Setting The Pace: A Pacers Podcast · Blue Wire

What If the Pacers Miss the Top 4 Pick? + Defining the Haliburton-Siakam Window

March 27, 2026·1 hr 1 min·5 clips

Chris Weach reveals the 48% chance the Pacers lose their pick and how it benefits ownership over fans.

Mother's Day hangs over the lottery talk. One host says losing the pick would be grim, then starts hunting for the kind of fan math that makes it hurt a little less. His coping route is simple enough. If the Pacers fall to five or six, he wants to fold the lost pick into the earlier trade that brought in Siakam and another player. His co-host lets him have the thought, mostly. Fans can tell themselves whatever helps, but he is not counting it that way. That is where the episode lives. One side wants a cleaner emotional receipt. The other will not tuck a bad lottery night into the Siakam ledger unless the pick actually lands. The Pelicans turn into the warning sign. Even if Derrick Queen becomes a superstar, the issue is not the player. It is the messy path that got New Orleans there. The hosts can give the Pelicans credit for getting what they could from the Lakers and still hate the negotiation. Anthony Davis comes up because of course he does. Rob Pelinka takes a hit for that deal, then gets a quick softening because landing Luka Doncic for nothing changes the room pretty fast. It is brisk, anxious, and very fan-brained. The hosts bounce between pain, trade accounting, and draft logic without pretending any of this is tidy. Then the board opens back up. A veteran averaging 11.2 points in 22.3 minutes becomes the next test for whether a player makes sense for the Pacers. Those numbers are not filler. They are how the hosts keep the conversation from drifting into pure panic, even with the pick sitting over everything.

As heard by us

A draft-night hangout focused on whether a fifth- or sixth-pick outcome can still be made palatable.

The episode is less interested in mock-draft polish than in the uneasy arithmetic of landing at number five or number six and asking whether that result can still count as acceptable.

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Why you'd press play

You want the Pacers' fear case, not a tidy mock.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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