Rick Carlisle’s first teams in Detroit and Indiana were defense focused, but his belief in randomized action helped him build Pacers’ wide-open offense.
INDIANAPOLIS – Tyrese Haliburton calls it ‘organized chaos.’
The Rick Carlisle system of offense as currently constituted is for there to be no system, at least not one that is easily recognizable by opponents. There is a playbook with set plays — lots of them — but the intention is to use that sparingly for specific situations and for the players on the floor to flow and vibe in such a way that creates constant ball and player movement. The nightly goal for each player is to ‘play random’ so defenders don’t have a clear sense of where their man or the ball is going next, but to make all that randomness cohesive so that as frequently as possible, it gets the ball to the right player at the right time at the right spot.
It’s like jazz on a basketball court, and in Carlisle’s fourth season as head coach of the the Pacers, that offensive approach has become one of the most dominant forces in the NBA.
Last year, the Pacers scored 123.3 points per game, the sixth-highest figure in league history and the highest figure in the NBA in 40 seasons. This year the Pacers were a little less prolific, averaging 117.4 points per game to finish seventh in the NBA, but paired with an increased focus on defense it led the Pacers to a 50-win season and now it has them back in the Eastern Conference finals for a second straight season. Haliburton and the Pacers shocked the Knicks 138-135 in OT in Game 1 at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night.
The Pacers’ success, particularly on offense, is the product of a group of players that has bought in and a coach that has evolved. In the early years of his head coaching career at a time when the style of play in the NBA was dramatically different, Carlisle could be the type to steer a team with a white-knuckle grip on the wheel. But over time he’s learned the importance of putting trust in players and they’ve rewarded him for that faith.
‘I think it’s freedom that the coaching staff gives us,’ forward Aaron Nesmith said. ‘We talk about it all the time. He trusts the offense and us. We have such great offensive players on our team I think we just are able to read the game. We’re pretty friendly off the court and it translates on the court as well.’
Carlisle’s trust in players has become one of his most valuable assets as a coach and it’s helped make him adaptable over the eras he’s been in the game since he broke in as a head coach with the Detroit Pistons in 2001. He sits 11th on the all-time wins list with 993 regular season wins with only Doc Rivers ahead of him among active coaches. He’s 14th among all coaches in playoff wins with 79 in now his 16th trip to the postseason, and he’s arguably in the midst of his best chance at a title since 2011.
‘Where Rick has always been good in my opinion,’ Rivers said, ‘is he coaches the team he has.’
‘This is ridiculous’
Carlisle was hired by the Dallas Mavericks in 2008 in hopes he would make a good team great.
Under the ownership of Mark Cuban, the Mavs had gone from a forgettable lottery team in the 1990s to a consistent contender, winning at least 50 games and making the playoffs each year from 2001-08 with three 60-win teams and the 2005-06 Western Conference championship in that mix. However, previous coach Avery Johnson had been fired because the Mavs followed their NBA Finals appearance with back-to-back first-round playoff exits — including one in 2007 when the Mavs won 67 games but lost to the No. 8 seed Golden State Warriors — and Dallas wanted more. Carlisle took over a team with two future Hall-of-Famers in Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Kidd carrying the expectation he could take them to the next level.
The Mavs began that season by losing seven of their first nine games including five straight. Carlisle realized then the most important thing he needed to do was find a way to get out of the way. He saw the game slow down as the Mavs looked to him for guidance on every possession, which made less sense because their floor leader in Kidd was already a 14-year NBA veteran at 35 with nine All-Star appearances and six All-NBA selections to his name and their other top players including Nowitzki, Jason Terry, Josh Howard and Erick Dampier were in their late 20s and early 30s and had plenty of experience, as well.
‘At a certain point, watching Jason Kidd, him looking over at the bench for calls, finally one day it just hit me that this is ridiculous,’ Carlisle said. ‘I’m gonna talk to him about just taking over all that stuff, running the team. Run plays, don’t run plays, just get guys immersed in the game. Lead, all that kinda stuff. He was unbelievably great.’
From that point, the Mavs went 48-25 to finish 50-32, then beat the San Antonio Spurs in five games in the first round of the playoffs before losing to the Denver Nuggets in the Western Conference semifinals. Two years later, they won the franchise its first NBA championship, taking down LeBron James’ first Miami Heat team. Each of those first three teams finished in the top 10 in the NBA in offensive rating and they won even though they were never better than 10th in scoring defense or eighth in defensive rating.
‘Our season changed and so obviously from that point forward for the next couple of years we stayed the course on that,’ Carlisle said. ‘Our game became more of a free-flowing random game and that was one of the big things that led us to a title in 2011.’
Before that point, the hallmark of Carlisle’s teams was stingy defense at a time when the NBA and the Eastern Conference in particular played a slow, grind-it-out game. He won 50 games as a first-year head coach with Detroit by averaging 94.3 points per game and holding opponents to 92.2 per game, finishing sixth in the league in scoring defense and eighth in defensive efficiency. That year just four teams averaged 100 points per game and no team averaged more than 105 per game. The following season, the Pistons won 50 games again and reached the Eastern Conference finals by leading the league in scoring defense, holding opponents to just 87.7 points per game.
But Carlisle could sense the game was changing. He followed closely the work of Jerry Colangelo, the Phoenix Suns executive who had been appointed by then-commissioner David Stern to chair a select committee that advised the NBA’s Board of Governors on rules changes designed to increase freedom of movement and spacing to make the game a little more wide-open and high scoring. With the Mavericks, he knew he had a special collection of offensive talent — especially Nowitzki — and that maximizing their potential would require something different than getting the most out of the early-aughts Pistons. Even when they had personnel changes after the championship season he knew he’d have to be adaptable to new moves.
‘I was going to base my career on taking the players that were there and trying to do the very best to help them succeed,’ Carlisle said. ‘Mark Cuban was a big influence because after we won the title, we didn’t bring back the exact same team. We had good players but we had a lot of roster movement each year. We had seven or eight new players over the next three or four or even five years. That created some real fertile opportunities to keep adjusting. I just think it’s difficult to pigeon hole yourself as you’re just a certain style coach. The opportunities to teach become limited and it just kind of affects your whole approach to the game.’
Carlisle had ingrained trust in the idea of player freedom and free-flowing basketball because he’d seen it work as a player himself. He earned a championship ring on one of the most high-IQ squads the league had ever seen — the 1985-86 Celtics that included Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish. So he knew that approach could work.
‘That was the big thing for me,’ Carlisle said. ‘It was a simple system. There were great players there. … Part of a playoff style is you’ve gotta be able to play a random, unpredictable game or a ‘flow game’ … You gotta acquire players that you know can do that, that can handle the trust involved with that responsibility, and the privilege really.’
The Mavericks eventually found another star who could handle that kind of responsibility in Luka Doncic, and he was starting to show the heights he could reach when Carlisle and the Mavs decided to part ways and Dallas made Kidd the head coach. Carlisle went back to Indiana to take over a team that was headed toward a full rebuild, but before the end of his first year, the Pacers acquired exactly the sort of player Carlisle wanted to run his offense.
‘He ran with it’
The Mavericks held the No. 18 pick in the 2020 NBA draft, but they knew that wasn’t going to be high enough to get the player they wanted. Carlisle and the front office believed in Haliburton more than most teams, but they also knew that the top 17 weren’t going to pass on him.
‘In the 2020 draft, we were desperately trying to move up to take him in the first round,’ Carlisle said. ‘… We knew that he could play with Luka and that he could be just another essential piece to our build in Dallas.’
Nobody made the Mavs a deal. The Sacramento Kings took Haliburton No. 12 overall and the Mavericks ended up taking Josh Green 18th, but Carlisle kept an eye on Haliburton’s development. And when the Pacers decided at the 2022 trade deadline they needed a roster overhaul, they created shockwaves in the league by sending All-Star big man Domantas Sabonis to the Kings with other pieces for Haliburton along with sharpshooter Buddy Hield.
Haliburton was initially stunned by the move because he had hopes of staying with the same franchise for his whole career. However, Carlisle had dinner with Haliburton his first night in town and gave him an idea of the responsibility he had in store for him.
‘When you make a trade like that and a kid like Tyrese goes from a situation in Sacramento where he thought he was going to be there long-term and a big part of what they were building, it can be shell-shocking that you’re going 2,000 miles away to some place in the Midwest that maybe you’ve never even been before,’ Carlisle said. ‘I wanted to make sure that he felt, No. 1, welcome, and No. 2, that I had great confidence in what he was not only able to do at that present time, but going forward. I thought him having the keys to the team was an important thing to get across in that first conversation. And he loved it. He ran with it.’
Carlisle could tell he made the right call immediately. The Pacers lost their first game with Haliburton at the helm 120-113, but he scored 23 points and had six assists. Even with a skeleton roster and little cohesion with anyone on the team outside of Hield, he had the offense whirling.
‘The first game he stepped on the floor, we played faster in that game than maybe any game I had ever coached before,’ Carlisle said. ‘That’s saying something. I’d coached a lot of games. It was clear that our blueprint had to be to built around his unique skills and vision and scoring ability and ability as an on-court connector.’
Said Rivers: ‘I think he realized early on with Haliburton, this may be one of those teams where I just have to wind him up and let him go. That’s why he’s such a sensational coach.’
‘Trial and error’
Building around Haliburton and building a randomized action-system, in Carlisle’s mind, meant finding players who play hard but play selfless.
When the Pacers got Haliburton, they already had a few pieces in place who fit that mold, though two of them sat out the end of that 2021-22 season with injuries. Center Myles Turner gave them a skilled big man who could score at all three levels and also pass, which made him dynamic as a ball-screen partner. Veteran point guard T.J. McConnell gave them a capable backup well conditioned enough to maintain pace and flow either with Haliburton on the floor or without him.
In the 2022 draft they added a top-lever perimeter scorer in Bennedict Mathurin and a combo guard in Andrew Nembhard who could play on the ball or off. They traded for Aaron Nesmith. The following year they added an elite floor runner and finisher in Obi Toppin. And then when they finally made a big trade for another All-Star caliber player, they found one with a remarkably low ego for his stature in Pascal Siakam.
And over the past three years, the Pacers have done what they could to keep that core together. With every game and every practice, they get a better sense of when to pass, when to drive and when to shoot.
‘It’s trial and error,’ Haliburton said. ‘Working on that through practice, working on that through games. … We have great offensive minds on our staff who continue to implement new things. We have a running joke that coach Carlisle has to add a new play every day.’
The Pacers have one of the most balanced teams in the NBA with seven players who averaged more than 10 points per game in the regular season but none who averaged more than 20.2 per game. They finished third in the league in field goal percentage, third in assists, fifth in fast-break points, seventh in pace and nine in offensive rating. They threw the second-most passes in the NBA with 330.5 per game after leading the league with 308.3 per game last season.
And, of course, the approach has produced wins. The Pacers went from a 25-win team in Carlisle’s first season to a 35-win team the following year to a 47-win team to a 50-win team. And now they’re just one step from the franchise’s second NBA Finals appearance and two steps from their first NBA title.
‘You just have a bunch of guys who want to play for each other,’ Siakam said. ‘You can’t have egos. You have to focus on team. We preach team and that’s the only thing in our minds. Once you have that mentality, it’s not easier, but you’re able to achieve that selfless basketball and playing for one thing, which is winning.’