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Why Wednesday night was a perfect representation of the Pacers/Heat race

Pat Lovell / USA TODAY Sports

In many ways, the Pacers surviving to beat the Heat in last night’s crucial Eastern Conference tilt was very reminiscent of the way Indiana has managed to survive atop the East standings for so long now.

The Pacers came into Wednesday’s game losers of seven of their last 12 - a type of slump that would send the Spurs or Thunder spiraling down the West standings (LOL at the thought of the Spurs even going through a 5-7 stretch), but coupled with the Heat’s own poor play of late, the team lost exactly zero games in the standings to Miami. They went into that 5-7 stretch two games up and they came out of it, heading into last night, two games up.

Even if you look back over a longer stretch of the season, where the Pacers went ‘just’ 18-13 from January 22-March 24, they only lost a couple of games in the race for the East’s No. 1 seed during that time, as the Heat cut the deficit from four games to two.

It may not exactly have been failing upwards, but it was as close as it gets for an elite NBA team trying to lock up home court advantage throughout the Conference playoffs.

Wednesday night in Indiana gave off a similar vibe.

The Pacers played their most inspired ball in months, but they still didn’t exactly look their best, they lost Roy Hibbert momentarily in the fourth quarter after he took an elbow to the head from LeBron James, they lost Lance Stephenson to an ejection with five minutes to play in a four-point game and they nearly imploded by blowing a four-point lead in the final 13 seconds thanks to a pair of missed George Hill free throws, only to see the Heat’s rally fall just short on a potential game-winning jumper from Chris Bosh.

And yet when the final buzzer sounded, the Pacers had beat the two-time defending champions for the second time in three tries this season and had moved three games ahead of the Heat for the East’s top spot.

Much like the last couple of months, last night the Pacers didn’t quite look like the team that came out of the gates to the season like gangbusters, but they were somehow still just good enough to hold off a Heat team facing their own mid-to-late season demons.

And now? The Pacers have guaranteed themselves at least a split of the season series with Miami (the first tiebreaker in the event two Division leaders are tied in the standings) and have a comfortable lead when it comes to intra-Conference records (the next tiebreaker), with a 35-9 mark against the East compared to the Heat’s 28-14 mark.

At this point they’re probably as in control of that No. 1 seed as they have been all season, as the Heat would basically have to gain four whole games on them over their final 12 (Indiana has just 10 games remaining).

Plenty of attention will still be paid to how poor the Pacers have looked at times since January, how their defense is allowing teams to shoot better from deep, how much their offense struggles to score, how terrible Paul George’s shot has looked, how ugly George’s reported off-court issues may be, how much Roy Hibbert seems to have regressed recently and how Stephenson’s volatility can backfire at any time, but the fact remains that this team is now 6-1 when playing the Heat in Indiana over the last two seasons (playoffs included).

And after Wednesday's win, barring a disastrous collapse over their final 10 games, the Pacers seem to have all but assured that any seven-game series with the Heat this Spring will feature four more at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.

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