Paul George Talks Disappointing Pacers Finish

Ask Paul George what went wrong with the Indiana Pacers' season last year and he’ll tell you the team started feeling their own success too much and lost the edge that allowed them to be the No. 1 seed in the East. “Before we were hungry,” George, a Palmdale, California, native, told the Los Angeles Daily News. “We started the year off hungry, the bad taste from the year before was in our mouths and everyone was on a mission. Once we started to win, the game was coming too easy. We were running away from our opponents and we just kind of forgot that edge. It was a point where we came into games thinking we could just turn it on, regardless if we started bad or not. And I think that kind of put us in a funk to where teams were starting to really play us and get ready for us. We weren’t the team chasing opponents. We were being chased and we couldn’t find that balance between getting that edge back we started the season with.” Despite landing the top seed in the Eastern Conference, the Pacers nearly lost a seven-game, first-round series to the Atlanta Hawks before being eliminated by the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals.