Cavaliers vs. Pacers: The six mistakes Cavs made that opened the door for Tyrese Haliburton’s Game 2 heroics

With 57.1 seconds remaining in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Indiana Pacers, Donovan Mitchell sank consecutive free throws to give the Cavaliers a 119-112 lead. Those shots took him to 48 points in what looked in the moment like his greatest triumph as a Cavalier. 

Entering Tuesday, only two teams in the play-by-play era had ever lost a playoff game when leading by seven or more points in the final minute. After those free throws, Mitchell could seemingly rest easy. He’d done it. With Evan Mobley, Darius Garland and De’Andre Hunter sidelined, he had nearly singlehandedly tied the series at 1-1, and in the process, became the first Cavalier not named LeBron James to ever amass 40 points and four steals in a playoff game. The comparison was fitting. Just as James had lifted undermanned Cavalier teams so many times before, his successor as the face of the franchise was about to do the same. 

And then all hell broke loose.

Mitchell just gave the Cavaliers the best non-James season in franchise history, but he, like pretty much everyone else in the NBA, lacks LeBron’s greatest superpower: his unparalleled stamina and durability. In that final minute, Mitchell was visibly out of gas. The Cavaliers, as a team, followed their leader. The result was one of the wildest 8-0 runs to end a playoff game you’ll ever see, concluding in Tyrese Haliburton hitting a game-winning 3-pointer, the Pacers stunning the Rocket Arena crowd and taking a 2-0 series lead on Cleveland.

So… what happened here? How did the Cavaliers let this game slip away? In the final 57.1 seconds, six miscues ultimately doomed Cleveland. So let’s start with the first, and probably the loudest. 

Mistake No. 1: Nesmith’s thunderous put back

With 48 seconds remaining, Jarrett Allen fouled Pascal Siakam, who missed both shots. However, on the second miss, Aaron Nesmith stormed into the picture and threw down a thunderous put back dunk. Keep an eye on where he starts the play. He’s lined up against the exhausted Mitchell, who offers little resistance as Nesmith makes his initial break to the rim, but then, caught trying to play defense from behind, bears the brunt of the dunk and winds up on the ground in pain.

Officials review the dunk to make sure it isn’t offensive interference. That should give the Cavaliers a badly needed break, but instead, they immediately commit miscue No. 2 on the inbound. 

Mistake No. 2: Mitchell’s offensive foul

Mitchell, struggling to break away from the ultra-physical Nesmith, manages to corral the inbound pass, but finds himself stuck on the sideline with Tyrese Haliburton seemingly ready to come trap him. Rather than attempting to change direction and get out of the corner before Haliburton’s arrival, Mitchell tries to bring the ball to his right side seemingly in an attempt to get the ball across half-court by walking the sideline tightrope. As he does so, though, he elbows Nesmith in the face. Offensive foul.

This foul did two important things for the Pacers. The first, obviously, is that it gives them the ball back. The second, and ultimately most important, is that it compels Kenny Atkinson to take Mitchell out of the game for defense. This launches a chain of events that ultimately secures Indiana’s win, but more on that in a bit. For now, the Pacers have the ball. 

Mistake No. 3: The un-corralled rebound 

Haliburton drives into the paint, but gets blocked by Allen. However, despite three Cavaliers being in the vicinity, none can get their hands on the ball before it rolls out of bounds. This allows the Pacers to retain possession.

No coach in the NBA has a better set of inbounds plays to deploy late in games than Rick Carlisle. Andrew Nembhard serves as Indiana’s inbounder, but the other four Pacers start lined up just inside of the 3-point arc. Nesmith cuts first, heading for the right corner, and then, with the defensive scrum hopefully focused on him, Haliburton breaks formation to collect the inbound pass. Nembhard curls back around the remaining screeners after making the pass, setting him up at the top of the arc with Max Strus behind him.

This forces Allen into a difficult position. He’s nominally guarding Siakam, but if he doesn’t rotate into help-position, Nembhard is going to get a clean run to the basket with only Sam Merrill, a relatively weak defender, available to help. Even if he does, that would leave Nesmith alone in the corner, where he made 47.2% of his 3s this season. So Allen therefore makes the correct decision to rotate into help position, but the Pacers anticipated it. Nembhard crosses back toward the middle of the floor and kicks the ball to a wide-open Siakam. This causes panic for Cleveland. Allen initially tries to jump out to contest him, but he Dean Wade doing the same, leaving Myles Turner alone in the corner. So he pivots over to Turner, which leaves the rim uncontested for Siakam, who punishes Wade for overcommitting on the closeout.

Mistake No. 4: The costly turnover

This is where Atkinson’s decision to remove Mitchell for defense comes into play. Now that Cleveland has the ball back, he has to call a timeout to get Mitchell back on the floor. However, this was Cleveland’s last timeout, which is going to be important later. That timeout at least advances the ball, but Atkinson’s inbound play isn’t nearly as clever as Carlisle’s was.

The basic play call was for Cleveland’s two guards, Mitchell and Ty Jerome, to screen for the two bigger Cavaliers on the floor, Allen and Merrill. If the Pacers had switched those screens, as many teams do in late-game inbounding situations, both Jerome and Mitchell would have had a chance to break free against bigger, slower defenders. But the Pacers don’t switch, forcing Mitchell and Jerome to try to beat their original defenders. Mitchell, again, is too gassed to escape Nesmith. Jerome can’t get away from Nembhard either, so with his five-second clock nearly expired, Max Strus needs to just throw the ball up and hope for the best. Nembhard intercepts it.

Mistake No. 5: Haliburton gets his own missed free throw

With 12.1 seconds remaining, Haliburton gets fouled by Jerome and goes to the line. He makes the first. He misses the second. But take a look at what happens when he does. Rather than being lined up behind the arc on this free throw, Mitchell is instead on the left block, behind Allen and Turner. With his last burst of energy in the game, Mitchell slides around the two big men in an attempt to sky in for the board. In the process, Allen gets sandwiched between him and Turner, leaving him a hair slow to make his own jump. That allows Turner to bat the ball out.

Jerome sees this as it’s happening. He is initially supposed to box out the shooter, Haliburton, but he freezes thinking he’s about to rebound Turner’s slap. That gives Haliburton a split-second to sneak into the open space between Jerome and the tussling combination of Nesmith and Strus. It’s unclear if Turner sees this, but he bats the ball a bit to the right instead of all the way back out, as is typically preferential on free throws. That puts Haliburton in position to grab the ball. He walks it back out and sees that he has Jerome on him. This is key. The Pacers might have called timeout if any other player had the ball against any other defender. But their best player had a mismatch, so Carlisle ran with the chaos. Haliburton baits Jerome one step too far inside of the arc, steps back, and drills the game winner.

Mistake No. 6: Being out of timeouts

This is where that decision to remove Mitchell ultimately doomed the Cavaliers. The ball went in with one second remaining on the clock. If they’d had a timeout, that would be plenty of time to inbound the ball and get a shot up, but they had no way of advancing the ball. That meant Cleveland needed to go the length of the court in a single second. Obviously, they couldn’t, and Indiana walked away with the win.

If the Cavaliers do indeed lose this series, as the odds suggest they now will, they will look back on this game and grimace all summer. Cleveland spent all season managing Mitchell’s workload. He played a career-low 31.4 minutes per game this season in part because the Cavaliers were so deep that they rarely needed much more out of him. But on this night, with three key teammates out, he had to carry the entire offense while he was on the floor. That took a toll. Cleveland won his minutes by 13 points in Game 2. However, Atkinson left him on the floor for 36 minutes.

This is highly unusual for a team’s best shot-creator in a must-win game. For reference, Jalen Brunson hasn’t played less than 36 minutes in a single playoff game this season, including the one in which he got hurt against Detroit. For most part, players of Mitchell’s caliber are at or above 40 minutes at this time of year. But Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau believes that playing his best players major minutes in the regular season conditions them to play bigger minutes in the playoffs. 

Atkinson took the opposite approach all season, and that provided a bit of a workload shock to Mitchell with Garland and Mobley out. He attempted 30 field goals and 21 free throws in Game 2, both season-highs. That meant that by the 57.1-second mark in the fourth quarter, he was totally spent. By that point, a player who was used to playing 31 or 32 minutes had played 35 significantly more taxing ones as his team’s only remaining All-Star. 

He just couldn’t carry them across the finish line, and he was playing against the one opponent in which they desperately needed him to. Remember that stat we mentioned up top, that only two teams in the play-by-play era had ever won a playoff game trailing by seven in the final minute? Well, one of them was the Pacers last week in Game 5 of their first-round series against the Milwaukee Bucks. This was, in that respect, a perfect storm. One side, we had an undermanned team pushing its best player to his absolute limit. On the other we had a team of proven miracle workers. Put them both together and you get one of the most stunning playoff collapses in recent memory.