They say the home crowd was extremely noisy Sunday night, in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinal series between the Indiana Pacers and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Play-by-play guy Spero Dedes called it "just deafening." Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle, asked about the challenge facing his young team in the second round of the playoffs, didn't even mention the opponent. "This place is very loud, very crazy," he told TNT sideline reporter Jared Greenberg, after the first quarter.
I'll have to take their word for it, and not only because my home sound system is pathetic: The broadcast quality sucked shit! After a big awkward crap-out in this same arena back on April 21, TNT's audio was all screwed up again Sunday. Greg Anthony sounded like he was dialing in via Zoom, or had his head submerged in water. Since no one in particular wants to hear from Anthony, this presented more an annoying distraction than a real deficit of information. Several times Dedes's voice was swallowed up at random, so that whatever it was he had to say about a particular event suddenly sounded as if it was being mumbled by someone at the other end of a hallway. Worst of all, the mix deadened crowd noise, so that it was hard to connect with Dedes when he said, during a third-quarter run by the home team, that the arena was the loudest he'd ever heard. I considered the possibility that he was gassing up the event with hyperbole, but the rim noises were distracting and Anthony's voice continued to sound as if it was being bounced off of Voyager 2, so it was easy enough to accept that TNT simply did not want home viewers to experience any of the crowd's ear-splitting enthusiasm.
Still, I was grateful to Dedes, moments later, for reminding viewers that Cavaliers fans were going nuts. Donovan Mitchell missed a tough pull-up three-pointer, but De'Andre Hunter tapped out the rebound and it was secured by Ty Jerome. Jerome shoveled it back to Mitchell and Mitchell beat T.J. McConnell with a jab step, slicing right down the middle of the paint. The Pacers were for the moment without a true rim protector in their lineup, and both Pascal Siakam and Obi Toppin were late in help defense. Mitchell took two hard dribbles and loaded up into a two-footed gather that could only mean one thing; even without hearing the crowd, you could sense the entire arena inhaling as one. The Pacers were ahead by three points but the top-seeded Cavs were making their first real push of the night, wiping out a 12-point deficit with a big three, an alley-oop, some free throws, and some genuinely stirringly energetic playmaking from their superstar, who at that moment was about to put some serious punctuation on the surge. Mitchell rose up and pounded the ball through the hoop with maximum violence, the crowd appeared to pop pretty good, and I went ahead and allowed myself to imagine how thrilling that sound would've been had TNT not been transmitting it with a ham radio. Wow!
In this moment I thought the Pacers were dead. They'd led for most of the game, often enough by double digits, and they'd stiff-armed a couple of little mini-runs from the Cavaliers along the way. There'd been no bullshit in their play: They'd built and sustained their lead by sticking to a formula that works for them. They ran at every opportunity, they moved the ball a lot, and they were energetic and organized when the Cavs had the ball, extending their point-of-attack defense high up the floor and rotating with discipline. They'd had to take and make some tough shots, sure, but of the two teams on the floor it was the higher-seeded Cavaliers who were more often attempting tough, contested, hero-type stuff. The Cavs, for all their precision, require a little bit more improvisation and verve from their ball-handlers than do most great offenses, a little more daring, and little more shaking and baking. It's part of what makes them so cool; it's also why, with premiere shaker-and-baker Darius Garland shelved due to injury, things sometimes looked blacktop-ish Sunday, a little more ragged and forced than you'd like.
The Pacers are also cool. The coolest part of their coolness comes from a different angle: They run and run, and play with a really commendable level of mutual trust. So many times in the first half Sunday they stirred Cleveland's defense into awkward mismatches not with the usual grinding sequence of tedious high-screens and forced switches so common to playoff offense, but simply by pushing the ball up the court as quickly as possible. There was a delightful moment in the first half where Mitchell made a beautiful driving layup in semi-transition and the ball bounced to Siakam, who gathered it for a quick inbounds. Jarrett Allen sensed that the Pacers were in a hurry and lurched to deny a passing lane to Tyrese Haliburton, Indiana's star and best playmaker. On a more boring team, Siakam would've waited a beat or two for Haliburton to very easily zip away from Allen, by which time Cleveland's defense would mostly be beyond half court and organized enough to force Indiana into an offensive set.
Not the Pacers! Siakam inbounded the ball to Myles Turner, his 6-foot-11 center; Turner, instead of then handing off to Haliburton on the go, pushed the ball up the court his own damn self. Sam Merrill had to scoot over to close Turner's lane to the cup, and the Cavs never did get organized: Andrew Nembhard zipped over to take a handoff from Turner, dragging Evan Mobley with him, and Haliburton, trailing the play against a scrambled defense, walked into an acre of open space at the top of the key. Nembhard pitched it over, Haliburton drained an open three-pointer, and Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson called a timeout.
So this was mostly a fun matchup of contrasting styles, perhaps de-juiced a little by Garland's absence. Back to the third quarter: Mitchell threw down the huge driving dunk, the home crowd went very quietly insane, Greg Anthony went blub blub blub blub blub from inside a fish tank, and I assumed the Pacers would die. This assumption was helped along when the Pacers missed two shots on their next possession and then lost the lead for the first time since the game's opening minutes on a tough Mobley bucket inside. The Pacers spent a timeout and then missed again, and Mitchell scored on back-to-back possessions to give the Cavaliers a two-bucket lead with the quarter winding down. I was completely certain that the lower-seeded Pacers were deader than shit.
They were not dead! A couple of good, patient possessions generated a pair of corner three-pointers, the second of which splashed home at the buzzer. The Cavaliers missed a couple of shots, including an annoyingly bold and ill-timed step-back three from Mitchell, and the Pacers snatched back a two-point lead headed into the fourth.
It was interesting, if mildly disappointing, to see a game that had been contested on contrasting stylistic terms come down to hero-ball stuff in the fourth, but the key sequence of the final frame involved some hooping that a purist might not consider entirely ethical. About halfway through the quarter and with the Cavaliers up a point, Haliburton sized up an isolation against Allen, used a couple of fancy-looking setup dribbles to go absolutely nowhere, and then unleashed an infuriating reverse-gather crab-dribble Riverdance-ass mess of a step-back three-pointer that anyone would consider a criminal misuse of a mismatch, except that the ball went into the basket. On Indiana's next possession, Haliburton again unleashed some entirely ineffective set-up dribbles at another Allen mismatch before throwing a hand grenade of a late pass to Nembhard, who stepped sideways into a preposterous contested 31-footer that looked out of his hand as if it was not even intended to go in the basket, except that it did. The Cavs couldn't string together the stops from there to mount another serious push.
That's how it is in the playoffs. You're lucky if you get a couple quarters of flowing hoops before the action breaks down into late-clock matchup hunting. To their credit, these two teams are so committed to their visions of basketball that the moments when they resort to grinding through switches are like a galling interruption. For most of this game this was Cleveland doing Cleveland and Indiana doing Indiana, and Indiana's Indiana had the better of Cleveland's Cleveland. It was surprising, as a Cavs enjoyer, to see Indiana also come out ahead from a sequence where they abandoned Indianahood for something more like Los Angelesdom. You'd almost say that bodes poorly for the East's top seed, except that Garland is day-to-day and should be back at some point in the series. That's exciting to think about, provided TNT can get their microphones in order. This is a series that deserves close attention, and to be recorded and broadcast with something more sophisticated than a tin-can telephone.
