Kevin Pritchard Has No Salary Cap Space To Work With But Tons Of Decisions To Make For The Indiana Pacers

Indiana Pacers President Of Basketball Operations Kevin Pritchard is entering his first offseason without salary cap space since the beginning of his tenure with the Pacers. At the same time, only three players on the Indiana roster are entering free agency. The lack of resources, combined with the small amount of departing talent, makes it appear as if this will be the most straightforward offseason of Pritchard’s time in charge of the Pacers.

But that could not be further from the truth.

Instead, the man at the helm has to find a way to improve the Pacers while battling league-wide financial uncertainty. “We don’t know what that future holds,” Pritchard said when asked about the precarious nature of the NBA’s financial future. He explained that the league doesn’t even know when next season is going to start, which makes planning for the upcoming campaign difficult.

Regardless of when the upcoming season begins, Pritchard has to make his team better with limited resources, a daunting task. On top of that, he has to hire a coach, deal with more questions about his team’s biggest star, and continue to investigate weather or not a key part of the Pacers roster construction is still viable. It’s going to be a busy summer for the Indiana front office.

“Ownership expects more,” Pritchard said of the path forward for the blue and gold. “As a President of this organization, I want us to be better than four-and-out in the playoffs.”

Step one for Indiana improving on their past seasons is hiring a new coach. The organization fired Nate McMillan soon after being swept by the Miami Heat in the first round of the postseason. “We want to be better than getting swept in the playoffs,” Pritchard said. The McMillan firing was done with a variety of factors in mind, but his postseason shortcomings was perhaps the biggest one.

Whoever the Pacers hire as their next coach will be of a different mold than McMillan. The former coach was known for his defensive principals and no-nonsense style, but his offensive strategy was antiquated. What Pritchard wants in his next coach is someone who brings a more modern approach to the game and can relate to the players.

“We have to figure out how to communicate better with these players… communication would probably be my top thing,” Pritchard said when listing some of the factors he is looking for in his next coach. “Playing a little bit more of a modern game. The game is changing and you’ve got to look to the future,” he added.

But really, the Pacers President wouldn’t rule out anything. He could value experience. He might go with an outside of the box hire. He hasn’t ruled out a college coach or an up-and-comer. Pritchard’s coaching search will cast a wide net and continuously narrow to the right person.

Pritchard said he had a conversation with former Pacers forward David West about communicating with current NBA players. West played in the league just two seasons ago and thus has a great read on the modern player, Pritchard can use West’s informed take to better understand what the type of communication is that he will need from his next coach. “I feel like that coach has to communicate on the level of the players,” Pritchard said.

Once he is done hiring a coach, Pritchard and his new partner will turn their attention to the roster. While the main focus will be looking for ways to improve the team heading into next season, an important step this fall is determining a plan forward regarding star guard Victor Oladipo.

Oladipo is eligible for a contract extension. The Pacers are permitted to lengthen the former Indiana Hoosier’s deal by up to four years, with the maximum extension being a four-year deal with about $113 million guaranteed.

The two-time All-Star’s market value is hazy right now as he is coming off of a major injury and an underwhelming playoff performance, but smaller markets like Indiana can’t typically lure players with star upside. The Pacers have to at least try to ink Oladipo to a longer deal this offseason, even if it is incredibly unlikely for the two sides to come to an agreement.

Oladipo is a confident guy. He knows that if he plays well next season, he could set himself up to receive far more than $113 million as a free agent — from the Pacers or from another team. That confidence means that he will almost certainly bet on himself and his ability to improve this offseason, and given that next summer could be the first time he enters free agency as a pro, Oladipo has good reason to not accept an extension before showcasing what he can do at an elevated level of health.

And while Indiana should attempt to sign him to a longer deal, it’s not a simple decision. As mentioned above, his value is unclear right now. Finding the right price tag for Oladipo is difficult, and risky. It’s certainly possible that he wouldn’t live up to any extension that he signs.

The final layer of the relationship between Oladipo and the Pacers is the one that complicates the situation the most. If Oladipo even subtly hints that he doesn’t want to re-sign with Indiana after next season, Pritchard has to consider trading him. It’s bad business to let a star leave a team for nothing in return, especially if you have an inkling ahead of time that he may depart. There’s a ton of factors at play for both Oladipo and Pritchard.

“Victor and I have a good dialogue,” Pritchard said. “We have him for another year… but it will be up to him. He will have the choice, and it’s his first choice. It’s his first time to have an autonomous choice. He can go and do whatever he wants. I’m hopeful that we can create an environment that he feels good about, that he feels like he can win [in].

I think he’s been pretty consistent in saying that the most important thing is that he can win,” he added. “I do believe that we can have a team that can do some good things in the playoffs.”

Pritchard explicitly stated, “I have not heard anything other than [Oladipo] does want to be here, that he does want to make it work here. So I will take that at its face.” That makes a trade seem very unlikely at this point in time. The more probable outcome is that the Pacers and Oladipo enter the season without agreeing on an extension, and the Indiana brass will have to dedicate a ton of effort into this situation all season long in to avoid getting burned by an Oladipo departure.

Another big trial staring Pritchard in the face is improving his roster, a task that will be extremely tough. The Pacers are over the salary cap, meaning they are low on resources to acquire new players, and the team doesn’t have a first round pick in October’s draft. Finding upgrades will be difficult.

Indiana’s front office is armed with the non-taxpayer mid-level exception, which allows them to sign a player to a deal that would start at up to $9-10 million (depending on the salary cap). That’s a sizable chunk of change in the upcoming free agency climate, but Pritchard may have to use some, if not all, of that exception to retain key wing Justin Holiday, who is Indiana’s most important free agent.

Cap-wise, the Pacers have a few tricks they can use to acquire some talent to improve. One would involve the aforementioned mid-level exception, which Pritchard noted can be split up to acquire multiple players. “You can bifurcate your full mid-level… you can use it in a lot of creative ways,” he said. For example, the team could use some of that exception to retain Holiday and use the rest on a sweet-shooting forward who would fill out the rotation. The exception could even be split into three players, if the front office desires. There are a lot of options.

Another tool the Pacers have this offseason is the bi-annual exception, a smaller team building tool that would allow Indiana to sign a player to a small deal for up to two-years in length. Prtichard didn’t dive into specifics on how he may use this exception, but it is a tool he has at his disposal to improve the roster without having to give up anything.

Beyond those two salary cap exceptions, the Pacers have one draft selection at their disposal. The team sent away its first-round pick in a trade to acquire Malcolm Brogdon last summer, but they still own their second-round choice, so Pritchard and co will pick 54th in the 2020 NBA Draft. It’s one of the final few selections, but Indiana has had some success in the late second round throughout recent drafts.

And don’t rule out a trade for a better, or additional, draft slot. “I do believe that this is a draft that we potentially could get in at a higher level,” Pritchard said. The Pacers own five future second-round picks from other teams that they could use to enter the draft in a superior slot, should they be so inclined.

The trade possibilities don’t end with the draft, though. As previously discussed, Oladipo is a guy who could be moved if the circumstances call for it, but from purely a roster improvement standpoint, there’s plenty of options at Pritchard’s disposal.

The Pacers have multiple returning players under the age of 25 who could be valuable should the Indiana brass decide to move them, and all of the veterans on the squad have at least some trade value. There are countless permutations of swaps the Pacers could pursue.

“It seems like the trade market will be the way that teams really try to improve their chances in the short term,” Pritchard said of the NBA as a whole this offseason. “I would not be surprised if, when the trade market opens, that [it] actually gets super active.”

The most hotly discussed trades among Pacers fans involve one of Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis, two talented young centers that the blue and gold deploy together often.

Despite both players being centers naturally, Turner and Sabonis started alongside each other for the Pacers. In general, the team looked solid when the duo shared the floor. But all season long, bench lineups featuring Sabonis without Turner dominated. And during the seeding games in the NBA bubble, Indiana looked great with only Turner in the lineup. There is ample evidence that the Pacers may be better with only one of the two bigs.

The situation leads to rampant speculation that one of the two could be moved. Both centers are talented and young, meaning they would draw interest from a variety of teams if Pritchard decides to deal one for a betting fitting player.

There are no good reasons to trade one of the bigs just to shake things up. Pritchard would only deal Turner or Sabonis if it clearly made the Pacers better. And, per his own admission, both centers want to continue to grow together.

“When talking to Myles and talking to Domas, both of them, the very first thing each other said was ‘I want to play with Domas and I want to play with Myles. We can make it work,’” Pritchard said. He said he was taken back by this feedback, which makes sense given how this season went, but these reactions have been common from the big men over the past few years. The Pacers front office just has to figure out if keeping both is the best path forward.

The new coach could be a factor in that decision as well. If the new coach is as modern as Pritchard prefers, he may not want to play two centers at once. That could force the Pacers to move one of the bigs for a player that better suits the system of the new play caller. The coaching hire could make this decision for Pritchard.

From coaching to personnel, Pritchard has a wide variety of challenges to deal with this offseason. And these challenges — the new coach, the Oladipo conundrum, the two center overlap, and the lack of resources — are just the obvious, and big, things Pritchard has to navigate this fall. There are a ton of other things he will have to consider in his attempt to improve the roster and the organization, some that will be easy and others that will not.

Pritchard needs to nail all of those little things to make the team better. Pacers owner Herb Simon has indicated that he wants to see more success and is willing to pay for it — firing a coach with a guaranteed contract during a pandemic is not a cheap move. “He wants us to be a great organization,” Pritchard said of Simon. In order to become great, Pritchard himself is going to have to nail the offseason from start to finish. That’s going to be a tough task.