INDIANAPOLIS — The lineup Pascal Siakam took the floor with to start the second quarter of Friday’s game against the Wizards was symbolic of the burden the three-time All-Star forward has had to carry throughout the Pacers’ star-crossed 2025-26 season.
None of the other four Pacers entered Friday’s game averaging more than 7.3 points or 1.2 assists per game in their careers. In their 16 seasons, Garrison Mathews, Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, Ben Sheppard and Isaiah Jackson had produced exactly one year in which any of them had averaged double-figure scoring. That was the 2021-22 season in which Mathews had averaged exactly 10.0 points per game with the Rockets. None of them had ever averaged more than 1.8 assists per game.
All four serve purposes on the Pacers’ roster but none of them have extensive history of having to create offense.
Siakam took the floor knowing exactly how much weight was on him and how important the segment would be with the Pacers holding a 30-24 lead coming out of the first quarter. The 6-8, 245-pound nominal power forward knew he would have to bring the ball up, drive it, create for others and make shots and knew that the Pacers couldn’t afford the sort of drought that doomed them in Wednesday’s loss at Toronto.
So Siakam took the Pacers’ first five shots of the period and made four of them — two layups, a 5-foot floater and an 18-foot turnaround jumper — which in turn opened up the floor for the rest of the group. He ended up scoring 14 points on 7-of-9 shooting in the second quarter alone, helping the Pacers take a 12-point halftime lead. They turned that into a 119-86 win over the Wizards in a game between teams with two of the NBA’s worst records and Siakam finished with 24 points on 11-of-20 shooting and 11 rebounds. In his 26 minutes and 27 seconds on the floor, the Pacers posted a plus-minus figure of +32.
“He decided that we were not going to lose this game tonight,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “He was ultra-aggressive but within our system, really our adjusted system and our spacing elements and stuff like that. He was tremendous. And as good as he was on offense, he was equally good and maybe better defensively and rebounding the ball.”
Siakam decided the Pacers were not going to lose because he is quite sick of losing after the Pacers (3-16) dropped 16 of their first 18 games. He was also well aware that they weren’t going to get a much better opportunity to grab a win than they did against Washington, which at 2-16 now stands alone with the NBA’s worst record. The Wizards rank 28th in the NBA in offensive rating and 30th in defensive rating. Outside of decorated 34-year-old veterans C.J. McCollum and Khris Middleton, they are almost entirely reliant on players 22 and under. Siakam knew he was facing a team on which he could impose his will with relative ease — especially because they didn’t double-team him as much as he’s used to — so he did it.
“Obviously, in a lot of games I’m seeing a lot of bodies,” Siakam said. “People send two or three every time I’m out there. They don’t double as much, so that’s good. You can get to your spots and things like that.”
Still, the fact that the degree of difficulty wasn’t particularly high didn’t take much away from the feeling of relief that came with grabbing a third win instead of suffering a 17th defeat. Siakam has been wearing the defeats particularly hard, and though he acknowledged that winning one game against one of the worst teams in the league is a cause for only so much celebration, he also said the feeling of victory is something the Pacers need to enjoy just so they remember what they’re fighting for.
“You can’t take it for granted,” Siakam said. “Every single night you go out there, and when you’re used to winning you take it for granted. I think every day we go out there, every single possession that we win, every single run that we have, every single win, we gotta take it and enjoy it and know — which is the most important — know what it took for us to get to that. We’re tired of losing. We can’t keep losing. That has to be our mindset. We have to give everything for that.”
Siakam didn’t sign up for this, of course. When he was acquired in a trade in January of 2024 from the Raptors, he was leaving a team that was embracing the idea of a full rebuild less than five years after claiming its first NBA title and joining a franchise on the rise back toward championship contention. He OK’d the idea of a trade to the Pacers because he believed they were primed to win big and believed that as an All-Star caliber running mate for point guard and franchise cornerstone Tyrese Haliburton, he could be the missing piece that would make it happen.
His prediction was accurate. He helped the 2023-24 Pacers reach the Eastern Conference Finals — leading them in scoring for the rest of the regular season and throughout the playoffs — then re-signed on a four-year max contract in hopes they could take another step. They did, reaching the NBA Finals in June with their first Eastern Conference title in 25 years, and he reached his third All-Star Game.
When Haliburton tore his right Achilles tendon in Game 7 of the Finals and then center Myles Turner left for the Bucks in free agency, Siakam knew the burden on him would be significantly heavier on him this season and that wins would be harder to come by in 2025-26 than it had been the first two years. What he didn’t expect was for almost every other key returning piece of the Pacers’ rotation to suffer a significant injury either in the preseason or the regular season’s first month. Point guards Andrew Nembhard and T.J. McConnell, wings Bennedict Mathurin and Aaron Nesmith and forward Obi Toppin have each missed at least eight games due to injury. That’s left Siakam as the only Indiana player of the eight who averaged more than 15 minutes per game in last year’s playoffs who has also appeared in at least 12 games for the Pacers so far this season.
Mathurin, McConnell and Nembhard are back — though Nembhard missed Friday’s game with a right quad contusion — but Nesmith is likely out for two more weeks with a knee sprain and Toppin is out until February with a stress fracture in his right foot. With them out, the Pacers have had to piece together lineups with two-way contract players and additions such Robinson-Earl and Mathews who joined the team on 10-day hardship contracts.
Siakam has taken one game off for rest, and for every other game, he’s gone in knowing that he’ll be facing constant double-teams and taking on tough defensive assignments and knowing he’s had to produce anyway. He has, leading the Pacers with 23.9 points and 7.1 rebounds per game. He also leads the team in total assists with 79 and total steals with 23.
But he hasn’t allowed himself to feel comfortable with the idea that he’s doing everything he can do. Because by his logic, if the Pacers are losing this much, then he obviously isn’t.
“I’ve always been — most of the time — been a part of winning, so it’s hard,” Siakam said after Monday’s loss to the Pistons. “It’s hard when you’re losing. I want to be the best version of myself. I want to be better. I promise you that’s the first thing I do every time after the game is over. It’s like, ‘What can I do better?’ ‘How can I be better for the team?’ Because at the end of the day all I care about is really winning. Just being in a position where you feel like you’re not getting the wins, it’s hard, it’s tough. I have to just have a positive attitude about it, continue to find different ways every single day to be better. That’s what it is. I can’t run from it.”
The fact that he hasn’t run from it has particularly impressed Carlisle, because it would be easy for the 31-year-old Siakam to write 2025-26 off as a lost season and start thinking about 2026-27 season as his next chance to do something special. It would also be easy to start to wonder if he’d bet on the wrong horse and think about engineering a trade. Carlisle has seen no signs of that, and instead he’s seen him become more vocal in working. with younger players.
That matters because even if this season doesn’t turn around, it matters that veterans such as Siakam continue to set a high standard and remain invested. Though defeat my help the Pacers bring in talent in the draft, they won’t be title contenders if they can’t recapture the cohesion that made them so formidable the last two seasons.
“I’ll give you four words, he’s a great player,” Carlisle said. “That’s why we made the deal for him. And I believe he’s gotten better since he’s been here. And as it’s gotten more difficult, a lot of veterans in that situation would lose interest. They would start questioning things. They’d come up with aches and pains out of nowhere. He ain’t doing that. You know? He ain’t doing that. He’s committed to this organization and this franchise and these fans. And we’re committed to him.”
And Siakam is committed to doing what he can to try to win every game possible to try to turn this season around. There’s a good chance it’s already too late, that the Pacers have already dug too deep a hole to dig out of and may find themselves better off protecting draft position than winning games. But Siakam still sees value in the pursuit.
“Continue to build good habits,” Siakam said. “That’s going to be my message to everyone every single day. No matter the score, no matter the record, build good habits. If we do that, we’re going to give ourselves good chances to win games every single night.”
He’s holding himself to that standard individually as well. That approach helped him become an NBA player after picking up the game at age 17 in Cameroon, so that’s what he will lean on now.
“I want to be great,” Siakam said. “I want to be the greatest I can be. That’s my motivation every single day no matter who is out there, no matter who plays, no matter what is happening. That is my motivation. … I take pride in that. That’s what got me where I’m at today. It’s not going to stop regardless of if we’re winning games or not winning games. I just know that my process has to be the same. I have to keep holding myself accountable and trying to be the best that I can be.”
Dustin Dopirak covers the Pacers all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Pacers Insider newsletter.
