Indiana’s front office is staring at a cap problem with no clean answer, and that’s the whole issue. The Pacers are headed toward a summer where flexibility will be scarce, their own free agents may not be cheap, and the kind of star chase that usually drives a big-market team’s offseason doesn’t come naturally in Indiana.
That’s the reality of life outside the league’s preferred destinations. Cap space means one thing for places like New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago: a chance to land impact talent.
For everyone else, it usually comes down to two choices - overpay someone to come, or absorb another team’s bad money in exchange for draft picks. Indiana is not operating from the same playbook as the glamour markets.
There is, though, one narrow exception. If a team is good enough and its stars are compelling enough, free agents can be persuaded to look past geography.
Golden State did it in 2017 with Kevin Durant. Denver did it with Paul Millsap.
It can happen, even if it almost never does.
That’s why the Pacers are looking ahead to the summer of 2028. If they want a real swing at a star by then, they need a plan now - because the alternatives are ugly, and there are no perfect shortcuts.
One route would be to clear the books by letting internal free agents such as Pascal Siakam, Ivica Zubac, Andrew Nembhard chief among them walk, then using those abandoned cap holds to carve out max space. That’s an aggressive approach, and it’s been done before. Boston used a version of it most recently in 2016.
The other path is slower and more complicated: wait to sign your own players until after the external target is in place, then use Bird rights to keep the rest of the roster by going over the cap. That would push Indiana into second-apron territory quickly, but with the Pacers holding so few draft picks, it’s a route that could actually make sense.
There’s also the wild-card option: trade away future free agents for minimal contracts and draft assets, open the space, then try to rebuild around the incoming deals and the picks that come back. It’s a drastic move, but it would give Indiana both room and some ammunition to restock the roster.
None of it is comfortable. Clearing salary makes the team weaker.
Keeping the players makes the team pricier. And with this roster about to get expensive, Indiana is stuck in the middle, trying to avoid a mistake while knowing there may not be a safe one.
In Other News...
Pacers Face A Tough Trade Question Around Michael Porter Jr
The Pacers have spent enough time building around Tyrese Haliburton and Pascal Siakam to know what the next step should look like, and the profile is pretty clear: a third high-level scorer who can space the floor, create his own shot and hold up on the wing. Michael Porter Jr. checks a lot of those boxes on paper, which is why his name stands out in any conversation about how Indiana could raise its ceiling without disrupting the balance of its core.
The problem is fitting that kind of talent into a payroll that already has bigger issues lurking ahead. Indiana is staring at salary-cap strain in the coming years, with several important free agents set to reach the market in 2028, and that makes any pursuit of Porter more complicated than simply asking whether he fits next to Haliburton and Siakam. The Pacers have to weigh the obvious basketball appeal against the possibility that one swing now could leave the roster less flexible when the next round of decisions arrives. [Read more 🡒]
Pacers Need More Than Hype From Ivica Zubac This Season
Ivica Zubacs arrival last season gave Indiana another big body to build around, and this fall the Pacers are counting on that addition to look less like a simple roster move and more like a real fit. With Tyrese Haliburton back from injury, the opening-night setup will offer an early glimpse at how Zubac can complement Indianas pace and playmaking, especially in a frontcourt role that should help stabilize the group around him.
The expectations are not small. RotoWire projects Zubac for 14.5 points, 11 rebounds, 2.2 assists and a block per game, numbers that would give the Pacers a dependable interior presence on both ends. For a team trying to take a step forward, the bigger question is whether Zubac can turn that projection into consistent production once the games start to count. [Read more 🡒]
Pacers Keep Winning The One Way Small-Market Teams Usually Dont
Since the 2019 offseason, the Pacers have kept leaning into the part of roster building that usually gives small-market teams their best chance to stay relevant: trades. They have made 31 of them in that span, and the volume alone says plenty about how Indiana has tried to navigate a league where free agency is rarely a friendly path and the draft does not always deliver a quick fix. The result has been a front office willing to keep moving pieces, reset the deck and keep chasing the right mix.
What stands out is not just how often the Pacers have dealt, but how often they have been willing to make the kind of player-for-player swaps that can reshape a franchise. Paul George, Victor Oladipo, Domantas Sabonis, Tyrese Haliburton, Aaron Nesmith and Ivica Zubac all fit into that larger pattern, with Indiana often finding value where others were ready to pivot. Even the rougher misses have been manageable enough to keep the strategy intact, which is why the bigger question now is less about whether the Pacers will keep trading and more about what they are willing to move next. [Read more 🡒]