Listen up, Cleveland Cavaliers fans. For those who were not paying attention, the Indiana Pacers looked really good in their first round victory over the Milwaukee Bucks. The next series will not come so easily as the first.
The Cavaliers rolled in the first round, taking on the 10-seed MIami Heat and making them look like a 15-seed. Only one of the four games was anything resembling close, and a Donovan Mitchell flurry in the fourth quarter put that game out of reach before things could get interesting. The other three wins were all by 20 or more points, including a 55-point extinction in Game 4.
There are plenty of reasons to be riding high as a Cavaliers fan. No team has ever dispatched an opponent in such dominant fashion; Cleveland outscored the Heat by 122 points in four games, shattering the previous record. No offense has ever been that potent in a playoff series. At every level, the Cavaliers appear to be unstoppable.
Unfortunately, the playoffs have a way of pumping the breaks. The Heat were a shaky team all season and lost their star wing Jimmy Butler at the Trade Deadline. They were not the worst playoff team to ever make the field, but they were not a dangerous opponent.
The Indiana Pacers, on the other hand, are a team that Cleveland cannot afford to overlook.
The Indiana Pacers are playing well, too
The Pacers had a much more difficult task in the first round, dispatching one of the three best players in the world in Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks. They received some breaks, including Damian Lillard's Achilles injury and a late-game collapse in Game 5 by the Bucks, but they still had to overcome a sequence of massive games from a two-time league MVP.
For the series, Antetokounmpo averaged 33 points, 15.4 rebounds and 6.6 assists to go with a steal and block per game. Those are monstrous numbers, and yet the Pacers managed to overcome the Bucks in just five games.
In the process, they displayed just how potent their starting lineup. is. The Cavaliers are lethal because of their various bench combinations, but the Pacers have put together one of the best starting 5s in the NBA. Tyrese Haliburton is the offensive engine, Pascal Siakam the second banana and versatile forward, Myles Turner the stretch big, and both Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith 3-and-D wings -- with Nembhard boasting scoring and playmaking pop as well.
The Pacers won 50 games this season and will test the Cavaliers in ways that the Miami Heat simply could not. They only took a single day longer to end their first round series, so they are getting some rest as well before Sunday's Game 1. They have star power and complementary players. This is no walk in the park ahead of Cleveland.
The Cavaliers will be favored, without a doubt, They should win the series. But the odds of another easy-peasy four-game sweep are long; this victory will take more. A challenge awaits. And there will be moments when the feel-good vibes of round one fade into the tough realities of a playoff battle.
Cleveland will need to come prepared for war.