How the Pacers' all-bench lineup cost them Game 5

In the social media age of bite-size vines and soundbites, the Toronto Raptors' stunning fourth-quarter rally past the Indiana Pacers in Tuesday's Game 5 will likely be reduced to a Solomon Hill 3-pointer that came a fraction of a second too late, a thunderous Norman Powell dunk, and a couple of trolls from Raptors ambassador Drake.

The truth is that the Raptors had no business being in the series-turning game after playing some of their worst basketball of the season through the first 36 minutes, but were let up off the mat by the puzzling decision from Pacers head coach Frank Vogel to ride a lineup painfully lacking playoff quality talent.

Given Indiana's inability to score consistently, going even a second without Paul George, Monta Ellis, or George Hill on the court seems ludicrous, and yet it's something the Pacers have leaned on far too often over the last couple weeks.

Entering play Tuesday, a lineup featuring Rodney Stuckey, Ty Lawson, C.J. Miles, Solomon Hill, and Myles Turner had a minus-30.2 net rating in 14 postseason minutes together, while the same unit anchored by veteran Ian Mahinmi rather than rookie Turner was minus-10.6 in 15 minutes of shared time.

The latter lineup is the one that did Vogel and the Pacers in Tuesday night in Toronto, as in the 6:55 of Game 5 action the Stuckey-Lawson-Miles-Hill-Mahinmi unit logged, the Pacers were outscored 19-1.

"I chose to trust those guys," Vogel said postgame after admitting that he considered shying away from that lineup after they were outscored 13-1 in the first three-and-a-half minutes of the second quarter. They rewarded his misguided trust by being shutout 6-0 in the opening 3:24 of the final frame.

"Those guys have been good for us," Vogel added. "They had a tough stretch there."

In Vogel's defense, the Pacers not only got away with units devoid of George, Ellis, and George Hill during the regular season, but actually thrived.

In fact, the team's 11th-most used regular season lineup was the Stuckey-Lawson-Miles-(Solomon) Hill-Turner combination, and it pounded opponents to the tune of a plus-27.5 net rating. The Mahinmi unit was even better, albeit in a far smaller sample size (only seven minutes played).

As mentioned after the Raptors' Game 1 loss, however, with rotations tightening and star players logging considerably more minutes come playoff time, the postseason is when depth is much less valuable, and top-tier talent often wins the day.

With that in mind, it's not surprising that the same aforementioned Pacers lineups have struggled during this first-round series, and downright mind-boggling that Vogel continues to turn to them.

As the Pacers head back home facing elimination, the Lawson-Stuckey-Miles-Hill-Mahinmi combo now ranks as the worst of 27 lineups used by 2016 playoff teams for at least 20 minutes, with a horrendous net rating of minus-45.9. It's also Indiana's fourth-most used lineup through five games.

A lineup that incompetent has no business logging a second together during the playoffs, let alone nearly seven minutes in Game 5 of an even series that their team was on the cusp of taking control over.

Paul George said there's another level his team's reserves have to take it to after refusing to throw the second unit under the bus. Unfortunately, the quality necessary to reach that level is lacking in those players, and they were once again put in a position they never should have found themselves in.

There were plenty of moments that got the raucous Air Canada Centre on its feet down the stretch on Tuesday, and enough memorable highlights to fill a timeline, but Toronto wouldn't have been in position to steal the game had it not been for those seven minutes at the beginning of the second and fourth quarters.

Should their season come to an end against a Raptors team they had on the ropes, those seven minutes will haunt Vogel and the Pacers fans all summer.