Heading into the season, most of us wondered whether swapping coaches and point guards would really be enough to give the Indiana Pacers the super-charged offense that team president Larry Bird has been dying to see. Two weeks into the new campaign, it looks like we should’ve been focusing more on the other end of the court.

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The Pacers got their doors blown off on Monday night, giving up 75 first-half points to the Charlotte Hornets en route to a 22-point defeat. The loss dropped Indiana to 3-4 on the season, and to the verge of the NBA’s defensive basement.

In five full seasons under Frank Vogel, the Pacers finished 10th, first, first, eighth and third in defensive efficiency. Through seven games under new head coach Nate McMillan, Indiana ranks 28th on that side of the ball, allowing an average of 109.3 points per 100 possessions to slot in ahead of only a Boston Celtics team currently operating without ace defenders Al Horford and Jae Crowder, and a New York Knicks team that has been a defensive laughingstock for the better part of the last 15 years.

They let the Hornets score on their first 12 possessions on Monday night, completely devoid of answers for Charlotte forcing cross-matches that required the diminutive Monta Ellis to guard the 6-foot-7, 230-pound Michael Kidd-Gilchrist in the post, or to meaningfully impede the progress of Kemba Walker, who had 10 points and seven assists in nine minutes of first-quarter floor time. Indy put together a late-first flurry to cut an 18-point deficit down to nine, but the game was ostensibly over before halftime.

After a loss to the Milwaukee Bucks last week in their fifth game of the season, Paul George said it’s “embarrassing, the way we’re playing and how we look on the floor,” with C.J. Miles terming the Pacers defense “clueless” and “pathetic.” After the annihilation in Charlotte, George once again lambasted his club’s defensive comportment, according to Nate Taylor of the Indianapolis Star:

Several Hornets baskets were followed by the Pacers looking at each other with either confusion or irritation. In transition, many Pacers ran back on defense without locating the player they were assigned with guarding. George and C.J. Miles, on separate occasions, raised their arms to ask their teammates who was going to defend the opposing guard dribbling up the court. Both times, no other Pacers answered. George and Miles were left to try to stop the Hornets’ dribble penetration.

Miles’ expression throughout the second half was to look up and shake his head in disgust. George voiced his displeasure in the locker room with sharp criticism for how the Pacers were not a cohesive team.

“We’re all out of whack,” George said. “There’s no trust, there’s no chemistry, there’s no belief. We’re kind of just lifeless right now.” […]

“We didn’t get up on screen-and-rolls, we didn’t stop rolls from going to the basket, we didn’t get out to 3-point shooters and we gave them too many easy opportunities,” [power forward Thaddeus] Young said. “They were just getting drives to the basket and we were just giving tick-tack fouls and they were scoring.”

Other than that, though, everything’s going great!

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If you’re of a mind to look for a silver lining to Indy’s awful defensive start, you’re going to be staring at an awfully gray sky for an awfully long time. The Pacers are dead last in opponent’s field-goal percentage. They’re giving up the game’s highest-value shots with relish, ranking 27th in attempts allowed inside the restricted area and tied for 26th in corner 3-pointers allowed. They’re hemorrhaging points all over the floor, standing 23rd in points allowed in the paint, 24th in points allowed on the fast break and 30th in points allowed off turnovers, despite coughing it up on just 14.8 percent of their possessions, tied for seventh-lowest in the league.

As is often the case with defense, everything starts up top, and the Pacers are getting blistered whenever the starting backcourt of Ellis and Jeff Teague share the floor, allowing 107.7 points-per-100 in their 160 minutes together. (For what it’s worth, the Pacers gave up 100.4 points-per-100 last season when Ellis and George Hill, who was shipped out this summer to bring Teague in, played together.)