The Wizards have so much to learn from the soon-to-be-champion Pacers

The Indiana Pacers are — shockingly — two wins away from the first NBA championship in franchise history.

The Pacers play a blue-collar, exhausting brand of basketball largely defined by simply wanting to win games more than their opponents do. They have compiled a portfolio of jaw-dropping comeback wins this postseason, fueled by an array of grinder and hustler role players.

No team can learn more from the Pacers’ success story than the Washington Wizards. The Wizards, like the Pacers, were directionless and middling for a long stretch of time before blowing up their situation. 

The Pacers never bottomed out nearly as aggressively as the Wizards did, and Tyrese Haliburton single-handedly trumps every asset the Wizards currently have combined, but the scrappy, underdog Pacers have nonetheless laid out a blueprint for unconventional success at the highest level.

The Pacers are led by Haliburton, who is a top 10-to-15-ish player in the league but does not fit the typical mold for an NBA champion’s best player. This is a comforting notion for the Wizards, who have been picking in the lottery for the better part of a decade but have not managed to draft a true franchise player quite yet. 

Rather, the core of Bilal Coulibaly, Alex Sarr, and Bub Carrington more closely resembles the Pacers’ ensemble cast of lovable role players like Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith, and Obi Toppin. 

With those players in tow, the Wizards should heavily emphasize development in areas in which the Pacers excel — defensive intensity, selfless play, and positional playmaking. 

Indiana (or OKC) will be the seventh unique NBA champion of the past seven seasons. The Pacers are proof of concept that this is, indeed, an era of parity in the NBA rather than a coincidence.

Indiana has proven that the model for teambuilding in this new era has changed. No longer is the “big three model” (at which the Wizards failed hilariously with the Beal-Porzingis-Kuzma trio) how organizations choose to build. The Pacers are the merely the first of potentially many “blue collar”-type teams to break through to the championship level.

The Wizards already have some of the infrastructure in place to evolve into the model the Pacers have perfected over the coming years. There are certainly no players of the caliber of Tyrese Haliburton or Pascal Siakam on Washington’s roster, but there does not seem to be any sort of a rush from the Wizards’ front office to become competitive in the next couple of years.