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Paul George is ready to go 48 minutes to keep the Pacers alive
Through five games, the Indiana Pacers have outscored the Toronto Raptors by 26 points in 189 minutes with Paul George on the floor. They have been outscored by 29 points in 51 minutes with George sitting. Other factors have helped determine success or failure in their first-round playoff series — stuff like Kyle Lowry's iffy shot-making (and possibly balky elbow) and random acts of Ian Mahinmi — but for the most part, it's been that simple: the seventh-seeded Pacers' chances of upsetting the deeper and better (if somewhat scrambled and not-quite-world-beating) No. 2 Raptors go away when George goes to the bench.
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Down 3-2 after Tuesday's buzzer-beater-that-wasn't, the Pacers face elimination when the Raptors visit Bankers Life Fieldhouse for Friday's Game 6. Indiana staying alive means George staying on the floor ... and to hear the All-Star swingman tell it, he's ready to go the distance. From Nate Taylor of the Indianapolis Star:
“It’s on everybody,” George said. “It’s on everybody to get this win.”
Much of the burden, though, will be placed again on George’s body – a task he has carried throughout his first full season back from sustaining a compound fracture in his right leg in August 2014. George understands this.
Yet what could await him Friday is a test of his will and endurance. [...]
With the season’s most critical game upon the Pacers, George is not afraid to be on the court for every second of Friday’s game.
“If that’s the direction that the game is going, I’m all for it,” he said. “Whatever we've got to do to win, I’m doing it.”
If he does so, he'll be adding himself to a pretty small list of recent performers to go all the way without a break in the postseason. The most recent bell-to-bell playoff outings have came from effort avatars/irreplaceable pieces like Jimmy Butler, who played all 53 minutes of the Chicago Bulls' overtime Game 2 loss to the Washington Wizards in 2014 and had a run of no-breaks games for Tom Thibodeau in 2013. Kevin Durant went the full 48 for the Russell Westbrook-less Oklahoma City Thunder in a loss to the Memphis Grizzlies in 2013 and to eliminate the San Antonio Spurs in 2012.
Other iron men include pre-injury Dwight Howard back in 2011; championship-era Ray Allen, peak Dirk Nowitzki, and 2012 Playoff Rondo. These performances are the province of tireless superstars whose teams simply can't survive without them ... which, if you've been paying attention, you know is a pretty perfect description of the spot George occupies on this year's Pacers.
If he goes the distance, George will be pushing himself past his previously established limit. George has never played all 48 minutes of a regulation game in the NBA. He has played 45 or more minutes 12 times in his pro career, with seven of those games featuring overtime, and five of the 12 games coming in the playoffs. He has not, however, done it in 23 months, after missing most of last season following his catastrophic leg injury and topping off at 42 minutes, 13 seconds — interestingly enough, against these Raptors back in March — in his first season back, a campaign in which he re-established himself as one of the game's greatest two-way players.
You can kind of forgive Pacers coach Frank Vogel for not feeling 100 percent comfortable heaping that kind of burden on George. After the Pacers blew Game 5 — in which they had a 13-point lead after three quarters, but watched the Raptors cut into the advantage with George on the bench to start the frame before blowing Indy's doors off in a 25-9 fourth — Vogel said he'd chosen to go away from George at the start of the fourth because he believed his star needed a rest.
"He looked pretty gassed at the end of the third," Vogel said. "We had a decent lead that I thought we could hold up. That lead stayed around 11, I think, until around the nine-minute mark, and then we were ready to get him back in."
George acknowledged his fatigue after playing brilliantly for 32 1/2 of the game's first 36 minutes, but added, "It wasn't enough to keep me from being ready and prepared in the fourth."
George also seemed less than thrilled by the efforts turned in by the teammates entrusted with picking up his slack while he sat ... and, considering the Pacers managed just one point on 0-for-10 shooting with three turnovers in the the six minutes and 55 seconds that he sat, according to ESPN Stats & Information, it was pretty hard to blame him.
"I think our guys, individually, know that they have to bring it," he said after Game 5. "I'm not about putting guys down or putting teammates down, but individually, everybody has to bring it. [...] It's another level that [the second unit's] got to take it to."
The second unit to which Vogel turned when he rested George at the start of the fourth — Mahinmi, C.J. Miles and Solomon Hill up front, with Rodney Stuckey and Ty Lawson in the backcourt — had played just seven minutes together during the regular season, and had been outscored by two points in 15 minutes in the series prior to Game 5. With the playmaking spark that made Lawson so special in Denver seemingly gone and Stuckey fighting whatever ghosts led him to just fall down in front of Drake, it's a five-man unit pretty much devoid of paths to points, and it had already been outscored by 12 points in the first three minutes of the second quarter. (Those were the minutes, by the way, in which DeMar DeRozan finally found some room to breathe, some space to operate, and some shots that would go in, kickstarting him to the best playoff game of his career.)
And yet, rather than trying to put the hammer down and push the lead from 13 to 20, Vogel decided to trust that group to start the fourth. It didn't work out for the Pacers, but the coach remained confident he handled the situation the right way, and didn't seem super keen on the idea of the notion of George going the distance in Game 6. From Nick Friedell of ESPN.com:
Pacers coach Frank Vogel was noncommittal about George playing all 48 minutes, saying only that it could happen "if necessary." [...]
"Coach is getting a lot of criticism for taking me out," George said. "Both times he took me out we were in the driver's seat looking comfortable. Up 15 [to start the second quarter] and up 13 [to start the fourth] both times. We're supposed to do our job, maintain that lead, extend that lead. We didn't know the game was going to go that direction."
That's the thing, though: while five games isn't a giant sample, given the dearth of playmaking talent on Indiana's bench, we kind of do know the game's going to go in that direction when George isn't on the floor, and especially when he's joined on the bench by the Pacers' other two capable initiators, George Hill and Monta Ellis. If Vogel's reluctant to lean wholly on George for the full 48, it certainly seems worth considering keeping at least one of the two on the court when George sits. If he's reluctant to shuffle up his rotation this late in the season, then he's got to have a lightning-quick hook on those bench lineups on Friday night — we're talking "yank after one or maybe two bad possessions" quick.
When you've got the worse team in a playoff series, your margin of error is small; you can't afford to let bad groups try to figure it out for three or four minutes. When you've got the best player in the series, you have to ride him; 38 minutes just isn't enough when disaster looms in the other 10. Those are the stakes facing Vogel and George entering Game 6: do everything you can to get everything you can out of the one megawatt star who can force a Game 7 and put the pressure of postseason collapses past back onto the Raptors' shoulders.
Other factors will help determine success or failure on Friday, but for the most part, it's that simple: George must do everything for as long as he can, or the Pacers' season will end.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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