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Context: Celtics played their starting lineup of Horford/Hayward/Tatum/Brown/Irving in their first preseason game. Seems like it works. With the exception of Horford, they all seem to have the timeline as the Pacers in terms of window

Pacers have Vic who is entering his prime, they have Gordon and Kyrie. Pacers have two promising young players who could potentially carry the franchise in the future in Myles and Domas, they have Tatum and Jaylen Brown

In short, it seems like the Celtics are going to be the team that the Pacers will need to overcome in the foreseeable future, if they ever have any aspirations to reach the NBA finals

As usual, Pacers are going to be the underdog to the Celtics' juggernaut; this seems to be their never-changing destiny; it used to be the Bulls, then the Pistons, and then whichever team LeBron James was on

I for one hope to not see history repeat itself, though I can already see it happening; Pacers are going to be eliminated by Celtics in the playoffs year after year after year, putting up fierce competition each time only to fall short

What is the best strategy the Pacers can adopt in order to avoid this?

Of course, there is always the keep your fingers crossed approach; their roster might get too expensive to keep together, someone might sulk at not getting enough touches, Brad Stevens might suddenly mull a career change, etc etc

But assuming that nothing too disastrous happens to the Celtics and they manage to more or less keep the core of their team together, what is the long term gameplan for the Pacers?

Topofthekey wrote:
But assuming that nothing too disastrous happens to the Celtics and they manage to more or less keep the core of their team together, what is the long term gameplan for the Pacers?

As I mentioned in the thread I created last week - Get Vic some scoring help. It's the only way we'll ever beat Boston.

Philly are another entering our time line and with some ability to challenge for the future.

Boston are a tough match up for us as they have genuine pace, plenty of guys who can shoot the three and are a very big team height and length wise across the court. We are missing one or two three and D wing options from being able to genuinely challenge them at the moment in my opinion.

We first have to start by continuing to develop who we are with what we have the key pieces to. We have so many free agents after the year (Collison, Joseph, Tyreke, Somner, Bogs, Thad, KOQ, and Myles; Ike and Alize NG), that we’re not even sure what we’re building around yet. Let’s not start making drastic changes to compete with Boston in 5 years when we’re not even sure what we’re really starting with. Will TJout it together? Will Myles and Dom play well together? Can we use Holiday? Will Oladipo be here for another 5 years when his deal expires?

We've beaten teams that were suppose to be better than us before.