Insider: Pacers tend to their own business, with big defense

The conclusion of the Brooklyn Nets-Toronto Raptors game played inside the Bankers Life Fieldhouse home locker room on Friday night, if anyone cared to watch.

Instead of focusing on what was unfolding in Brooklyn, many of the Indiana Pacers concentrated on showering, dressing and leaving as fast as possible after their 93-74 win over the Charlotte Hornets.

Scoreboard watching may have turned into a serious hobby for some, but largely, the players won't play that game.

"I'm not," Rodney Stuckey said, never turning towards the television on the other side of the locker room. "I don't know what everybody else is doing."

Instead of wishing for the teams ahead in the standings to fall apart one by one, the Pacers spent their time doing the only thing that matters for the remaining six games – playing lock-down defense and earning a necessary win.

Indiana improved to 33-43 and coach Frank Vogel earned his 200th career victory as his team tied a season low in points allowed to an opponent. Since the Pacers had given up an average of 107 points over the previous 10 games, the defensive performance was a welcome change back to normal.

As the Pacers pulled away in the third quarter, Charlotte (32-43) blew 19-of-21 shot attempts, certainly missing low-post scorer Al Jefferson, who sat out the second half with right knee soreness. The Hornets scored just nine points through the third quarter as the Pacers opened a 70-47 lead.

"I don't know if there was one thing. I think we just worked at it," Vogel said about the defense that stifled Charlotte to 35 percent shooting overall. "The guys are just hungry for a win. We let two get away on the road, so we came in with great desperation and got the job done."

While point guard George Hill (2-of-11 from the floor) finished with a game-high 10 assists, he and the other starters remained relatively silent. The Pacers' bench outscored the starters 60-33, as players like Stuckey (game-high 15 points), C.J. Watson (13) and Damjan Rudež (3-for-3 from beyond the arc for nine points) flipped an early deficit into a runaway win.

The Hornets led 25-17 in the first quarter before Indiana turned to the bench that trimmed the deficit to three points by the start of the second quarter. Rudež, the NBA's best rookie 3-point shooter at 39.9 percent, tied the score with a long-range triple from the top of the arc. From there, the Pacers outscored Charlotte 15-5 and even when the Hornets' starters began checking back into the game, Indiana's reserves remained on the floor. Lavoy Allen, who replaced backup center Ian Mahinmi, closed out the final 6 minutes and 43 seconds of the half, and his offensive rebound and layup gave the Pacers a 47-35 advantage, their largest of the half.

"Just the energy of the bench," Vogel said. "They just outplayed Charlotte's bench. That's happened a lot this year."

The win moved Indiana into 10th in the Eastern Conference, still behind the Boston Celtics (who lost Friday night) and the eighth-seeded Miami Heat (the Pacers' opponent on Sunday night). By the way, Brooklyn defeated Toronto and held firm to the seventh position. Though it's tempting to see how the standings seemingly shift on a nightly basis, C.J. Miles understands the Pacers should pay attention only to their own results.

"We can't control them winning or losing. We can only control when we're on this floor," Miles said. "It would be disappointing for us to get to that point where they do what we needed (them) to do to put us in the playoffs and we didn't take care of our end."

Call Star reporter Candace Buckner at (317) 444-6121. Follow her on Twitter: @CandaceDBuckner.