The intensity system

"This league has become this" and the 64-win Cavaliers couldn't keep up

The Pacers have built a machine that wears down opponents, no matter how good those opponents. JASON MILLER/GETTY IMAGES

The Pacers didn’t need Game 5. They were on the road, down 19, and up 3-1 in the series. Perhaps even NBA players make little choices, here and there, about measuring effort. Tuesday night in Cleveland didn’t have to be it.

But the Pacers tore through the second half, picking up the Cavaliers full court, flying into the lane just in case a free throw missed, getting two chase-down blocks on one Cleveland fast break. As the Cavaliers tried to conserve energy, the Pacers did the opposite, and pumped as much as they possibly could into the game.

Afterward, a reporter would ask Pascal Siakam, essentially, why the Pacers bothered to try to win the game that eliminated the first-seeded Cavs. His answer: “We always know that with our physicality and the way we play, we can always be in the game, and it was just a matter of time until our pressure and the things that we do gets to a team.”

It’s a system.

It can be confusing, trying to understand how the Pacers, a middling team in the regular season standings, keep making the conference finals. Last year, there was an urge to describe it as a fluke.

This year, though, the NBA’s coach of the year sees it as a model. The Pacers play with off-the-charts intensity. Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson held his hand way up high early in his post-game press conference. “They're up here, guys,” he explained. “I know what I know from the data and I know from watching film. They're up here, and they can sustain it. … I give them so much credit for being able to stay in that, to sustain that type of intensity for so long.”

This idea of mounting intensity that wears teams down doesn’t fit most of the broadcast narrative about how teams win–that tends to focus on star who score a lot like Donovan Mitchell. But the Pacers have a system of playing starters short minutes, while role players like Obi Toppin, Bennedict Mathurin, T.J. McConnell, Ben Sheppard, and Thomas Bryant fly all over the court, badgering the other team’s stars into fatigue.

Then the starters come back, fresh and ferocious, and seal the deal. It changes the math of basketball in ways that are somewhat new to the NBA. It’s a bet that a player like Donovan Mitchell is battling not just his defender, but the limits of his own body. It’s a bet that the league’s best players are close to cracking, if only you can tip them into exhaustion.

“You can see it on the other team’s faces,” Pacers forward Aaron Nesmith would later admit. “They’re tired. Their hands are on their knees.”

Coach Atkinson wouldn’t let it go. Intensity is the story of the series and the league. The rest of his press conference included:

• “This league has become this. The pace is, especially against this team, is incredibly high, and it's 48 minutes. So there's just a lot of work.

• “They wore us down. They have a particular style they play. … Really struggled with the pressure, the full-court ball pressure, I felt like that was the beginning of it, and we struggled just to get into our stuff early enough.”

• “Mad respect. It's like a college team. And I say that in a really good way. They press for 48 minutes and they run faster than anybody in the league. We have the data. I wish I had a graph, right? You got the league. We're kind of up there, and probably sixth, and they're up here,” holds his hand way higher. “And I think, to their credit, they've recruited to that, their style of play.”

The thing about Rick Carlisle’s Pacers system is that it is proving to be a good bet, with many deep nuances. That’s what David Thorpe and I have been discussing all playoffs, and that’s the lens through which we’ll be discussing the playoffs and the draft in the weeks to come. The players you want are the players who can play with massive intensity. How do you do that? It’s fascinating.

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