Andrew Nembhard fixed the Pacers

The written work at Basketball, She Wrote is typically paywalled. This article from Samson Folk, as an explainer of Andrew Nembhard's quiet importance to the Pacers that is slowly becoming much louder, is available as a free trial. If you're new here and want to support independent writing about actual basketball, please consider subscribing and/or sharing it around. Alright, on to his words about the Pacers.

By: Samson Folk I @samfolkk

Tyler Herro walks the ball up the court and Andrew Nembhard meets him 40 feet away from the rim. Herro pitches to Bam Adebayo and tries to initiate a handoff that Nembhard sprints between and negates. Herro flows into his role as the screener in a Chicago action, then comes out of it to get the ball, only to be met once again by the presence and the calm gaze of Nembhard. Herro rips through and Nembhard opens up to the possibility of a drive, but Herro pulls back, and somehow – with his legs the wrong way –  Nembhard explodes out of his stance to climb over a second Adebayo screen (keeping a hand attached to Herro the whole way through) and teams up with Bennedict Mathurin to kick Herro back out. 

The screens did nothing. Time to isolate. 

Herro tries to explode to the rim, but Nembhard easily meets him and allows no quarter below the dotted line. Herro steps back and pumps – his free throw rate is the highest it’s ever been, maybe a bit of craft? – and Nembhard doesn’t bite by contesting the shot, he uses the pump as an opportunity to step into Herro’s body and close the space. Herro puts up the heavily contested fader, and it’s a brick. 

That was one of the first possessions of the Pacers game against the Heat, and it came on the heels of a three-game stretch in which Herro was averaging 29 and eight on absurd efficiency. Then, he had to line up against Nembhard for a quiet 17 and three. 

None of this is particularly surprising, though. What Nembhard does defensively can usually be described as quiet excellence. He was a focal point of Caitlin’s recent defensive observations.

Nembhard will kick guys out, climb screens - and apply about 800 more pounds of force than offensive players expect. Did Damian Lillard expect to get nowhere when his body met Nembhard’s? No. Then Lillard expected to spin off him downhill, found himself going only sideways, then threw up a fading left handed push shot. Lillard might have had to try that four times in his whole career. Nembhard climbing two screens and aggressively pursuing Devin Booker before forcing a miss was set to the sounds of Mike Budenholzer yelling at the refs in protest of Nembhard’s physicality and the Suns broadcast saying: “I love this matchup between Booker and Nembhard. Nembhard, he is just a tough guy to play against.”

Nembhard is the living embodiment of DeMarcus Cousins smugly repelling a struggling Karl-Anthony Towns.

The “Basketball She Wrote” Patreon has long championed the quality of Andrew Nembhard. I went back to look at my catalog of tweets about him, and here’s the order of tweets over the years, roughly:

• “I want Andrew Nembhard on the Raptors. He is awesome.”

• “He will never be a Raptor. Heartbreaking.”

• “Covering Nembhard during this playoff run is awesome.”

• “Andrew Nembhard fixed the Pacers.”

Since Nembhard stepped back into the lineup without any restrictions 15 games ago, the Pacers are top-10 in net rating, top-5 in offensive rating, and very nearly climbed into the top half of defenses across the NBA over that span. A span that includes a 37-point loss to the Celtics that did not include Nembhard on the floor. As far as Cleaning The Glass’ on/offs go (that remove garbage time), the Pacers ultimate minutes winner is: Nembhard. Defensively, Caitlin has touched on a lot of why, I’ve touched on some, and maybe as a quick point to what Caitlin has written about the increased frequency of peel switching and next-ing: those defensive principles work much better when the defender can inflict a bit of panic into the ball handler before he gets jumped by an incoming rotation. Not only do the Pacers need that help from off-ball players, but Nembhard helps on ball, applying that urgency, before he leaps off of it. Not to mention he’s been pretty slick making the transition in the opposite way as well. 

Offensively, Tyrese Haliburton is a tremendous flow player, he turns on an offense and runs it with ease. Nembhard is a big ol’ change of pace. A knuckleballer. Where Haliburton skips through the paint while making reads, Nembhard will sit and dribble or pivot in it. He is a pig in the mud, mucking around happily. He is in the 99th-percentile among wings (CTG has him categorized as a wing… hmm…) as far as mid-range frequency goes, and that love for those shots makes defenders leery of his presence there, regardless of his overall efficiency - they’ve seen him make the shots, they’ve seen him wiggle and bump Kevin Durant and Jayson Tatum off their spot before hitting over the top. Defenders step up as Nembhard holds court, and for a Pacers team that is so active, a lot of cuts open up - whether it’s the roll man, the baseline basket cut, or from the 45. 

The Pacers don’t just have the Haliburton juggernaut, they don’t just have the reigning most efficient play holder of the 2024 playoffs (Siakam’s post up), but they also have a Nembhard pick n’ roll that they can run out there for more than a point per possession, including passes (per synergy). 

When you’re trying to concoct who fits next to Haliburton and who elevates him, you of course have to think about the rapid shooting, ghost screening and spacing that a guy like Buddy Hield provided. However, even though Nembhard isn’t a heat pump from downtown, he is almost as perfect a backcourt marriage as I could imagine for Haliburton, and if you’re discounting stars and max contracts, who better? A player who helps you do everything defensively, a player who gets better in the more physical realm of the playoffs, and a player who provides something different. Haliburton and Nembhard aren’t Steph Curry and Durant, of course, but the Warriors offense was not as dominant relative to league average, technically, once Durant joined. “How high can the numbers go?” is a fun game, but being impervious to a wider set of defenses is a more rewarding one - and we see a bit of that with the Pacers backcourt partnership.

The NBA continues to get deeper and deeper. Every coach I talk to, every player I talk to echoes that belief. More players than ever can take a 25-percent usage rate and give you 20-5-5. However, there’s not a lot of players who ratchet up and down according to team need on offense, while being non-stop brilliant on defense. 

Nembhard is like if that bottle of snake oil actually worked for everything. 

Have a blessed day.