Enter 29-year-old Siakam, who's easily the best player to play with Haliburton since his 2022 trade to the Pacers. Siakam figures to become a hub for lineups with Haliburton on the bench that have struggled to score as efficiently.
Per Cleaning the Glass data, Indiana's league-leading offense goes from ranking in the 98th percentile of all lineups leaguewide with Haliburton on the court to the 56th percentile -- slightly better than league average -- without him.
The Pacers can surround Siakam with more spacing than has he enjoyed at any point since becoming a go-to scorer for the
Toronto Raptors after
Kawhi Leonard's departure in the summer of 2019. Siakam often had to grind his way to volume scoring against packed-in defenses, one factor in the two-time All-Star not scoring with above-average efficiency in terms of true shooting percentage (TS%) at any point from 2019-20 through 2022-23.
That has changed to a degree this season with Siakam being tasked with creating less offense thanks to the emergence of
Scottie Barnes as a scorer. This season's 25% usage is Siakam's lowest since he was a role player on the Raptors team Leonard led to a championship. At the same time, Siakam's .600 TS% is a dramatic improvement on the .565 that was his previous high-water mark as a high-usage scorer.
Siakam's iffy outside shooting hasn't shown any improvement. He's hitting 32% from 3 this season, a tad below his career mark of 33%. It's not reasonable for the Pacers to expect that to improve, which might be acceptable in the context of their offense. Indiana has Turner as a stretch-5 and hasn't gotten high-volume 3-point shooting from power forwards Toppin (5.1 attempts per 36 minutes) and
Jalen Smith (4.7) -- although both are shooting better than 40% on 3s, substantially above their career averages (32% for Smith, 34.5% for Toppin).
One interesting proposition is whether the Pacers will put the ball in Siakam's hands at times to leverage Haliburton's shooting threat off the ball. Indiana's pick-and-roll offense has been almost exclusively run through the team's point guards. Per Second Spectrum tracking, Haliburton has been the ball handler in 70% of the Pacers' ball screens while on the court. Siakam-Turner pick-and-rolls with Haliburton spacing could yield good shots, and coach Rick Carlisle should also experiment with Haliburton screening for Siakam in inverted pick-and-rolls.
There's little question that adding Siakam will make Indiana a better team. He fills a positional need and is athletic enough to replace the high-percentage finishing the Pacers were getting from their forward options while simultaneously adding shot creation and playmaking and upgrading Indiana's defense. The Pacers will get bigger by sliding 6-foot-8 Siakam to the 3 at times in place of 6-4 Brown, who didn't make the kind of impact Indiana was hoping after adding him in free agency.
