When Jim O'Brien was hired to transition the Pacers out of the Jermaine/Artest/Jack/Tinsley era and into the 'Danny Granger can be an All-Star wing one night per week' era, nobody expected it to end with a top-10 defense and ineptitude offensively.

The Pacers defense is strong across the board, particularly in preventing easy transition buckets and in the post. They can be exposed in isolations, which isn't surprising considering the makeup of their personnel.

On offense, the Pacers shouldn't be as ineffective as they have been. They have a nice collection of shooters and can score in the post, but are forced into too many challenged shots since they don't have a single offensive player teams can ill-afford to double-team. Good teams have at least have one of these players and it frees up everyone else to become better than they are on their own. This is how the Cavaliers win 60 games with LeBron and then win a dozen without him the very next season.

The Pacers biggest need is clearly to acquire one of those star playmakers, but you positively cannot trade for one, so let's look at something actually attainable.

Even though they aren't a threat in transition or in the pick and roll, Indiana's core five of Granger, Mike Dunleavy, Roy Hibbert, Darren Collison and Josh McRoberts has played well together. They don't jump off the League Pass LCD, but they will generally overachieve.

Hibbert's confidence appears to have returned under Frank Vogel, plus the Tyler Hansbrough/Paul George picks are showing far more promise than Brandon Rush.

Desperation Meter: The Pacers' quagmire is easy for many Americans to identify with. They are immovably living a lower middle class life and lack any potential for specialness that comes from situations that are really bad (high lottery picks in this case) and they don't have the right pedigree (free agents wanting to play in Indiana) for natural upward mobility. They also have cap space in a summer where free agency will be for all intents and purposes aborted, which is like owning a home you can't even give away to squatters.

Indiana has the aforementioned cap space because of the expiring contracts of Dunleavy, T.J. Ford and Jeff Foster, so another acquisition akin to the conversion of Troy Murphy into Collison and James Posey's contract should be the deadline aspiration of Larry Bird and David Morway.

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