The Pacers would like to trade for a player who can help boost their bench scoring, tweets Bleacher Report’s Jared Zwerling. The team’s regular starters score 106.4 points per 100 possessions, according to NBA.com, a rate that would be tied with the Suns for the league’s eighth-best offense. Overall, Indiana scores just 102.3 points per 100 possessions, which puts them 18th.
Indiana’s leading scorer off the bench has been Danny Granger, who averages 8.6 points per game, but his expiring contract could be a trade chip, as I examined last month. He makes more than $14MM this season, but extracting a better scorer will be a tall order if Indiana insists on keeping its balance sheet for next season as clean as possible. Suitors have begun to line up for Lance Stephenson, whom one GM believes will command eight-figure salaries in free agency this summer.
It’ll be doubly tough for Pacers president Larry Bird to pull off a deal, since the team doesn’t have a first-round pick to trade. Bird dealt the team’s 2014 first-round pick to Phoenix in the Luis Scola deal this summer, and the Pacers can’t trade any of their other first-rounders because of the Ted Stepien Rule.