Chances are, your reaction to the Indiana Pacers' acquisition of Evan Turner from the Philadelphia 76ers at the trade deadline tracked closely with how heavily you rely on analytics to interpret the NBA. Is Turner the productive bench scorer the Pacers need, or is he the inefficient possession-burner who will kill an already mediocre offense?
"Evan has great potential, and I think our offense is his style of play," Pacers All-Star Paul George said just before Turner joined the team. "He's a pick-and-roll guy, can create his own offense and get into the paint at will. I think it will be an easy transition. Evan is a good dude. He's a hard worker and a winning player."
That might all be true, but the thing is, Turner just hasn't been very good as an NBA player. Among those with at least 5,000 minutes played since he came into the league in 2010, his 12.2 career PER ranks 171st of 184 players. It's not that he lacks talent, but in basketball, it's not so much what you can do, but what you actually do. In Turner's case, his above-average volume was a liability, given his level of inefficiency. It has been the story of Turner's disappointing career, and it's a problem that throws a wild card into the well-established atmosphere of the Indiana locker room.
"Our culture is strong enough to handle anything," forward David West said. "I don't think there'll be a [problem] in terms of what our goal is."
My own knee-jerk reaction was that the Pacers were messing with a good thing, and I could not envision Turner and Lance Stephenson sharing the floor in a productive manner. On the latter front, I saw the attacking styles of Turner and Stephenson as redundant and Turner's lack of floor-spacing ability as a detriment for a team short on that quality. While the ghost of Danny Granger might not have had much left, his style remained a better fit for what Indiana needed from that slot in its rotation.
Coach Frank Vogel doesn't see a problem.
"That's what we have on this team is guys that can play off the ball and with the basketball," Vogel said before a recent game in Milwaukee. "These guys are really good with the ball but really good on the weak side, too."
A delicate balance
I've watched every possession Turner and Stephenson have played together and most of the rest of Indiana's games. Turner's lack of self-awareness has been his obstacle in the NBA. He has a star player's mentality but not a star player's game. It's always possible he could change on a strong team, but it's also possible that Turner has no idea a change is needed. No doubt, it's a risk for Indiana.
"We know that when it comes to fruition, it's going to be better than what it was," Vogel said. "It's our job as a staff to make that happen as smoothly and quickly as possible."
The Pacers have been deservedly lauded for their ability to develop talent. In fact, Turner is the only rotation player on the Pacers roster, aside from George, who was a top-10 draft pick. However, it's tough to know whether it's realistic to expect Indiana to change Turner this late during a season, especially when practice time is limited.
Turner's lineup fit
For his part, Stephenson sounded excited about the addition of Turner before he joined the team, seeing opportunity in the redundancy between him and Turner.
"He's a good guy. I know we're going to work well together," Stephenson said. "He's about the same kind of player. He's a slasher. I feel like both of us, on the floor at the same time, that's going to be hard to guard."
Since the trade, the lineups that have included Stephenson and Turner have outscored opponents by 10.4 points per 100 possessions, though we're talking about less than two games' worth of sample size. Stephenson has a remarkable 78.2 true shooting percentage alongside Turner, per nbawowy.com. However, his usage rate is just 18.0 percent, next to Turner's usage of 30.7 percent. Turner has been the alpha dog.
The Pacers have struggled in recent games, losing back-to-back for the first time since December. George's shooting slump is the prime reason for the recent slump, and you can't really hang that on Turner. But while it's encouraging that Stephenson has remained efficient alongside his new teammate, it's also true that he's getting a smaller slice of the pie, while Turner has put up virtually identical numbers to the ones he put up for the Sixers.
Again, the samples are tiny, but you can interpret all of this to suggest the Pacers are fitting in around Turner, not vice versa. If this, and the team's struggles, continue, what happens? It's a wild card, an uncertainty created where there was not one before.
The early returns
"It's great," Turner said after his first couple of games with the Pacers. "I definitely want to play in the spring and help this team be a winner."
That's what he said when everything was going well, after Indiana beat Boston for its third straight win with Turner in the rotation. On Tuesday, against the Pacers' first quality opponent after the trade, Turner went scoreless in a two-point home loss to the Golden State Warriors. Next time out, Indiana was blown out at Charlotte, but that was hardly Turner's fault. He scored 22 points on 12 shots, and the second quarter was the only stretch in which the Pacers played well.
It's not going to get easier from here. If rifts are going to form as a result of Turner's acquisition, they're not going to show up in a midweek win over Milwaukee or even in a blowout loss at Charlotte. They're going to show up in Game 5 of the playoffs at Chicago, when Turner tries to take over a key possession late in the contest while Stephenson and George watch helplessly from the wing. Maybe by then, the Pacers will have broken Turner of some of his old habits, or maybe those habits mark the player he actually is.
"My teammates have done a great job of making me feel acclimated," Turner said in Boston. "Coach has helped me out a lot, and, when I'm on the court, [my teammates] have helped out a lot. They want me to blend in."
Player development takes time, and that's something the Pacers don't have. And what if Turner isn't open to being developed? Regardless, we're not going to know the end of this story until the playoffs arrive.