INDIANAPOLIS — For the second time in six days, the Nets and Pacers battled to a relative standstill for 24 minutes.
And, for the second time in six days, the Pacers put away the game in the second half.
Indiana, the best second-half team in the league, outscored the Nets 28-20 in the third quarter to open up a double-digit lead heading into the fourth. The Pacers never relinquished that lead, beating the Nets 105-91 in front of a sellout crowd of 18,165 at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.
“We know they’re a great third-quarter team, and we just turned the ball over a little bit too much at the start of the third,” said Paul Pierce, who led the Nets with 18 points. “That was able to ignite their transition, they got easy baskets and we dug ourselves a hole on their homecourt.
“You almost have to be flawless [to win here], and when you come out and are sloppy with the ball in the third quarter like we did — we didn’t get shots up, we turned the ball over … it’s tough to come back from that.”
The Pacers (24-5) opened the second half with a 14-5 run — capped by a 3-pointer from Paul George (team-high 24 points on 9-for-13 shooting) — to turn what was a 58-56 halftime lead into a 72-61 advantage with 8:07 remaining in the third. The Nets (10-20) were never able to get closer than seven points the rest of the way, as the Pacers used a balanced scoring attack and took advantage of the Nets’ sloppiness with the ball.
In that decisive third quarter, the Pacers went 11-for-16 from the field — including hitting four of their five attempts from behind the 3-point arc. The five Indiana starters combined for all 28 points scored in the quarter. Meanwhile, the Nets went 8-for-17 and committed four turnovers that led to nine Pacers points, helping to put the game out of reach. The Nets — after scoring 56 points in the first half on 50-percent shooting — stopped using the same ball movement they did in the first half.
“I don’t know why [that happened],” Deron Williams said. “I don’t know why it’s that way. Especially when we have success in the first half, why it changes.
“Teams go on a run and we’ve talked about we do one pass and it’s guys trying to get going because we don’t want to lose the lead or don’t want to do it on their own.”
It was a similar performance to the one the Pacers put together Monday in Brooklyn, when they took a six-point lead into halftime before outscoring the Nets 30-19 in the third quarter, allowing them to cruise through the fourth to a comfortable 17-point victory.
“We played for a half,” Nets coach Jason Kidd said. “The effort was there. Again, in that third quarter, once we got down by 10 it seemed like guys thought we were down 20. … We have to keep fighting, and that’s something we have to get better at.”
To try and match the Pacers’ imposing frontline of David West (10 points, seven rebounds, six assists) and Roy Hibbert (11 points, five rebounds), Kidd switched up his starting lineup again, benching Shaun Livingston in favor of Mirza Teletovic, who scored 17 points. Brooklyn native Lance Stephenson finished with 23 points, nine rebounds and seven assists for the Pacers.
The Nets have lost five of their last six games, and are only within shouting distance of a playoff spot — three games back of the Celtics for eighth in the East and four behind the Raptors for first in the Atlantic Division — because of the embarrassing state of affairs in both their division and conference.
“Huge hole,” Williams said. [It’s a] huge hole [we’re in].
“At the same time, the only good thing about it is the East is so bad that we’re not out of it. We just have to stay positive and turn things around.”