Coming off a wild season opener in a rematch of last season’s NBA Finals, the Indiana Pacers will hit the road for a weekend back-to-back beginning Saturday night with a visit to Memphis.
Playing without All-NBA point guard Tyrese Haliburton, who tore his right Achilles tendon in Game 7 of the 2025 Finals, Indiana went to double-overtime with the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder on Thursday.
Despite the Pacers’ 141-135 loss, Bennedict Mathurin’s 36-point, 11-rebound double-double offered a potential silver lining for a Pacers team that will spend the initial stretch of the 2025-26 season finding its identity without Haliburton.
Haliburton is expected to miss the entire season after leading Indiana to its first NBA Finals since 2000. He averaged 18.6 points and 9.2 assists per game last season, both down slightly from his output the previous two seasons.
Haliburton’s absence isn’t the only significant shakeup to Indiana’s Eastern Conference-winning lineup. Myles Turner, who averaged 15.6 points, 6.5 points and 2.0 blocked shots per game, signed with the Milwaukee Bucks in the offseason.
But with returning Pascal Siakam, who averaged team highs of 20.2 points and 6.9 rebounds per game, and a young core of Mathurin, Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith, Indiana coach Rick Carlisle said he expects the Pacers to get opponents’ best shot throughout the season.
Nembhard has been ruled out against the Grizzlies with a shoulder injury.
“There’s not going to be any sugar pill or panacea to solve the challenges that are going to be coming every night,” Carlisle said. “We’re just going to have to have an attitude of loving the challenge of how difficult the NBA is.”
Part of that challenge includes navigating back-to-backs. Indiana will begin its back-to-back in Memphis and continue Sunday vs. the Timberwolves in Minneapolis — a team that reached the Western Conference finals. The Grizzlies will play the back-half of their own back-to-back on Saturday.
The weekend started in miserable fashion for Memphis, which lost 146-114 on Friday in a home game against the Miami Heat.
The Grizzlies opened their season on Wednesday with a 128-122 defeat of New Orleans behind 35 points from Ja Morant on 65% shooting from the field. But he was just 4-of-16 from the floor against the Heat and finished with 12 points.
Morant also was forced into three turnovers, part of the 20 Memphis committed as a team.
The ball-control issues on Friday continued a problem that vexed the Grizzlies in their 48-win 2024-25 season. Despite averaging 121.7 points per game, second most in the NBA, Memphis coughed up an average of 15 turnovers per game last season — more than all but the Utah Jazz and Portland Trail Blazers, teams that finished near the bottom of the West.
“Turnovers are generally the cause of something. Could be technical skills. Could be individual tactical decisions. Could be the scheme the other team is playing,” Grizzlies coach Tuomas Iisalo said. “We’ve got to get better, is the short answer. … It’s not optimizing to get into the high-level areas.”
Iisalo took over for the fired Taylor Jenkins last March and coached Memphis into the play-in round and then the first round of the 2025 playoffs, where they were swept by the Thunder. He was named the team’s full-time replacement for Jenkins in May.
–Field Level Media
