Victor Oladipo offered a big smile. He was reminded that, in an interview before the start of this season, he declared that 2017-18 would be a no-nonsense year. “No more Mr. Nice Guy” was how he’d put it as he headed into his first season with Indiana, just a short drive up from Indiana University, where Oladipo starred for three seasons.

All that begged the question: Had he been too nice during his first five NBA seasons?

“Maybe,” he said. “A little bit.”

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Too nice in Orlando, apparently, where he had been the No. 2 pick in the 2013 draft but was never able to take control of a young team scrambling for a leader. By his third and final season with the Magic, he’d spent a quarter of a season as a sixth man, losing his starting backcourt spot to Evan Fournier and rookie Elfrid Payton.

Last year in Oklahoma City, he was a consistent starter again, but made little improvement, instead plucking his opportunities where he could behind league MVP Russell Westbrook.

This year, if Oladipo has chosen not to be so nice, it’s working. He comes into the All-Star break averaging 24.4 points, a huge lift over his career average of 15.9 points. He is shooting 48.4 percent from the field and 38.1 percent from the 3-point line, both career highs. He has the Pacers eight games over .500, the biggest surprise team in the East, if not the league.

The payoff comes this weekend in the NBA’s All-Star Game, Oladipo’s first such appearance. It’s been the result of work, Oladipo says, but it’s also been a change of mentality, what he called his understanding of being an “Alpha Dog.”

“I truly believed that I could be a significant attribution to a team,” Oladipo said. “I felt like I had the ability, but I had to put in the work to get that ability out of me.”

It would be tempting for the Pacers to gloat over Oladipo’s rise. The organization took a blitz of bad publicity when trading away star forward Paul George last summer, with Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis as the only return. Sabonis has played above expectations, but Oladipo has shattered what had appeared to be his ceiling over the first four years of his career.

But the Pacers are treading carefully, with good reason. The Eastern Conference All-Star team, in recent years, has been littered with players who quickly fade back into mediocrity after making their showing on the team — the Pacers should know because center Roy Hibbert was one of those players. Guards like Jeff Teague, Jrue Holiday and Kyle Korver are other examples.

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The franchise can’t afford to have Oladipo as a one-and-done All-Star. Thus, you’re not going to hear coach Nate McMillan toot Oladipo’s horn all that much.

“We’re still looking — we’ll still look and evaluate our guys for the entire season,” McMillan told Sporting News. “We knew he had potential, and we are seeing some of that potential and development and growth from the start of the season to now. But we’ll still continue to work to develop and hopefully he will continue to show even more growth, leading us down the stretch here.

“For us to evaluate him right now, we are not there. We’ll talk about all of that at the end of the season.”

Oladipo can’t be a first-half wonder if the Pacers are to move forward as an organization. That’s indicative of the strides Oladipo has taken. He was seen as a solid but unspectacular NBA starter before this season. Now, the Pacers need him to be a franchise cornerstone and selling point.

That opportunity is coming. Indiana is in a good financial position. There will be some cap space this summer — not enough for a max deal, but more than $10 million — and in 2019, the team is slated to have only rookie deals and Oladipo’s $21 million on the books.

Front-office executives around the league expect that the Pacers will be a player on the restricted free-agent market this summer, where some talented players could be the victims of a league-wide financial squeeze. That would allow Indiana to bring in talent at a reduced cost. Aaron Gordon and Marcus Smart are bigger names expected to draw interest from the Pacers, and there could be bargains with the likes of Yogi Ferrell, Montrezl Harrell and Patrick McCaw.

The Pacers were active at the trade deadline, seeking to leverage their cap room as part of three-way trades, willing to take on a bad salary in exchange for draft picks. Nothing panned out, but they will continue to explore using their cap room in trades at the draft and during this summer.

If that does not pan out, the Pacers will be in position to compete for free agents to bolster Oladipo in 2019. The hope is that young players like Sabonis, Myles Turner (who has had a disappointing year) and T.J. Leaf develop quickly and give the team the makings of a promising young roster around Oladipo. That would enable the Pacers to sell themselves — and their cap space — two summers from now.

But it all requires Oladipo to maintain and build upon this year’s success. He’s gotten that message.

“I still got a lot of work to do, a lot I need to accomplish to get on a level I want to get on,” Oladipo said. “I feel like I am going in the right direction, and taking that first step. But I want to continue growing. There are things I can still improve.”