Indiana Pacers – Trade for Jay Huff shows strategy to rebuild Myles Turner in aggregate!

Indiana Pacers – Trade for Jay Huff shows strategy to rebuild Myles Turner in aggregate!

Look at what your Indiana Pacers did over the weekend, making a trade, an unheralded trade that is going to pay big dividends for them coming into the upcoming season. For a second round pick in swapping seconds, the Pacers get Jay Huff. You don’t know Jay Huff at this point. You’re going to know Jay Huff. Unless you’re a really good college basketball fan, you don’t know Jay Huff. Jay Huff played a few years ago for the University of Virginia. He’s 71, 240 pounds, and he’s one of three 7- foot tall centers in the NBA last year with more than 200 attempts to hit 40 or more percent from beyond the ark. He is a stretch five who can defend. He was the G-League defensive player of the year in 2023. Now, I don’t know whether he’s going to entirely replace Miles Turner or whether he’s going to be a really good backup as a stretch five, but this is kind of an anomalous sort of player in the NBA, a guy who’s played on a different NBA team each of the last four seasons and now is coming to the Indiana Pacers. We’ll talk about the trade a little bit and what Jay Huff is going to be able to do for the Indiana Pacers on the cheap, which is a good thing as they decided not to pay Miles Turner and and go into their pocket, not just pay him, but go into their pocket $47 million for next year and allow the Bucks to go into their pocket recklessly to compensate him. Ho! Pacers may have just found a really really nice way to for a period of minutes in the upcoming season replace Miles Turner.

Myles Turner averaged 15.6 points and 6.5 rebounds per game, so finding multiple centers to recreate that production is the plan – and the acquisition of Jay Huff is a big part of that basic math.