At one time it looked like the Pacers could be one of the busiest teams at the trade deadline. A well below .500 record, players posting cryptic emoji tweets, a team desperate for some relevance and direction. While some moves can still be made it seems some of the wind has been taken out of the sails with the news that Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis, both rumored to be getting heavy interest around the league, are now injured.
Because of course they are.
If the Pacers didn’t have bad luck they’d have no luck at all. This team is in desperate need of a serious makeover and now arguably their two biggest trade assets are injured. Turner is expected to be out through the deadline while Sabonis was healthy up until Wednesday night’s game against the Lakers when he injured his ankle. While there’s no official timeline on how long he’ll be out he’s already been ruled out of Thursday night’s game against the Golden State Warriors and head coach Rick Carlisle offered a grim prognosis
Rick Carlisle says Domantas Sabonis has an ankle sprain “that is probably going to be significant.”
— Scott Agness (@ScottAgness) January 20, 2022
Add to the fact that Malcolm Brogdon has been battling injuries all season, Caris LeVert is dealing with a calf and T.J. Warren continues to be absent and a team that looked to be big players at the trade deadline may not only be less active but even if they do deal guys they could be getting them at pennies on the dollar due to injuries. Should they have made moves earlier? Probably. Did they overvalue their own guys? If the rumors of what they were hoping to fetch for Turner are true, then absolutely.
I’m fully preparing myself for the Pacers to make one minor move at the deadline and hang on to a flustered and injured Turner and Sabonis, justifying that they didn’t move them because the trade packages didn’t match their expectations. My worst-case scenario is we get through this miserable season, the Pacers made little to no moves, have little to no new faces and players to build around and on top of all that still don’t get a top-10 pick in the upcoming NBA Draft. It’s a horrible scenario but given their lack of good luck, something I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it happened.
We’ll see what the Pacers do as the deadline approaches. But you couldn’t ask for a worse time to have the injuries they are dealing with.
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