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Who will be the fall guys for the Pacers and Thunder?

Brace Hemmelgarn / USA TODAY Sports

These are troubling times for the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder. Both entered this postseason--this whole season, really--with expectations of competing for a title, and last night both lost their first road games to fall down 2-1 in their respective first round series, with confidence increasingly low that either will be able to get back up.

Despite sputtering to a halt to close the regular season, the top-seeded Pacers were at least expected to plow through the sub-.500 Hawks before receiving their first real postseason test. Instead, Atlanta has proven a nightmare matchup for Indy, with their floor-stretching big men and speedy, irrepressible point guards sending the Pacers' normally suffocating defensive sets into complete disarray. Behind-the-scenes bickering and general malaise have stripped the Pacers of their identity, while the Hawks seem to be growing into theirs at just the right time. 

Meanwhile, the Thunder experienced no such swoon to end the season, but have still run into an all-too-familiar brick wall in the Memphis Grizzlies. The Thunder have faced the Grizzlies twice in the playoffs before, both times in the second round, barely escaping with a seven-game win in 2011 and succumbing (without point guard and second-best player Russell Westbrook) in five games in 2013. The Grizzlies seem to accumulate energy feeding off their underdog status--you could argue the worst thing that ever happened to them was getting home-court advantage against the Clippers in 2012--while Westbrook and Kevin Durant have picked a pretty lousy time to go into a combined outside shooting slump.

Both teams are still very far away from conceding defeat--the Pacers picked up their one win in blowout fashion, while the Thunder crawled back to force overtime in their two losses, so neither team is being completely outmatched. But with both teams staying on the road this weekend with the very real possibility of going down 3-1, it's hard not to wonder what the consequences will be should they fail to come back in their respective series. If the worst-case scenario is realized, and these two expected playoff powerhouses end up losing in the first round, which individuals will assume the brunt of the responsibility for the collective failure? For that kind of disappointment, somebody's gotta take the fall.

Hence: The Fall Guy Power Rankings. As of both teams' 2-1 deficits, here's how the blame looks to shake out--ranked from lowest to highest percentage--should the teams fail to advance. It's probably not the way things should be, merely our perception of the way things will be, fair or unfair. Sorry in advance, dudes.

INDIANA PACERS

6. George Hill (5%)

Hill's regular-season stats were down across the board, and though he scored pretty well in the first two games (27 combined points on 10-16 shooting), he had a nightmare game from the field last night, going 1-11 for just four points in the loss. But that's OK--Hill's biggest value to the Pacers has usually come on the defensive end, where his length and ability to contain on the perimeter has played a key role in turning the Pacers D into an impenetrable half-court fortress these last few years.

Not in this series, though. Hill has failed so spectacularly to keep Hawks point guard Jeff Teague from getting into the paint and doing damage that for large stretches of the last two games, Frank Vogel has had to put his best wing stopper (Paul George) on Teague. The Pacers have been worse on both sides of the ball with Hill on the court this postseason, and that's pretty scary for a point guard that also struggled some to end the season and still has three years and $24 million left on his contract.

5. Evan Turner (10%)

Evan Turner never asked to be The Difference for this contending Pacers team, but that's the role he was thrust into with Indy's deadline deal for him, which sent out longtime franchise icon Danny Granger. To say Evan has failed to meet expectation says more about the expectations than his normal production, which never made for a good fit with this Pacer squad and indeed has left him entirely effective in his time in Indiana thusfar--a status made worse by reports of a recent practice scuffle with backcourt partner Lance Stephenson.

Actually, Evan's offense hasn't been bad in this series--he has per-36 numbers of 14.2 PPG, 8.5 RPG, and 5.7 APG--but that's made all but irrelevant by the fact that he's only played 38 minutes total in the series thusfar, sitting for the entire second half in last night's game, since his poor understanding of the team's defense makes him such a liability on that end (Not to mention that time Jeff Teague did that thing to him). If the Pacers lose this series, some will say ET was The Difference after all--just not in the direction he'd wanted.

4. Paul George (15%)

It's hard to say Paul George is too much at fault for the Pacers' woes, since he was an MVP candidate for most of the regular season, and has easily been their most productive player through three games in this series, with team-high tallies in points, rebounds, assists, steals, three-pointers and free throws, and a 26.3 PER. His Game 2 performance--27/10/6 on excellent shooting with four steals and difference-making perimeter defense on Jeff Teague--was as impressive as that of any individual player this postseason (whose initials aren't LMA, anyway).

Still, Paul George is the Pacers' leader and best player, and as such, he's always bound to get a certain percentage of blame for the team's performance, regardless of how much of it is actually on him personally. As good as he's been in this season, he hasn't quite been bulletproof, and if the Pacers do lose, certainly some will point to his subpar shooting numbers--just a combined 9-29 in the team's two losses--as a primary reason why. Unfair, but totally unavoidable.

3. Larry Bird (15%)

Team president Larry Bird gets a lot of credit for turning around the franchise, and rightly so. He played a large part in most of the team's franchise-defining personnel decisions of recent years: Trading for (and kind of drafting) Roy Hibbert, drafting Paul George and Lance Stephenson, trading for George Hill, signing David West in free agency. Unfortunately, since the team contenders, he's been on something of a cold streak--the full extent of which we've already detailed, but which he's capped in recent months by the unsuccessful trade for Evan Turner and the upside signing of Andrew Bynum, which has quickly become irrelevant with the big man's chronic injuries predictably resurfacing.

Bird was masterful in building this team's core, but he has been absolutely dreadful in augmenting that core with the final pieces needed to turn a contending team into a championship one. If some of those questionable moves of late end up haunting the Pacers' first-round loss, Bird will certainly have some answering to do.

2. Frank Vogel (25%)

This time last year, Frank Vogel seemed like the next great young coach of our beloved Association, a brilliant tactician who commanded the respect and unity of his players, and who seemed poised to be the face of the Pacers' sidelines for years, maybe even decades to come. What a difference a late-season swoon makes, as now GM Kevin Pritchard has to actually issue denials of reports that Vogel is "coaching for his job"--just a couple months after he was coaching the Eastern Conference All-Star Team--with the team struggling so badly to close the regular season and start the playoffs.

It's unfair to Vogel, no doubt, who played such a large role in building this team's identity and returning them to NBA relevance, but when a team loses itself as badly as these Pacers have, it's inevitable that the leadership will be looked at critically for their role (or lack thereof) in preventing the meltdown. From the look of Vogel in these playoffs--a kind of stunned quietude that goes way past the outraged righteousness you'd expect from a coach of an underperforming team to something far more unsettling--he seems like he's as stupefied as anyone about all of this.

1. Roy Hibbert (30%)

As much as you might try to mete out blame around the Pacers roster for their woes in the first-round series, the problems on both ends really start and end with Roy Hibbert. The Pacers' center--an All-Star and Defensive Player of the Year frontrunner for most of the season--has been absolutely unplayable over these first three games, lacking the quickness or agility to properly contest the Hawks' sweet-shooting bigs on their perimeter pick-and-pops, and failing to put ball in basket to such an alarming degree that you wonder if he's got some sort of NBA big man version of Steve Blass disease. He has a PER in this series of -1.3, and even that seems somewhat charitable.

It's hard to say what this means for Roy Hibbert--still signed for another two years and $30 million after this season--moving forward, but if the Pacers lose this series (and probably even if they don't), both player and team are going to have to do some serious soul-searching in the off-season. But at the very least Hibbert discovering the form that made him such a deadly force in the post-season as recently as last year would go an awful long way to bailing Indiana out of this horrible mess they've made for themselves.

OKLAHOMA CITY THUNDER

6. Reggie Jackson, Jeremy Lamb and Steven Adams (5%)

Throw Perry Jones III in there, too, if you want. Remember when all the analysts said at the beginning of the year that Oklahoma City was going to need big contributions from all these young guys for them to have a chance of contending this season without James Harden or Kevin Martin? Well, they certainly haven't gotten them so far: Jackson has averaged five points a game on 16 percent (!!) shooting in just 19 minutes a night, Adams has played just 15 minutes total, picking up five fouls and scoring zero points, and Lamb and Jones are both Club Trillion members for their sole brief cameos in the series.

It's possible too much was being asked too soon of these young players, it's possible that they've just been squeezed out of the rotation for reasons beyond their control, and it's possible that they're just not as good as we thought or hoped. But the Thunder really did need at least one or two of them to be difference-makers to have a chance of going all the way, and without them, it looks like even getting out of the first round is gonna be a struggle.

5. Russell Westbrook (10%)

It hasn't exactly been a series of Bad Russ, as the hot-blooded point guard has averaged 27.3 points a game this series while leading the team in both assists and rebounds (ten a game, remarkably). But he's only shot 38% through three games, including just 5-25 from deep, and he has nearly as many turnovers (12) as assists (15). What's more, his injury was seen as the difference in last year's series loss to Memphis, so if they lose again with him healthy in tow, that hurts a little of the validation he earned in absentia last postseason.

4. Kendrick Perkins & Thabo Sefolosha (15%)

For about four years now, the Thunder have been able to get away with largely playing 3-on-5 on offense with the two defensive specialists Perkins and Sefolosha in their lineup, especially when Perkins could at least post up a couple times a game and Sefolosha could still hit an open three. Those days have clearly passed, as the two have combined for just 27 total points in over 150 minutes in this series--though Perk has actually connected on all five of his attempts from the field, lord love him--and as a team that averages 106 a game in the regular season struggles to break 100 in overtime, you have to wonder if they could use a tad more offense from those two positions.

Sefolosha's contract finally expires this summer, and the Thunder still have until the beginning of next season to pull the trigger on their long-anticipated amnestying of Perkins. If the Thunder's offensive struggles continue through this postseason, maybe this will finally be the off-season where the OKC brass realize it's time to finally cut bait with those two.

3. Sam Presti (20%)

Now, you could very easily argue that the Perk/Thabo duo should have been improved long ago, at the trade deadline, if not even earlier. GM Sam Presti went into that deadline with at least five awesome trade chips--the previously mentioned Jackson, Lamb, Adams and Jones, as well as their Mavs-owed first-rounder for this upcoming draft--and a couple real areas of need to be upgraded. He cashed in absolutely none of them. That would be one thing if all of those undealt guys were playing big roles in big minutes in the team's current rotation, but as they fester on the bench while all their minutes go to Derek Fisher, Caron Butler and Nick Collison, it's hard to guess what the thinking was there.

Presti has built this Thunder team through the draft, with a reliance on patience and internal development, rarely going the free agency or trade route for external improvement. But if the team keeps coming up short in the postseason, you have to think that the pressure will eventually be on Presti to actually make a Go For It trade or two one of these years, with many wondering what's taking him so long.

2. Scott Brooks (25%)

Of course, it's not on Presti to play or properly develop the young guys--the majority of that is on Thunder coach Scott Brooks, who started the year off giving big minutes to Jackson, Lamb and Adams, and even called on Jones and Andre Roberson for spells here and there. But as the season went on and the young guys' production declined a little, Brooks apparently decided that he didn't trust them to contribute in the postseason, and he slashed the PT of each to ribbons, if not yanking it entirely, deciding to put his full faith in Fisher, Collison and new acquisition Butler for one more playoff run.

It's understandable, but questionable, and possibly even a little irresponsible. Outside of the Thunder's Durant/Westbrook/Ibaka big three, nobody on the Thunder has averaged more than five--five!!--points a game this postseason, with the three previously mentioned vets shooting a combined 11-36. For all the intangibles and veteran leadership those guys provide, at some point, someone besides the OKC big guns is gonna have to score the ball, and with neither the past-their-prime vets or the under-developed young'ns seemingly primed to do so, Brooks has got to take a lot of the heat for that.

1. Kevin Durant (25%)

This was a great year for Kevin Durant, one in which after years of being the league's No. 2 guy--a status he was becoming vocally fed up with--he officially graduated to 1a and 1b status with LeBron James. The downside of that for KD, however, is that now that he gets LeBron-level praise, he also gets LeBron-level scrutiny. Now, whenever his teams underperform, particularly in the playoffs, it's immediately traced back to whatever Durant is or isn't doing to put them in that position. Meanwhile, if he doesn't win it all this year--and especially if he doesn't even make it out of the first round--the story starts to become "Does Kevin Durant have what it takes to win a championship?" 

It's not right, but it's the same sort of malarkey that just about every truly great NBA player--aside from those like Magic, Bird and Duncan who won pretty instantly--has gone through before eventually climbing to the top of the mountain. And despite all-around great numbers of 33 points, nine rebounds and five assists a game--I mean, really--if Durant continues to struggle with his shooting in this series (44% FG, 30% 3PT, 78% FT, all well below his season averages), you can bet he'll start to hear about it from those convinced he's lacking that ever-elusive clutch gene when it comes to the playoffs. It's beautiful in it's own predictable and terrible way, really.

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