Ranking Pacers’ Top Trade Targets After 2024 NBA Playoff Loss

The Indiana Pacers made progress this season.

They snapped a three-year NBA playoff drought, had their first All-Star starter since 2016 in Tyrese Haliburton, brokered a blockbuster trade for two-time All-Star Pascal Siakam, won a playoff series for the first time in a decade and then another and still found time to develop some young talent.

It was a fun, productive campaign in the Circle City, even if the vibes aren’t all warm and fuzzy on the heels of the team’s conference finals loss to the Boston Celtics. Once that wound heals, the Pacers can fully appreciate how much they accomplished this past season.

And once that appreciation wears off, they can start getting to work on accomplishing even more the next time around.

Could another trip to the trade market make that happen? It’s possible, so let’s spotlight the top three players worth targeting in a deal.

Assuming Siakam re-signs, the Pacers will have stars at point guard and power forward. And their center, Myles Turner, is one of the league’s top providers of the unicorn blend of shot-blocking and three-point shooting.

The one thing potentially missing from the puzzle is an impact two-way wing. Now, the word potentially is important, because both Bennedict Mathurin and Jarace Walker have a chance to develop into exactly that. With that aforementioned trio all right within their primes, though, Indiana might not want to wait and see whether either prospect maxes out his potential.

A trade for Andrew Wiggins would effectively hedge their bets. Because he’s coming off a disappointing season and still owed a colossal amount of cash, he shouldn’t cost much in trade assets but would arrive with significant bounce-back potential. No, he hasn’t been great (or sometimes even good) the past two seasons, but in the campaign prior to that, he was the best defender and sometimes the second-best player on the NBA champion.

If the Pacers can coax that kind of play out