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Tim Bontemps
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Tim Bontemps
ESPN Senior Writer
- Tim Bontemps is a senior NBA writer for ESPN.com who covers the league and what’s impacting it on and off the court, including trade deadline intel, expansion and his MVP Straw Polls. You can find Tim alongside Brian Windhorst and Tim MacMahon on The Hoop Collective podcast.
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Jamal Collier
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Jamal Collier
ESPN
- Jamal Collier is an NBA reporter at ESPN. Collier covers the Milwaukee Bucks, Chicago Bulls and the Midwest region of the NBA, including stories such as Minnesota’s iconic jersey swap between Anthony Edwards and Justin Jefferson. He has been at ESPN since Sept. 2021 and previously covered the Bulls for the Chicago Tribune. You can reach out to Jamal on Twitter @JamalCollier or via email Jamal.Collier@espn.com.
THERE ARE THREE new banners hanging above the main court inside the Indiana Paces training facility, across the street from the team’s arena, Gainbridge Fieldhouse. On one end there are retired jersey numbers, Reggie Miller’s 31 and Mel Daniels’ 34, and a banner each for Herb Simon, the team’s governor since 1983 who was inducted into the Hall of Fame last year, as well as Jim Morris, a pivotal member of the Indianapolis community who held leadership roles in the organization up until his passing in 2024.
On the other end, a new banner for the 2024-25 Eastern Conference championship quietly hangs. It went up last week — a few days after the team had already begun training camp — without a collective acknowledgement from the players and coaches as they prepare for the upcoming season.
“It was not here one day, up here the next,” Pacers forward Aaron Nesmith told ESPN.
The Pacers do plan to commemorate the banner at the arena before their regular season opener against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Oct. 23, but Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said there’s no plans to dwell on it for long.
“There’s not going to be a big thing about it,” Carlisle told ESPN after practice last week. “It was a great run and really a lot of amazing things happened during that stretch. But you got to turn the page.”
Such was the vibe at Pacers training camp, a team still fresh off the glow of one of the most improbable playoff runs to the Finals in NBA history, while also wrestling with the disappointment of coming up short in Game 7 and the consequences of a season-changing injury to Tyrese Haliburton in the first quarter of that game.
Haliburton’s torn Achilles was the latest such injury during the playoffs that has altered the trajectory of the 2025-26 Eastern Conference. The last two Eastern Conference champions will be missing their star player for most of, if not, all of the season after Boston Celtics star Jayson Tatum tore his right Achilles in the conference semifinals. Boston had been to the conference finals in three consecutive seasons, and in four of the past five seasons. Meanwhile, Indiana had made back-to-back conference finals runs and appeared set up as well as anyone in the league to return with its young core and playoff experience.
It sets up both Boston and Indiana to endure an entire season with their star players almost certainly unavailable — the Pacers have ruled Haliburton out for the season although the Celtics have not done the same for Tatum — but also with much lower expectations than usual for the two teams who have controlled the East in recent years.
“I think it’s exciting,” Celtics guard Derrick White told ESPN. “We’re not the hunted anymore. But just have that mindset of ‘We’re going to prove people wrong’ and compete at a high level.”
In addition to losing their stars, both teams also lost other key pieces of their roster. The Celtics traded away Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis and lost Al Horford and Luke Kornet in free agency. The Pacers lost center Myles Turner in free agency after the Milwaukee Bucks made their own move in response to a torn Achilles, waiving Damian Lillard and stretching his contract over the next five years after he was injured during the first round of the postseason.
It sets up a potentially wide-open Eastern Conference field where several teams believe they have a chance to make the Finals, especially after seeing the run Indiana made last year.
“You got to focus on what you have and not what you don’t have,” Carlisle told ESPN. “We want to develop and maximize.”
“One of the things I’m most proud of the last two years is the development [of our young players]. We’re going to be looking to do the same thing. We got guys that still have upside, and we want them to realize that upside. And we want to maximize what we can with wins and losses.”
Winning may be the intention of both teams coming into the season, but the projections are not optimistic about their chances even in a weakened conference. According to ESPN BET, the Celtics currently have the seventh best odds to win the East, just behind teams such as Detroit and Philadelphia, while Indiana has the ninth best odds.
Yet, neither the Celtics or the Pacers have intention of tanking to try and get the best draft pick possible, sources told ESPN, or taking a gap in their contention. Their goal will be to win as many games as possible, remain competitive and hope different players flourish in their new roles.
“That’s not going to be part of the lexicon [on rebuilding] in our building, and that’s the way we’re going to focus moving forward,” Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens said this summer.
The mindset is the same for last year’s Eastern Conference champion.
“There’s been no internal talk about that,” Carlisle said about taking a gap year. “We want to compete at the highest level that we can.”
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Tatum feels ‘no pressure’ to return sooner from Achilles injury
Celtics star Jayson Tatum explains why there is no pressure to return quicker from his Achilles injury.
THERE ARE FEW PEOPLE that have walked into their first NBA head coaching job quite like how Joe Mazzulla did.
When Mazzulla replaced Ime Udoka as Celtics head coach on the eve of training camp three years ago, Mazzulla became the youngest coach in the league at 34 years old. He swiftly rose from a Division II head coach three years prior to running a group that has spent each of the past three seasons as one of the favorites to win the title.
And as he’s thrived in his position, Mazzulla has become defined by his intensity. His pre- and postgame interviews have gone viral, at times, for Mazzulla’s focused intensity and dry, sometimes unintentional, humor. Last year, when he was asked how the Celtics planned to embrace being the defending champion, Mazzulla responded “People are going to say the target is on our back, but I hope it’s right on our forehead between our eyes.”
Even if outside expectations have changed around the Celtics, it hasn’t dimmed that intensity at all.
“The same thing excites me every year,” Mazzulla told ESPN. “I get excited about, ‘OK, where are we as far as the trends of the league? Where are we as far as what we’ve put in up until this point? Does it really maximize the roster that we have? Does it maximize the mindset that we have? Are we truly taking advantage of the strengths that we have?”
Under Mazzulla, the Celtics have been known for an intense dedication to getting up as many 3-pointers as possible. Boston has led the league in 3-point attempts in each of the past two years and ranked second in his first season as coach, a 3-point barrage that has become dubbed Mazzulla ball. However, Mazzulla pushed back on that title over the weekend — “I don’t pay too much attention to that,” he told reporters — and he has said his belief in playing that way over the past three years was driven by his roster construction.
This year’s team doesn’t appear to have that same wealth of options.
Rather than stick to one overriding philosophy and making his players fit into it, Mazzulla said his goal was to figure out how to maximize the talent that’s in front of him on his roster — the same mindset Carlisle was planning nearly a thousand miles away.
“I may have to coach completely differently than the year before,” Mazzulla told ESPN. “In years past, you had an older, more experienced roster, four or five All-Stars on the team together. So your process is different.”
With a scoring void on the roster, it could present an opportunity for White to step into an even bigger role. Already regarded around the league as one of the best two-way guards, White is in position to emerge as the clear second option on the roster behind Jaylen Brown on offense.
But White has made his career out of conforming to whatever role the team needs him to play and he said going into the season focusing on trying to become a go-to scorer, it’ll take away from what made him the player the Celtics gave a four-year extension, $126 million extension last year.
“I know that if I focus on, ‘I need to score 25 points’ or something, I know I won’t play well,” White said.
“If I just do what I do and play within the offense and do it, I might get 25 points a night, who knows? And so my goal is not, ‘Oh, JT is out, I can do more.’ I still got to just be who I am and just do things I can to help us win games.”
Both Mazzulla and White pointed to the Pacers as a model for how an undertalented, but hard-playing, Boston team can find ways to win games.
Indiana provided the blueprint last season and particularly, in the playoffs, when they wore down opponents with a relentless playstyle, covering 94 feet of the court and for all 48 minutes of every game.
“It’s a copycat league, and you see success with it and now everybody tries to do it their own way,” White said. “You’re probably going to see that a lot around the league, and you’ve definitely seen like last year — the pressure. Everybody’s trying to pick up full and these teams are trying to just create turnovers.”
The Pacers have grown used to hearing that sentiment all summer.
Nesmith spent most of his offseason near Austin, Texas and while at baggage claim after the season ended, he had several fans remark about how the Pacers style of play inspired them.
“I’ve had a lot of people come up to me this summer and just say, “You made me a fan of NBA basketball again,'” Nesmith told ESPN.
The word Carlisle said he’s heard associated with the Pacers frequently throughout the summer: inspirational.
“Really it’s a credit to the players,” Carlisle said. “You got to have special guys that are willing to pick up full court. … that was cool to be a part of that.”
It’s why despite missing a few key players from last year, the principles of the Pacers offense and system are unlikely to change. Carlisle said Bennedict Mathurin will enter the starting lineup and Andrew Nembhard will take on more of the primary ball handling duties. While Indiana plans to lean into some of Nembhard’s strengths, such as playing downhill instead of as much high pick-and-roll as Haliburton, the Pacers are sticking to their principles.
“We’re doing the same things,” Nembhard said. “We’re still trying to push the pace, play randomly. A lot of different guys touching the ball. A lot of different actions.”
However, the Pacers are going to be walking a tightrope of leaning into that style of play while knowing the league is going to be more prepared for it than in the past few seasons.
“When you disrupt the industry the way we did, it’s going to disrupt back,” Carlisle said. “And so we got to be ready for that. More teams are going to be more physical and so we’ve got to be ready to bring it up another notch.”
HALIBURTON STOOD UNDERNEATH a basket, wearing a grey hoodie with grey shorts, as he waited for a rebound.
Two players at the end of the roster, Johnny Furphy and Taelon Peter, were engaged in a shooting competition at the end of practice with Peter getting ready to shoot around the 3-point line. Furphy has set the target score, and Peter is trying to match. But in addition to rebounding, Haliburton keeps providing more fuel to the fire.
“Ooooh,” he eggs Peter on with each shot. “Don’t let him beat you.”
When Peter misses, Haliburton fires a pass back at him: “Don’t miss. You got two more.”
Peter accepts the challenge and knocks down five in a row to win the competition.
Even if he is sidelined from playing in games for the entire season, Haliburton still plans to be a regular presence around the team both at home and on the road.
“We’ll hear his voice,” Carlisle said with a smile.
“He’s always going to have great energy. One thing about Ty, he has a consistent, positive spirit about life. He just loves it. He’s an early riser. He’s here before anybody in the morning. He’s tackled this rehab thing like a beast. It’ll be important to have him be a part of this every day.”
Haliburton was walking without the aid of a brace or crutches and proclaimed with a smile that he’s back to driving a car again. But Indiana has already targeted opening night 2026 for the breakout star of last year’s postseason.
Tatum, meanwhile, has closed no such doors on a potential return this season. Five months after his injury, he’s resumed light basketball activities, including a workout video before the start of camp that helped grease the speculation of whether he could play at some point during the 2025-26 season — though no definitive timelines have been laid out by either Tatum, or the team, for his return.
“No pressure to return back any sooner than when I’m 100 percent healthy,” Tatum said at Celtics media day. “No pressure from Brad, Joe, the team, the organization. The most important thing is that I’m 100 percent recovered and healthy whenever I do come back.”
That last point by Tatum is what makes this season all the more strange for both Boston and Indiana. For both teams, the most important thing that will happen this season won’t be on the court — instead, it’ll be the respective recovery processes for each team’s injured star, and with it the potential for brighter days in the future.
But rather than allow that to turn this season into a time-wasting exercise, the Celtics and Pacers are using it as motivation, in their own way, to try to make this a special year anyway.
“It doesn’t really matter what people believe or what they say,” Nesmith told ESPN. “They haven’t believed in us in three years. We surprise them every single year. I don’t see what makes this year any different.”
