The Indiana Pacers, perhaps you’ve heard of them, are in the middle of a rough week.

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The team escaped a minor Indiana snowshoeing in order to jet into New York and the city’s latest colossal crush of a snowstorm, only to be surprised with the news that the NBA would not be suspending Tuesday night’s game against the Knicks. Good news, as the Pacers’ schedule to finish the season is rather packed, no need to squeeze in extra contests on a would-be day off during the playoff race, the Knicks do indeed suck and sometimes they suck on purpose.

And the Knicks are tanking. And they lost Kristaps Porzingis to what would be a season-altering thigh contusion early in the fourth quarter. And Carmelo Anthony overreacts to months of a too-warm winter with hats like this.

And the Pacers lost, only scoring 79 points.

And Nate McMillan, first-year Pacer coach yet longtime NBA know-all as either a player or a coach, went in on his team a bit in front of the press:

“There is no excuse for (the performance). It is not playing the game the right way,” Pacers coach Nate McMillan said with a sigh. “And when you don’t play the game the right way, you look like that. Stop moving the ball, start taking quick shots, stop screening. Stop defending. Stop playing together.

“When you don’t play the game the right way, you show up looking like that.”

Here’s the issue. We’re just a month removed from the end of the 2016-17 regular season, and even after 67 games (34 of them wins, good for No. 6 in the East) we still don’t know who the Pacers are. We don’t know what “that” is, and if what we saw on Tuesday (for a team that struggles on the road, ranked 18th offensively) is closer to what we should expect from “that” than what coach McMillan and president Larry Bird expects.

Maybe you should drop McMillan from that scenario:

If you think the Pacers have a badly constructed roster, that makes it hard to blame Nate McMillan. — 8 Points, 9 Seconds (@8pts9secs) March 15, 2017





Bird: Oh, here are more lamps.

McMillan: They work fine, but why do I need 4 of them?

Bird: Build me a go-kart. — 8 Points, 9 Seconds (@8pts9secs) March 15, 2017





It’s especially tough when your top … lamp (? Or go-kart?) in Paul George has his tail handed to him repeatedly by Carmelo Anthony down the stretch of Tuesday’s road loss. This nearly four years removed from the Indiana/New York playoff meeting that was supposed to serve as a baton hand-off between the aging Anthony and emerging George.

Many would have scoffed at that position at the time, spying the defense-averse Anthony alongside the (still) critically tough Paul George, thinking George the better all-around (and, by extension, overall) player. What would seem to be agreeable is that a Tuesday night between PG and Carmelo was never supposed to be a draw in 2017. And if you value Anthony’s clutch play (20 points in the last 14 minutes) over George down the stretch, Anthony actually outranked a draw in this Pacer loss.

The good news is that the Pacers have another quick turnaround against Charlotte on Wednesday in order to help forget the entire thing ever happened. The worst news is that the team has been terrible on the second half of back-to-backs this year, despite a cadre of young players, and that the Hornets (despite losing three of four) are battling to avoid their own Plexiglas shame in missing the playoffs again in 2017 after making it in 2016.

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Charlotte is at the low end of a spectrum that (kindly) includes them among six teams attempting to make the final three playoff spots in the East. Indiana ranks above that list at sixth, five games ahead of Charlotte, a game up on a Detroit team that was just pantsed by Cleveland, and a No. 8 Milwaukee club that has star power on its side in the game-shifting Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Stinky Chicago and ascending Miami take up the other spots, just out of the ring. The Bulls have the league’s easiest schedule to go through, and surprisingly the Pacers have just one game (April 6, at home against Milwaukee) left in its schedule against the other five in this race, following whatever happens on Wednesday at home in Charlotte.

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