INDIANAPOLIS – By the time this thing was over, the Indiana Pacers were just making it up as they went along. Who’s the point guard? Whoever has the ball in his hands, really, and by the end of this thing that person was Pascal Siakam or Bennedict Mathurin.

Siakam is nominally a power forward, Mathurin a small forward, but what else were the Pacers going to do? As their 2025-26 NBA season-opener against the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder went into the third quarter, then the fourth, then one overtime, then a second, all their “real” point guards were sitting over there on the bench with coach Rick Carlisle.

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