INDIANAPOLIS – After being a half away from winning the NBA Finals in 2025, the Pacers had their worst season in franchise history, going 19-63. The Pacers head to New Orleans to face the Pelicans in their season opener Wednesday, as Tyrese Haliburton will be back in the lineup and the team has hopes of winning a championship.
While several of the pieces are the same, this is not the same team that made deep playoff runs in 2024 and 2025. After trading for Ivica Zubac in February and adding to their bench this summer, the Pacers will need to adjust in order to compete in a revamped Eastern Conference.
Before the Pacers’ season officially begins, here are the storylines to watch in 2026-27.
Ivica Zubac brings new element to Pacers
Ankle and rib injuries limited Zubac to just five games with the Pacers after they acquired him from the Los Angeles Clippers in February. Zubac is set for his first full season in blue and gold, and he’ll be the starting center, joining the established lineup of Haliburton, Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith and Pascal Siakam.
Zubac won’t be able to shoot like Myles Turner before him, as he has attempted just 12 3-pointers in 10 years in the NBA. But what Zubac brings is a stronger interior threat, as he has made 62% of his 2-pointers in his career (Turner has made 56%).
“I'm more of a roller than the bigs they had in the past,” Zubac said on media day. “And once I'm in a good position in the paint, when I've got a guy on a seal that could throw the ball inside, I'm gonna try to finish everything up inside.”
Zubac spent the summer conditioning himself to play at the Pacers’ pace. The Pacers’ up-tempo offense is their greatest strength, and their new center is adjusting to it. He has also focused on initiating the offense after he grabs rebounds.
“When I catch the rebound, no one's coming to me,” Zubac said during training camp. “Everyone's kind of already running, so I'm hitting ahead and we're off. It's not where I rebound the ball and then you've got two guys calling your name that are coming to you, getting the ball out of your hands. They're running, so it's really fun.”
The entire Pacers team has noted how Zubac is a difference-maker as a screener. Kelly Oubre Jr. joked that to get by a Zubac screen in practice, he “went down the street, I made a left and I made a U-turn and then came back to practice.” Zubac’s physical screens create open shots for his teammates all over the court.
“He hits people, man,” Haliburton said. “I feel like I can slow down even more because I know he's gonna make contact all the time. He enjoys hitting people, and so it's been a lot of fun.”
If Zubac and the Pacers can correctly adjust to one another, he’ll add elements to this team that it hasn’t had before. Zubac is a walking double-double and he provides stability in the paint.
“I think for him, this is a great opportunity to be a part of a different kind of system, and there will be challenges with it,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “I mean, the level of conditioning and how fast we play and all that kind of stuff, that's an adjustment for any player that comes to us. But I think it's a challenge that really good players like him will love.”
Can Tyrese Haliburton pick up where he left off?
The Pacers’ All-NBA point guard wasted no time letting everyone know on media day that he was ready to go.
“I am healthy, I am 100%,” Haliburton said. “There will be no restrictions. That is not news, there's no source. I am the source. I'm good, I'm ready to go for the year.”
The Pacers don’t expect to load manage Haliburton’s right Achilles, which he tore in Game 7 of the NBA Finals in June 2025. Now, it’s about reclaiming his spot as one of the NBA’s best point guards.
Haliburton’s presence completely changes the Pacers’ offense. His court vision almost always leads to quality shots, even if he’s not the one shooting.
With Haliburton sidelined last year, the Pacers had the second-worst offensive rating in the NBA. They had the ninth-best offense in 2024-25 and the second-best offense in 2023-24. In preseason, the Pacers led the NBA with 33.8 assists per game, and Haliburton averaged five assists per preseason game while only playing in the first half.
Haliburton’s playmaking is why Carlisle said “a player like that changes so many things for a team,” and that’s what the franchise hopes happens this year. He’s also added strength in his time away.
“I feel like I'm stronger,” Haliburton said. “I feel like that'll help me with more physical matchups, which I'm excited about – seeing how I stack up against those more physical defenders as time goes on.”
Haliburton has spent recent weeks building his connection with Zubac. When Zubac played on the Clippers, the offense was centered around wing Kawhi Leonard. With the Pacers, Haliburton makes the offense go, and he plays a unique style of basketball.
“I'm more used to point guards who spend more time with the ball, who hold the ball longer than him,” Zubac said. “He's getting off of it quick, and the system is based off making quick decisions and just guys making reads.”
The return of Haliburton should make the Pacers a better team. The question is if they can get back to contending for an NBA title.
Pacers look to learn from last year
Rather than completely chalking up their disappointing 2025-26 season to injuries, the Pacers have owned the fact that they weren’t good enough. Going from a 19-win team to a championship contender is a tall task, and the Pacers understand that they must reinforce winning habits.
“There's no way to look at last year and just dismiss it as a one-off type thing,” Carlisle said. “I mean, there were aspects of it that were difficult and ugly, and so we need to move beyond that, learn some things from it. And then work to reclaim our position as a competitive team in the Eastern Conference and in the league. And we know that it's going to be a significant amount of work.”
Whatever went wrong last season will be up to this team’s leaders to fix. It’s a challenge the team is choosing to embrace.
“It happened and it's easy to just be like, ‘Oh yeah, that wasn't us, and we're going to get back to it because everyone is back,’” Siakam said. “But it just doesn't happen overnight. We have to rebuild that.”
Flipping the switch is easier said than done. The Pacers will look to win at least 50 games and compete for a championship. A 31-win improvement is rare in this league, as only seven teams have improved by 30 wins in a season in the history of the NBA.
Completing a turnaround of that proportion will take a mindset shift. This roster has proven that it has the talent; now it must put it together.
“I think that we talked to you guys (media) a lot last year – I came up here, many people came up here – and said the standard is the standard,” Haliburton said. “And this is what we expect in our organization, and we'd be lying if we didn't say that there was a drop-off in that. And obviously, the way we played, we only won 19 games – it wasn't a great year. Obviously, we dealt with a lot of health stuff and things like that, but that's no excuse for the year that we had.”
How will Pacers bench unit perform?
During their run to the NBA Finals, the Pacers’ bench gave opponents headaches. The leading scorer off the bench that year was Bennedict Mathurin, who was traded away to acquire Zubac.
The Pacers have added Oubre on a two-year deal worth nearly $17 million, and they expect him to take on that sixth man role. Oubre’s versatility as a wing is why the Pacers wanted him, and based on the preseason, it appears he will be in the starting lineup whenever any starter besides Zubac is out.
“I’ve been able to kind of be a Swiss Army knife throughout the last probably five, six years, and adapt to whatever role I was given on any given day,” Oubre said. “So I don’t want to put a label on (my role). I don’t like being in a box, but I do love being on this team where the possibilities are endless.”
Backup point guard T.J. McConnell, 34, is expected to run the show when Haliburton sits, but McConnell missed all of preseason with a hamstring injury, and his timeline for a return is uncertain. If he does miss the start of the year, backup point guard responsibilities will likely be split between Nembhard and Quenton Jackson.
The Pacers have faith in improvement from Jarace Walker, the 23-year-old who enters his fourth season in the NBA. With the injuries last year, Walker had a career year – averaging 11.6 points, 5.1 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game.
Walker started 41 of the 76 games he played last year, which will likely be scaled down this year. (Walker had just five starts in his first two seasons.) The Pacers might not ask Walker to score as much, but they’ll need him to become a complete player off the bench.
“His role will be a little different this year than it was last year,” Pacers GM Chad Buchanan said of Walker on Sept. 24. “And the more simplified he can keep his game, the more he can focus on helping us do the little things. … We don't need a lot of playmaking necessarily from him like maybe we did last year, and I think part of his maturity and growth as a player is understanding what the team needs from him. We’ve got to see him do it and he's got to do it night to night.”
Walker missed the final two preseason games with an undisclosed injury, but in the first game, he played the type of role Buchanan envisioned. Walker scored seven points to go with 10 assists and five rebounds against the Minnesota Timberwolves. If he can frequently have all-around nights like that, it raises the ceiling of the Pacers’ bench.
The Pacers still seem to be searching for their answer when Zubac is off the floor. Jay Huff, who played all 82 games last year (and started 47), didn’t play in the first half of any of the team’s preseason games. In the final game, neither Huff nor newly acquired Larry Nance Jr. played in the first half, as the Pacers used Obi Toppin as their backup center.
While Toppin has shown the ability to be a small-ball center when paired with Siakam in the past, it might not be feasible to do so for 15 to 20 minutes per game. The Pacers flaunted the versatility of their center room early in training camp, but they don’t seem to be sold on Huff or Nance at this point. As the season progresses, the Pacers must home in on an answer at backup center.
The Pacers’ second unit enters the season with multiple questions. The bench has the capacity to be one of the best in the NBA, but it must prove itself again this year.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Zubac's screens, Haliburton's return and a bench in flux: Pacers storylines to watch