Oladipo, Pacers have the skill, need the moxie to dent LeBron's 1st-round armor
If you just look at the statistical profiles of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Indiana Pacers, sans context, there would be no reason to favor the Cavs - a team with the 29th-ranked defense, a barely positive point differential, and a losing record against plus-.500 opponents - in their first-round series.
Of course, context matters a great deal, and here's how it alters the calculus of this matchup: The Cavs have LeBron James, and LeBron James does not lose in the first round. Ever. Not only has James never lost a first-round series, he hasn't even lost a first-round game since 2012, when his Miami Heat got bored with a 3-0 lead and dropped Game 4 by two points to the New York Knicks. Since then, his teams have won 21 straight first-round contests. So, yeah, the statistical profiles kind of go out the window.
But, there's still reason to believe things could be different this year, and that the Cavs won't sail through the Eastern Conference quarters the way they have the past few seasons. The Pacers, at 48-34, will be the best team James has ever faced in the first round. This will also be the first time his team will go into a first-round series with a worse net rating than its opponent. Never has he played for a team that's been this bad defensively, and the Pacers, mainly because of the burgeoning skill set of Victor Oladipo, are well-equipped to pick at the Cavs' weaknesses on that end of the floor.
Oladipo has built himself into one of the league's most vicious attackers, and the Cavs have neither the perimeter defense nor the rim protection to prevent him from getting to and finishing at the rim. He's also made the Pacers one of the most efficient open-court teams in the league, and while they've slowed their pace considerably after a run-and-gun start to the season, they're still opportunistic (ranking second in the NBA in points per game off turnovers) and could do serious damage against the Cavs' ineffectual transition defense.
Oladipo has annihilated bigs on switches all season, and the Cavs have some particularly slow-footed players the Pacers can target. Once upon a time, Tristan Thompson was one of the toughest bigs in the league to turn the corner on, but that has decidedly not been the case this year. Oladipo's eyes will widen to Bobby Portis levels any time he sees Thompson or Kevin Love switched onto him. Larry Nance Jr. can offer more resistance but still doesn't have the lateral quickness to hang with the ultra-fast guard on the perimeter. Oladipo's pull-up shooting isn't the threat it looked like it would be at the start of the season, but he produced points on 65.7 percent of his drives in the four-game regular-season series against Cleveland.
The Cavs have shown a willingness to amp up the aggressiveness of their pick-and-roll coverages, especially down the stretch of the season, and you can bet they'll blitz Oladipo to get the ball out of his hands. On paper, at least, the Pacers should be able to handle that pressure. Though they lack a clear-cut secondary scorer, their supporting cast features a solid mix of complementary ballhandlers (Darren Collison, Cory Joseph), bigs who can hit shots or make plays on the short roll (Domantas Sabonis, Myles Turner), and deadly spot-up threats (Collison, Bojan Bogdanovic). If the Cavs get more conservative and try to divert Oladipo's path to the rim by dropping their bigs back, Turner offers a viable pick-and-pop antidote.
Indiana is a very selective but very good 3-point shooting team; against a Cavs defense that allowed more long-range attempts than all but one team this year, the Pacers' rate of threes skyrocketed and they shot 46.2 percent from deep.
The problems for the Pacers will come at the other end, where they don't really have the horses to even bother James. Young is by far their best option, but when the Cavs go big with Love at the four, they'll likely need Young to slide up a position, leaving a host of unappealing options for LeBron duty, like Bogdanovic and Lance Stephenson. Oladipo is a strong defender, but he doesn't have nearly the size to handle James. The Pacers could try hiding a wing on a big, but the Cavs could still exploit that by using that big as a screener, or, if it's Love, murdering them on post-ups.
Either way, the Pacers' defensive prospects here aren't particularly confidence-inspiring, which is why their odds of actually winning this season remain distant. They haven't been any better than Cleveland at defending the rim - allowing opponents to shoot 65.2 percent in the restricted area, the sixth-worst mark in the league - despite having an elite shot-blocker in Turner. And they haven't been much better than Cleveland at running opponents off the 3-point line. Part of the reason they've managed to maintain a league-average defense despite a suboptimal opponent shot profile is that opposing teams have shot poorly on open threes. The Cavs don't tend to shoot poorly on open threes.
That doesn't mean the Cavs are going to cruise. The Pacers should be able to score liberally, and the only reason to think they can't at least give Cleveland a series is that they're young and inexperienced, and Oladipo's first postseason foray - with the Oklahoma City Thunder last year - went disastrously. But no player has improved as much as Oladipo has this year, and he's improved in ways that will make him particularly problematic for Cleveland.
The question is whether he and his equally green teammates can keep playing with the courage they grew accustomed to playing with in the regular season. Better and more experienced teams than these Pacers have capitulated in the face of a locked-in LeBron, who manages to ratchet up the intensity a few notches each spring. They need to trust in their ability to break Cleveland down at the point of attack. They need to be unfazed, and ruthless.
That's still a lot to ask, honestly. But if the Pacers can just stay out of their own way, they have the juice to at least make this diminished Cavs team sweat. Don't be shocked if they push LeBron and Co. to six games.