The Pacers talked a lot about the playoffs, but weren't ready when the lights came on

MILWAUKEE -- The Pacers spent so much time this season talking about what this would be like. About the environments and the change in style of play and the importance of physicality and attention to detail. The younger players who hadn't been to the postseason before hit up the few veterans who had for advice and they especially leaned on guard Bruce Brown and then forward Pascal Siakam -- for whom Brown was traded in January -- to hear about what it was like to make an NBA title run.

They were hoping they had survived enough challenging circumstances during the regular season to get a taste of it. There was, of course, the In-Season Tournament finals run, which included wins over Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston and Milwaukee before the loss to the Lakers. There was also the daily grind of the stretch run in which they had to fight through the regular season's final game to clinch the critical No. 6 seed and avoid the play-in round. They entered their first NBA Playoffs since 2020 with 47 wins that included victories over every team in the Eastern Conference from top-to-bottom and wins over eight of the 10 teams that made the Western Conference postseason. They also won four games in five tries against the No. 3 seed Milwaukee Bucks who they were going up against with one win coming at Fiserv Forum and another on a neutral site in Las Vegas.

But on Sunday, when the day finally arrived and they played their first NBA Playoff game in someone else's building since 2019, it was glaringly evident that the real thing was something they just couldn't simulate in all that time. As long as they were waiting for the moment and as much time as they spent preparing for it, it was too big for them once it did.

For the game's first 24 minutes, the Pacers seemed nervous, jittery and simply out of sorts while Fiserv Forum was maddeningly loud and Damian Lillard carried the Giannis Antetokounmpo-less Bucks on his back. They let Lillard score 35 first-half points, falling behind by as many as 30 points before entering halftime down 69-42. They had some good second-half moments that made the final score respectable, but they still lost Game 1 109-94, missing out on their first opportunity to steal one on the road while Milwaukee was missing its two-time MVP, out with a strained left calf.

"The first half was embarrassing," Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. "No excuses. We simply have got to come out better. It was ugly, and we all own it ... They looked like the experienced team and we looked inexperienced. That led to a lot of the problems. Playoffs, you can talk about how different it is, but actually experiencing it is another thing. This is a great building, they have great fans, they understood what this game meant. Give them credit for how they played in the first half, but we were very poor, and obviously gotta be way way better."

The Pacers have struggled in first quarters all year, especially on the defensive end where they had the third worst defensive rating and gave up the third-most points in first quarters in the NBA in the regular season. But Monday's first quarter had a much different feel to it.

In many of their regular season games, they seemed to awaken slowly, not fully hitting their stride until the second or third quarters. On Sunday they seemed amped and wired, but not in a good way. On defense, they were physically aggressive to the point of making foolish fouls, and on offense they couldn't begin to calibrate their jump shots. They were 10 of 27 from the floor in the first quarter and 0 of 9 from 3-point range, hitting just three shots outside the paint. They took 14 3-pointers before they finally made one they finished the first half 16 of 45 from the floor (35.6%) and 3 of 18 from beyond the arc. A lot of those were wide open looks.

"It's easy to say we missed shots, now we're nervous," All-Star point guard Tyrese Haliburton said. "Whatever y'all are going to run with doesn't matter. I feel like we missed shots. At the end of the day, the ball wasn't hopping."

And once Lillard got rolling, the Pacers started flailing on defense. In the first quarter, he was the only member of the Bucks they couldn't stop as he accounted for 19 of their 30 points, six of their 10 field goals and three of their five 3-pointers as the Bucks made just 38.5% of their first-period shots. But as Lillard continued to get loose in the second quarter the Pacers started losing their men on rotations and failed to stop drives, allowing the Bucks to score 39 second-quarter points on 15 of 23 shooting, 4 of 8 from 3-point range. That's a gaudy efficiency figure of 1.68 points per possession. After holding the Bucks close at 20-19 with 1:55 to go in the first quarter, they allowed a 10-2 run to close the period to turn into a 20-4 run which then turned into a 45-16 stretch that put the Bucks up 65-35 with 1:23 to go in the second. By that point they'd dug themselves too big of a hole to even dream of dragging themselves out of.

It was all a sign of a team that -- outside of Siakam -- either hadn't been there before, hadn't been there in a while or hadn't had a big role the last time they were there.

"From a player's perspective, I think we got jumped into the playoffs," veteran center Myles Turner. "We have a young group that really hasn't experienced this level, but a lot of it is on our leaders, the guys who have been here before. When you're in the playoffs on the road, you have to come out with a certain intensity and a certain attention to detail, and that was lacking a little bit in that first half."

The value of playoff experience was obvious to the one guy who had a lot of it. Siakam never really seemed sped up. He got to his spots, scored over defenders in the paint and hit the shots he usually hits. He finished with 36 points on 15 of 25 shooting to go with 13 rebounds. The rest of the team was 21 of 66 (31.8%) from the floor. Turner, who had 17 points, and veteran backup point guard T.J. McConnell, who had 10, were the only other Pacers to score in double figures.

"Pascal's a great player," Carlisle said. "That's why we traded for him. We've just gotta make sure that we're doing the things our team needs to do to create a balance as well as we can. All year we've been a team that relies on anywhere from five to eight guys in double figures. Granted the playoffs are different. We needed his scoring desperately tonight because we were having trouble getting anything else going."

On the flip-side, Haliburton, the Pacers other All-Star and their franchise player struggled to even get himself in the action on offense in his first ever playoff game. The Bucks made a point to harass him with decorated defensive nuisance Patrick Beverley drawing the primary assignment and Haliburton facing either double-teams or at least hard hedges on most ball screens. He and everybody else who tried to drive the ball found the paint loaded up more and more as the Pacers continued to miss open shots. They finished 8 of 39 from beyond the arc (20.5%).

He took just seven field goal attempts and made four of them for nine points. He added eight assists and probably deserved more on passes that set up open looks from 3-point range. But still, the two-time All-Star and All-NBA candidate with a max contract starting next season could not bend the game to his will.

"I just gotta be better," Haliburton said. "And I will be on Tuesday."

There were moments in the second half that the Pacers could point to as evidence that once their initial first-half freak-out had passed, they were just as competitive with the Bucks as they had been all season. They threw a constant double-team at Lillard and he didn't score at all in the second half. They outscored Milwaukee 29-14 in the third quarter, holding the Bucks to 7 of 21 shooting in that period. The second half score was Pacers 52, Bucks 40 and at one point Indiana clawed their way back to within 12 points of the lead. It was never enough to put any fear into Milwaukee -- and the Bucks clearly took their foot off the pedal at times -- but it was enough for the Pacers to get the feeling that they could execute some things well on this big of a stage and head into Game 2 with some level of confidence that it could be different.

"We just take the positives from the second half and make sure we can do it for 48 minutes," forward Aaron Nesmith said. "Play our game. Play our brand of basketball. Pace, pushing, locked in on the defensive end. We just gotta do it for 48 minutes."

Game 1 counts as a significant missed opportunity for the Pacers with Antetokounmpo out, but it sounds unlikely he'll return for Game 2, so the Pacers still have another chance to steal one on the road before they go back home for Game 3 on Friday. They move on hoping they got their playoff-stage-fright moment out of their system.

"It did need to happen," Turner said. "It need to be like, you got punched first, you got smacked across the face, like, 'Alright, come on, we're here now. We're in this moment now,' as opposed to waiting a week for this moment to get here. That experience was good. Now there is no excuses."

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: The Pacers playoff inexperience was obvious in 'embarrassing" Game 1