will even be in the rotation next year? Two or three? It might well just be KO/Gradey and they were fine last night even playing above where they'll be situated role-wise next season. The biggest thing is that Gradey was able to score at that level against a pretty good defensive Knicks team.
This is literally the only thing that mattered in that game.
Next season we'll have IQ/Gradey/RJ/Scottie/Yak starting, and they've shown that they can keep up with most other teams when healthy. In that short time that they were together they were plenty competitive with some really good teams. It wasn't perfect and we know there's lots of work to do to improve defensively but they can score, which was a big problem with the old core that we started out the season with. Another summer of improvement and more time to work together to help them gain more chemistry together. They will only keep getting better.
At least right now we figure to bring back KO/Ochai off the bench at the very least and then we'll see what happens with Gary and there's flexibility there to trade Bruce/Boucher and improve the team. Also consider that we'll be bringing on-board 2/3 rookies and probably bring back some of the fringe g-league level guys to round things out. But the point is that there's lots of cap space and assets to drastically improve the bench/raise the floor of our rotation level guys compared to what we have now and that depth should help a lot next season. You only really need to find 1-3 guys to add to the mix considering that's already seven projected as sure-fire rotation level guys already and teams only really play like eight guys during a playoff series.
This isn't a defense of the job that Masai/Bobby/management have done in the last few years, I've called them out plenty. But Masai acknowledged that his faith in that old core didn't pay off and he hopefully learned from that. But at least to his credit he pivoted instead of doubling down and I think we'll be set-up well going forward. This is pretty much bottom right now, but that's because of injuries and because we got off to a terrible start with the old core. What's done is done but it's hardly the end of the world if we miss out on that Spurs pick. We'll either get a top six selection or get our own pick back next season in a better draft. And then that's it, we'll have our full suite of picks available to us.
Things will look brighter once we make those draft selections and we sign a few guys/make some trades in the off-season and then we'll see what happens with the draft next year. But at the very least we'll also have a few FRPs to also look forward to in 2026 and who knows how the Pacers will look by then.
Masai has shown that he can build a championship caliber team and I don't think that just goes away.
I really just don't get the crying right now.
