BOSTON — Rick Carlisle said he wasn’t waving a white flag.
With Tyrese Haliburton already out with an injury and the Pacers trailing the Celtics by 17 in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals, Carlisle took out Pascal Siakam and Andrew Nembhard, who had 28 and 16 points respectively.
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Neither went back into the game. Aaron Nesmith and Myles Turner were already out and didn’t comeback. The Pacers starters played a combined 7:09 in the final quarter as the Celtics coasted to a 126-110 win to take a 2-0 series lead.
It was a bit of a head-scratching decision for a team that led the NBA in regular season scoring and came in averaging the most points in the playoffs.
Carlisle said he wanted to see what the rest of his roster was ready to offer.
“To look at some guys that I thought needed a look,” he said. “(Doug) McDermott went in there and played well. Isaiah Jackson brought a lot of fight to the game. Jalen Smith hasn’t had much of an opportunity to play in the playoffs and so I wanted to see where he was at and we weren’t, we weren’t giving up, but it was an opportunity to get some energetic fresh guys in there to fight. They did some, they did some good things.”
Carlisle conceded that playing three games in four days all on the road had taken its toll a bit on his regulars.
“The guys that had played to that point Pascal was very tired,” he said. “Aaron had four fouls. He was, he was tired.”
