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Pacers Hopeful Of Retaining Pick But Won’t Regret Zubac Deal

By | at May 5, 2026 9:30 pm

The NBA will hold its annual draft lottery on Sunday. If the Pacers have some lottery luck, they’ll retain their top-four protected pick. If they drop out of the top four, they’ll convey the pick, courtesy of the Ivica Zubac trade with the Clippers.

Should Indiana drop out of the No. 2 spot to No. 5 or 6, there will be no regrets, given that Zubac is viewed as the team’s long-term solution at center.

“When we made the trade, obviously we knew there was risk involved as there is in any other trade,” Pacers GM Chad Buchanan said in a recent radio interview relayed by the Indianapolis Star’s Dustin Dopirak. “With the draft pick involved, we looked at the finances of the situation and the scenario where you keep the pick, the scenario where you lose the pick. We felt that both scenarios provided opportunities to help our team be better next year.

“We don’t want to be standing on the sidelines watching teams go for a trophy. We feel like we have a team that showed us these last two years that we are in that mix when we’re healthy. Shame on us if we don’t try to help put this team in position to have another couple runs at it. If we’re always thinking long, long, long-term, you never step up to the plate and swing.”

The Pacers have never had the No. 1 overall pick. They had the No. 2 pick in 1988, when they selected big man Rik Smits. They have a 14% shot at the top pick and a 52.1% chance to get a top-four pick, with a 47.9% chance that it’s conveyed to the Clippers.

Zubac played just five games after the February trade, spending a month recovering from an ankle injury and then ending his season with a fractured rib. However, he averaged a double-double for the Clippers before the trade (14.1 PPG and 10.6 RPG) and made the All-Defensive second team in 2024/25.

“The core of this comes down to Ivica is a great player,” Buchanan said. “We’ve been a big believer, a big fan of him for a long time. This team has shown that it’s capable of doing some really special things. We were missing a starting center that we thought could keep us in that mix. We owed it to this group and these fans and our community to put us in position to try and do and replicate some of the things we’ve seen these last two years from this team.”

There will be “disappointment” if the Pacers have to send their first-rounder to the Clippers, but Buchanan is prepared to pivot.

“Should we lose the pick, there’s other opportunities to improve our team through free agency,” Buchanan said. “We still have trades. We gain a pick that we can use in the future for a trade. We feel like there’s a way to improve our team either way with the ping-pong balls, however they fall for us. We’re not putting all our eggs into one basket that, ‘Hey, if we don’t keep this pick, it’s doom and gloom,’ because it’s not. “

There’s a specific need he wants to address, with or without the lottery selection.

“One thing this season revealed for us is the need for some scoring off our bench, I think will be important, probably from the wing position,” Buchanan said.

The Pacers project to have roughly $200MM in salary on their books for 2026/27, including non-guaranteed contracts and team options, according to Tony East of Forbes.com. That number will increase if they retain the pick, which would carry a cap hold of at least $10MM+. Without the pick, they’d have access to at least some of the non-taxpayer mid-level exception as well as exploring trade avenues.

“There’s a pretty significant salary slot for a top-four pick,” coach Rick Carlisle said. “Theoretically, there’s the opportunity to use that money, if it’s not being spent on a high draft pick, on some players in free agency or use that gap of money to be a part of another transaction that could help us. Time will tell.”

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