INDIANAPOLIS — Pascal Siakam was lounging at his stall in the visitors’ locker room at the United Center in Chicago when he saw an opportunity to make a correction.
The Pacers were basking in a sigh-of-relief December win over the Bulls after four straight losses and 14 defeats in their first 23 games. They had turned in their best offensive performance in nearly a month in a 132-123 victory and had some time to hang out in the locker room with a late last bus out of the arena.
But Siakam saw Bennedict Mathurin across the room and had something he wanted to bring up. He had noticed when Mathurin had taken a dribble handoff from him coming across the floor from right to left, he turned the corner and started his drive to the basket with his right hand — his inside hand — rather than his outside hand which would have given him more ball security.
The 31-year-old, ninth-year veteran Siakam asked the 22-year-old third-year wing Mathurin if that’s how he always took handoffs and if he just felt that much better dribbling with his right hand. Mathurin said he felt totally comfortable going left-handed. Siakam still wanted to work with him on doing it the right way. So even with both men still in shower towels and reporters still around, Siakam grabbed a ball and had Mathurin practice taking handoffs.
Siakam’s season and a half with the Pacers have been filled with moments like that when he fixed something no one else saw or spoke up exactly when the time was right to get a needed message across. Along with the steady production the Pacers expected, he’s brought a necessary voice of wisdom he didn’t even fully realize he had when he arrived.
“He understands that it’s needed,” Pacers guard Andrew Nembhard said. “I think he understands that we all listen to him. He has the experience to impart his wisdom in those moments.”
When the Pacers acquired the 6-8, 245-pound Siakam from the Raptors in January of 2024 in one of the most consequential trades in franchise history, they knew they could expect him to provide them with another All-Star caliber player to complement blossoming point guard Tyrese Haliburton and give Indiana the firepower to compete with the Eastern Conference’s top echelon. He’s matched and even exceeded expectations, helping the Pacers to a conference finals run last season and helping them earn a No. 4 seed in the playoffs this season with a 50-32 record, their first 50-win campaign since 2013-14. So far in their first-round series against the Bucks, Siakam is leading the Pacers with 22.3 points per game on 58.3% shooting and 50% 3-point shooting and the Pacers have a 3-1 lead and a chance to clinch the series in Game 5 at 6 p.m. on Tuesday night at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.
Last year, Siakam led the Pacers with 21.3 points per game after his arrival then led them again this season with 20.2 points. He scored in double figures in all but two of the 119 regular season games he’s played in an Indiana uniform and earned his third All-Star nod this season.
“This is who Pascal Siakam is,” Haliburton said after the Pacers’ Game 2 win over the Bucks. “He’s been a steady presence for us all year. So glad that he’s on our team. I think he could be the most underrated player in the NBA to be honest with you. I think what he does on a nightly basis is amazing. He’s so consistent, so steady.”
But from the time Siakam joined the team, the Pacers told him they were going to need something no other team had asked from him. They needed him to a speak up to a group that was desperate to hear what he had to say because he was an NBA champion and they were not.
“It’s been challenging just because it’s not my personality naturally,” Siakam said. “It’s not who I am. I like to lead by example. But I’m just trying to use my voice a little bit more. It’s been great, though, because the reception has been good. It feels like when your voice is heard, it’s impactful. That encourages you to continue to choose your spots and make sure you give your input on things because it’s needed. It’s wanted. I think in the past it hasn’t always felt like that. It’s been great to be in this position.”
And Siakam has managed to make handling the responsibility seem more natural than it is for him. He quickly found his lane and has managed to be what they need without trying to be more, filling a void but not challenging the positions of players who were more established in Indiana. He hasn’t tried to take over the team, but simply provided what it was missing.
“It’s just ongoing growth of leadership capacity,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “The thing that I admire about Pascal is he understands when to interject at the right times and the appropriate times. It’s not like some constant voice or anything like that. There’s an art to great leadership. It’s something that is learned certainly at a lot of levels, but he’s just had a natural feel for it. He’s got a lot of experience and the guys respect him.”
The reason they respect him so much is not just what he’s accomplished but how he’s accomplished it. The Cameroon native had very little formal basketball training until he was 17, but through an obsession with making up for lost time he turned himself into one of the league’s foremost craftsmen with an elegantly refined offensive game and the ability to make an impact on both ends.
“Whenever I see him doing what he’s doing,” Haliburton said, “I’m in awe.”
‘That’s the only way I know’
The tale of Siakam’s journey to the NBA has been extensively documented but it’s impossible to understand how he became the player he is without a brief overview.
He grew up in Douala, Cameroon with three older brothers who earned Division I basketball scholarships — Boris played at Western Kentucky, James at Vanderbilt, and Christian at what was then IUPUI. However Pascal never showed much interest in the sport and his father Tchamo — a devout Catholic who worked for a transit company but was also the mayor of a town called Makénéné — thought Pascal was the best suited of his children to be a priest. He enrolled Pascal in St. Andrew’s Seminary in Bafia, Cameroon, about 5 1/2 hours by car from Douala. Pascal didn’t think the priesthood was his calling, but he respected his father too much to defy his wishes and attended the seminary for seven years until graduation at 18.
Siakam didn’t play organized basketball until the summer of 2011 when he was 17 and on a whim attended a basketball camp run by Cameroon native Luc Mbah a Moute, who had a 12-year NBA career. Siakam attended again the following summer and was surprised to learn he’d been invited to participate at the Basketball Without Borders camp run by the NBA and FIBA in Johannesburg, South Africa. He played well enough there to earn interest from coaches and scouts and got an opportunity play and study for a year at God’s Academy in Lewisville, Texas.
Siakam was skinny and gangly and his game wasn’t refined at all, but coaches at New Mexico State saw enough raw material to offer him a scholarship.
“His lack of skill-set and lack of training and development were not deterrents for me based on the fact that his attitude was that of a guy who really wanted to invest in his own development,” said Marvin Menzies, then the coach at New Mexico State and now coach at Missouri-Kansas City. “He had a sponge-like mentality, received information pretty diligently… He instinctively rebounded out of his area, was consistent in his effort, didn’t take plays off. His motor was indicative of his attitude.”
Assistant coach Preston Laird was charged with much of Siakam’s individual instruction. What immediately struck him was Siakam had a fairly immediate sense of how high the hill he had to climb was and the level of devotion it would take for him to climb it.
“What separated Pascal was his intelligence,” Laird said. “He was just a smart person in general, but he was very emotionally intelligent. He was quiet, but you could tell he was a thinker and a processor early on. He had really good people skills, and he was incredibly self-aware at the same time. Not a lot of times do you see that. A lot of players, they’re not as self-aware, so it’s harder for them to maybe accept weaknesses and build strengths. That’s what made Pascal special. He knew he was coming to the party late and he had to make up the time he had missed, but there was such a thirst for knowledge.”
The time Siakam spent in seminary also gave him a sense of structure and an understanding of how to apply lessons and use them to build skills. He had been on his own long enough to be self-driven and was getting repetitions away from practice that allowed him to make more progress between sessions.
“In boarding school I was in a position where I wasn’t with my family, I had to find a way to adapt,” Siakam said. “I had to learn how to be a man. All those things just made me know what’s important and when you go for something, try your best and do everything you can. And being late also helped me have that drive because it felt like I was late.
“It felt like I had a lot to learn and it still feels that way. I think just obsessing over the fact that I have to catch up also helped me just know that this is something I have to sharpen every single day. I have to stack the day every single day. That’s the only way I know. That’s the only way I got better. And when you see something working, you don’t want to stop.”
Laird started Siakam’s skill development around the rim with Mikan drills and to improve shooting touch and footwork and slowly built outward and found out quickly he could make moves feel instinctive and fluid almost immediately.
“I can’t emphasize enough how quickly he picked everything up,” Laird said.
Siakam redshirted his freshman year at New Mexico State in 2013-14. Just before his redshirt freshman season began, Tchamo died in Cameroon as a result of injuries suffered in a two-car collision, and that broke Siakam’s heart but also increased his motivation even further.
Siakam won Western Athletic Conference Freshman of the Year honors in 2014-15, then was WAC Player of the Year as a redshirt sophomore, averaging 20.3 points, 11.6 rebounds and 2.2 blocks per game to lead the WAC in all three categories and leading the Aggies to a conference regular season title and an NIT berth.
Siakam entered the 2016 NBA draft after those two seasons and was taken 27th by the Raptors. As a rookie he started 38 games, but also spent extensive time in what was then known as the D League with Raptors 905 and helped them win a D League title. He still had a lot of work to do on his game, particularly on the perimeter after hitting just three 3-pointers as a college player, but the rapid evolution of his game continued.
“He was super determined, right?” said then Raptors coach Nick Nurse, now coach of the 76ers. “He was super determined and super hard-working. I just again remember that he really got to work on improving himself skill-wise, some fairly major changes, restructuring the way he shot the ball, went to work on it and double work on it. You know? See him a couple months later and you’re like, ‘Woah, how did you do that?’ ‘Well, doing what the coaches said, doing it in the morning, doing it at night. Doing it again.’ He just put the time into it.”
The dividends started coming through in 2018-19 when he earned a full-time starting job and won NBA Most Improved Player while helping a Raptors team led by Kawhi Leonard to the franchise’s first NBA championship. The following season, Leonard left for the Clippers and Siakam became the Raptors’ go-to scorer and averaged 21 points per game or better each of the next four seasons.
Despite all the strides he had made and despite becoming the clear face of the Raptors’ franchise, he never really pursued a vocal leadership role and the team never really pushed him to assume it. It became a moot point as the team’s fortunes started trending downward. Nurse was fired after Toronto lost in the play-in round in 2023. Siakam’s contract was up after the 2023-24 season, but extension discussions didn’t go anywhere and it became clear the Raptors were looking to go in another direction.
‘Your leadership is needed’
When Siakam was traded to the Pacers for guard Bruce Brown, forward Jordan Nwora and three first-round draft picks, the team was on a West Coast road trip. Before he joined them in Portland for his first game in a Pacers uniform, he spent a day in Indianapolis with the executives in the front office including president of basketball operations Kevin Pritchard and general manager Chad Buchanan. In their conversations they gave him a sense of how they expected he’d fit in what at the time was the top scoring offense in the NBA and what he could do to help their struggling defense.
But they also told him something he hadn’t heard before: They needed his voice and that his teammates would not only accept it but seek it out. In Toronto, he had been around a whole team of people who had contributed to the 2019 title and they didn’t need him to tell them what it took to get there. In Carlisle the Pacers had a head coach with a championship ring he won in Dallas, but no one on the roster knew what that was like.
“From the time I came here, it was like, ‘Your leadership is needed,'” Siakam said. “And it comes from a different place because it’s one thing when somebody sees you grow and they knew you since you were a little kid and you’ve achieved things, but it’s hard for people to see you in a different light. Then you come to a whole different situation. They see you as a champion. They see you as a vet as someone who’s accomplished a lot of things. Your vision and your input on things is received in a different way. It’s just natural. It’s not even trying to do that. I felt like here it was received in a way that just felt natural and was encouraged by the coach and everyone.”
Finding a comfort level with that was still a process for Siakam in his first half-season as he still had to get to know his teammates to get an idea what would resonate with him. But his overarching message was to stay together and not get too caught up in the ups and downs of a season. Nurse always told the Raptors to keep their minds on being the best team they could be in April, May and June, and Siakam told the Pacers to do the same.
When the Pacers finally got in to the playoffs after a three-year drought, Siakam was the one who steadied the ship after they were blasted in Game 1 of the first round by the Bucks. He scored 36 points in that loss and then 37 points in a Game 2 win to turn the series around and he ended up leading the Pacers in playoff scoring 21.6 points per game.
After they were eliminated by the eventual NBA champion Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals, the Pacers immediately went to work on getting him to sign a new contract and agreed upon a four-year deal worth approximately $188.9 million. That made Siakam feel even more confident and solidified in his role, and when the Pacers started 10-15 this season, he had no trouble speaking up.
“When we were struggling, we had a lot of players’ meetings and a lot of player-led conversations,” Haliburton said. “If it was player-led, a lot of it was him.”
A big part of the reason the Pacers were struggling was Haliburton was struggling, and the All-Star point guard said Siakam’s leadership meant as much to him personally as it did to the team as a whole.
Haliburton’s first 15 games this season arguably constituted the worst stretch of basketball of his life, which stung worse because he’s in the first year of a five-year contract extension worth approximately $245 million and was coming off earning third-team All-NBA honors and winning a gold medal with Team USA.
In the season’s first month, Haliburton couldn’t get a shot to fall and his confidence took so much of a hit he started to lose the joy in playing basketball, something he’d never experienced. In the season’s first 15 games, he averaged 15.3 points per game, shooting just 37.5% from the field.
“In that time when I was playing so bad,” Haliburton said, “I thought to myself, ‘Maybe Pascal’s thinking, like, ‘What the (expletive)? I didn’t sign up for this.'”
At the end of the Pacers’ win over the Wizards on Nov. 24 when Haliburton scored 21 points with nine assists and seemed to be snapping out of his slump, Siakam stopped Haliburton when he was coming off the floor. He told Haliburton he needed to trust in himself because he’d done the necessary work to be a great player and not put so much emphasis on whether he made or missed shots.
Haliburton was hearing the same thing from a lot of other people but it meant more coming from Siakam. That game marked a turning point, and since then Haliburton has mostly been back to himself. From that game forward he averaged 19.5 points and 9.4 assists per game the rest of the regular season, shooting 50% from the floor and 41.5% from beyond the arc. And after a 10-15 start, the Pacers won 40 of their last 57 games.
“It’s been a lot of just understanding that there’s expectations put on me that are warranted because of how much money I make and the success I’ve had in the past,” Haliburton said. “He just said there’s no need to put more pressure on myself than there needs to be. At the end of the day, it’s just basketball and understand that I’m gonna have bad games, he’s gonna have bad games, we’re all gonna have bad games, but that’s why we play a team sport. We’re supposed to rely on each other. The biggest thing about it when I was struggling was that my teammates weren’t losing faith in me and he wasn’t losing faith in me.”
Siakam’s opinion matters so much to Haliburton in large part because even as he’s being more vocal, he is very much still leading by example.
He seamlessly fits the strengths of the Pacers’ hyperkinetic offense because he is an excellent floor runner and transition finisher and can handle the ball on the perimeter and shoot catch-and-shoot 3s, but he also adds elements they didn’t have.
On the occasions when all of the Pacers’ movement doesn’t produce layups or open 3s, they can go to Siakam in isolation in the post where he can be deadly either getting around his man and getting to the basket or hitting a mid-range turnaround jumper. Considering the 7-3 wingspan that goes with his 6-8 frame, it’s an unguardable shot for most of the league, and he shoots it with remarkable accuracy and touch. In his season and a half with the Pacers, he’s made 53% of his field goals and 38.8% of his 3-pointers and his teammates see all the work he puts in to be that accurate.
“You see just his attention to detail,” Haliburton said. “He’ll spend 10-15 minutes in one spot shooting one shot just to sharpen it up. You see how hard he works. It’s no surprise that he’s doing what he’s doing.”
But as well-respected as he is, Siakam hasn’t tried to use that admiration to override the Pacers’ other leaders. He’s respected the work done to rebuild the franchise before his arrival and hasn’t tried to usurp Haliburton or others to make Indiana his team.
“We have a lot of great leaders on the team,” Siakam said. “We have people who have been in the league for a while. I think we have a different type of leadership with Ty that’s a young guy, but he’s a point guard so as the point guard you’re automatically the leader. JJ (James Johnson), that’s a veteran, been around. Myles (Turner), been around. T.J. (McConnell). We have different kind of leadership. I think my place is just trying to find the right spots. When there’s a lot of voices, sometimes it gets chaotic. I just try to choose my spots when it’s necessary. Also, that way, your voice means more. It’s more impactful when they know it’s coming from the right place at the right time.”
Siakam says he doesn’t come by this naturally. That leading with his voice isn’t who he is as a person. But maybe that’s not right anymore. As the experienced vet on his second NBA team, that’s who he is now, or at least who he’s becoming.
