Paul George has been in big moments before. He’s just 25-years-old, wrapping up his sixth season in the NBA, and yet the Indiana Pacers’ 98-87 Game 2 loss to the Toronto Raptors was his 56th career playoff game. George has taken clutch playoff shots, led comebacks, shut down dynamic scorers, even played LeBron James to a stalemate and lived to tell the tale. Yet, for all that accumulated experience of carrying an offense and leading a defense when the stakes matter most, this series against the Raptors is something new for him.

George has been masterful in the two games against Toronto. He carried the Pacers to victory in the second half of Game 1 and followed that up with a hyper-efficient 28 points in Game 2. His defense has completely stifled DeMar DeRozan. The jumper is falling and he’s been able to get to the rim at will. George’s athleticism is not quite as visceral or violent as it was before the broken leg that cost him most of last season, but he has clearly compensated with smooth control. In terms of skill and its implementation, what we’re seeing from George in this series is pretty much the full range of possibility.

One of the best two-way players in the league scraping his ceiling has only been good enough for the Pacers to earn a split in the first two games of the series. George has been the best player in the series, by far. But the Raptors are clearly the better team — they earned their No. 2 seed — and they’ve used a deeper and more versatile roster to their advantage. This playoff run is new for George because it’s the first since Indiana’s dramatic transformation of personnel and style. Roy Hibbert, Lance Stephenson, and David West are gone. The conservative defensive scheme and deliberate, grinding offense meant to complement it have both been abandoned.

George is still Indiana’s foundational player but what he’s supporting has changed and that means different responsibilities. There is no more accommodating of shots, touches, and mischief from Lance Stephenson. There is no more driving into the lane and running into an extra defender, either because Roy Hibbert is standing right next to the basket or because his defender is smart enough to know that Hibbert is not a threat unless he is. Ian Mahinmi and Myles Turner have done an admirable job protecting the rim this season, but neither is as effective as Hibbert was in this department. Instead of defending opposing scorers by inviting them into the soft middle of the defense for contested mid-range jumpers, George now has to be more of a barrier himself.

In the past, George was asked push his skills back to another era. The Pacers played a grinding game on defense which inevitably bled into their offense. They were straight out of the late 90s and early 2000s and George was tasked with being their Kobe Bryant, their Tracy McGrady, their Vince Carter. The job was to score through a defense, instead of over or around it. The Pacers were eventually forced to confront the ceiling on that style of play and the team was rebuilt to reflect George and the modernism in his gifts, although Larry Bird and Kevin Pritchard probably wouldn’t have explained it that way.