'That's why we brought him here.' Pascal Siakam goes off for 39 points in Pacers' Game 2 win

Indianapolis Star

24-05-2025

INDIANAPOLIS -- Before anyone else on the Pacers scored a single point, Pascal Siakam had already given the Knicks a survey course on all the different ways he could burn them.
In the Pacers' first seven possessions, Siakam scored 11 points on 5-of-6 shooting. The three-time All-Star forward twice scored on his signature silky turnaround fadeaway jumper. He twice scored in transition at the rim — once scooping up a loose ball and covering 75 feet from the opposite foul line to the rim in four dribbles for a layup through contact and once by running the floor and catching a no-look pass from All-NBA point guard Tyrese Haliburton for a wide-open dunk when the Knicks got scrambled trying to mark up shooters. Then Siakam hit a top-of-the-key catch-and-shoot 3 off a ghost screen that served as a reminder the 31-year-old is in the midst of the best 3-point shooting season of his career.
In just 4:36 of game action, Siakam scored at all three levels. He got buckets in isolation, in transition and off of movement and showed how he can be a weapon with and without the ball in his hands. He made clear in that stretch recovery for the Knicks after their Game 1 collapse would be hard to come by, and that was just the beginning of arguably the most productive playoff performance of his Siakam's career which already includes the 2019 NBA title with the Toronto Raptors.
Siakam scored a career-playoff high 39 points on a bloodlessly efficient 15-of-23 shooting, leading the Pacers to a 114-109 win in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals at Madison Square Garden that puts them in total command of the series and just two wins away from their second NBA Finals in franchise history and first since 2000. Teams that take a 2-0 lead are 76-6 in conference finals history and teams that take a 2-0 lead on the road are 17-0 in the round.
"Special game," Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said when asked about Siakam. "In the first half, he was the guy that got us going and got us through some difficult stretches. I thought he really picked his spots to be aggressive. He ran great. He did everything. He attacked the rim. He was great mid-range and the 3-point shot was there."
It hasn't been easy for Siakam to produce a performance like that in these playoffs because the Pacers have faced opponents who have been devoted to keep it from happening and who just happened to have some of the best defenders in the NBA playing the power forward position. He lined up primarily against Milwaukee's Giannis Antetokounmpo in the first round, Cleveland's Evan Mobley in the Eastern Conference semifinals and now New York's OG Anunoby — the former Indiana University star and Siakam's former teammate with the Raptors — in the conference finals. The three of them have been named to a combined eight NBA All-Defensive teams. Antetokounmpo and Mobley have each been Defensive Player of the Year with Mobley earning those honors this season.
Since it's the Pacers' guiding philosophy to not be overly concerned with who scores and to move the ball until it finds the open man and the best possible shot at the point of least resistance, Siakam has been relatively quiet by his standards almost as a matter of policy. Instead of asking him to run into walls to see if he can knock them over, the Pacers have been looking to others for points and not forcing him the ball when he's not been in advantageous spots.
Through the first 11 games of the playoffs, he was still more than solid, averaging 18.6 points per game on 53.5% shooting, including 41.7% from 3-point range going into Friday night's game, but that was down from 21.6 points per game in last year's playoffs and from his team-leading 20.2 per game in the regular season. Prior to Friday night, he hadn't scored more than 21 points in a game since he had 28 in the Pacers' Game 3 loss to the Bucks in the first round.
But the Pacers did see a chance to create more opportunities for Siakam if they were a little more intentional about doing so. As good of a defender as the 6-7, 232-pound Anunoby is, the 6-8, 245-pound Siakam has more of a size advantage in that matchup than he did against Antetokounmpo and Mobley, who are both listed at 6-11. Plus, Siakam knows how he can attack Anunoby, so the Pacers made a point to let him.
"We've gotta make his life a little easier," forward Aaron Nesmith said. "I thought tonight we made a point of making his life a little easier. ... Just spacing the floor, moving, not staying stagnant when he gets the ball. I can't give away everything, but he's a special player. He makes good plays, so we tried to make his life easier."
Siakam could sense there were more opportunities there, but he still didn't try to do too much to force action on his own or to try to take over the game in some overt sense. But he kept on finding his moments to attack mismatches in isolation, to hit open 3s and to score in the open floor.
Siakam made 3-of-5 3-pointers and all three were clean with two of them coming when the defense collapsed on a dribble drive and left him wide open. He had five layups or dunks that came because he was running hard either with or without the ball in transition. He's a strong believer in the Pacers' egalitarian approach to offense and he wasn't looking to break up the flow of that to create his own offense, even on a night when he was clearly sizzling.
"Whenever I was out there, I just took it," Siakam said. "I think what makes us special as a team is that we have different weapons. We're not consumed with who's gonna do what. We just go into the game and however the game presents itself, that's how we go and take it and do it that way. It doesn't matter who scores. For me, I just try to play my game. Shout out to my teammates, just finding me and make sure that I stayed aggressive the whole game."
But as humble and devoted to the team concept as he is, Siakam made some plays that only he could make that were the reason the Pacers targeted him in January 2024 when they decided to go get an All-Star caliber player to pair with Haliburton and gave up three first-round draft picks along with guard Bruce Brown and forward Jordan Nwora so they could make a push to win now rather than waiting.
He made elite moves out of post-ups for layups and more turnaround jumpers and he used every bit of his 7-3 wingspan to grab a pass Haliburton threw behind him in the second quarter, controlling it over the head of Knicks guard Miles McBride and then driving past him for a layup that cut a three-point Knicks lead to one when New York could have expanded it to five.
All game long, Siakam's buckets either created momentum for the Pacers or stopped it for the Knicks, and his last field goal of the game put the Pacers up 110-100 with 2:45 to go. The Knicks had one more comeback in them after that and went on a 9-0 run, but they never got to 110 points. The Madison Square Garden crowd was desperate for an opportunity to turn the series around after the heartbreak in Game 1, and Siakam made sure it never could.
"That's why we brought him here," Haliburton said. "That's what he's here to do. He can get a bucket in so many different ways. He started the game hot. We just kept feeding him. I thought he did a great job of making big shot after big shot after big shot, killing momentum. When you're in an environment like this, the crowd is getting into it. A lot of those shots can be back-breakers at times. I thought he just kept making big play after big play."
Even though that was why the Pacers got Siakam, it speaks to his maturity he didn't demand this kind of night for himself as the Pacers head toward history. He waited until the opportunity was there, but then turned it into one of the most impressive individual performances of these playoffs.
"He's a veteran who's been in these situations multiple times," Carlisle said. "He understands the importance of patience and being disciplined and understanding the NBA playoffs are a process. You have to keep working the process whatever your process is within the team. He never forces it, but whenever we get in a bind late clock, he can get a shot up on the rim and a lot of time it goes in. He's been great. He's been great all year."