2025 Pacers Summer League: Rookies

Taking a look at what to watch for from the newest Pacers

By: Caitlin Cooper I @C2_Cooper

In the wake of Game 7, it seems as though time is both standing still and flying by. Although fans of the Pacers may still be trying to process the harsh conclusion to what was a fairy tale-like run to the NBA Finals, the league has continued to march on. Somehow, the NBA Draft already came and went, and the calendar is almost ready to flip to July, when in addition to the slow burn of free agency, rosters chock-full of young players and short on familiarity come together in the scorching heat of Las Vegas to play something vaguely resembling basketball.

For the Pacers, who presumably want to remain competitive while also continuing to develop as they enter a new Tyrese Haliburton-less reality, the week of exhibition play should provide an early glimpse at whether any of the players from the 24-and-under crowd are primed to take steps forward next season with some mighty big shoes to fill, presumably, by committee.

As such, what follows is an attempt to provide a guide of one micro-skill and/or macro-concept to watch for from all of the first and second-year players who have direct connections to the team either via the draft, standard contract, or two-way deal. First up, let's take a look at the rookies.

Kam Jones - "right" hand man

As a quick disclaimer, when the Pacers were busy playing basketball in the NBA Finals, Basketball, She Wrote was also busy covering the NBA Finals, which means there wasn't much opportunity to brush up on prospects -- especially when the Pacers traded out of pick No. 23 in order to re-acquire their own 2026 first-rounder and then acquired pick No. 38 from the Spurs on the day of the draft. Needless to say, without the prescience to peer into the future or the presence of mind to take my mind off the Finals, Marquette's Kam Jones wasn't exactly on my radar.

That said, despite the quick turnaround, I still wanted to do a condensed version of my usual draft coverage, taking you along for my journey of getting to know the Marquette product as a player through the lens of at least one full game. So, I watched Marquette's 79-63 loss to St. John's in the Big East Tournament, in which Jones had 24 points on 10-of-22 shooting. Don't worry, this game wasn't picked entirely at random. St. John's had one of the stingiest perimeter defenses in Division I college basketball last season, allowing just 0.811 points per possession. Jones is a creative finisher with what one scout/biomechanics expert described to me as having "a similar body shape, dribble pattern, shooting sequence and drive track" to old friend and fan favorite, Lance Stephenson.

For the season, the 23-year-old boxing enthusiast, converted a mammoth 64 percent of his shots at the rim in the half-court on over 200 attempts, while also finishing as the only player in college basketball with an assist rate over 35 percent and turnover percentage below 10 percent while appearing in at least 30 games, per Stathead.

A 6-foot-4 combo guard who generates paint touches and can finish at the rim while minimizing turnovers? Sounds like a hand-in-glove fit for the Pacers, right? Well, perhaps with the exception of which hand is sliding into the glove.

Last season, the Pacers ranked fifth in drives per 100 possessions to the right. Among ball-handlers, no one in the league drove more frequently in that direction than T.J. McConnell, who amassed 19.019 drives to the right with his propensity for turning the court into a whirlpool while turning the corner. Meanwhile, over 65 percent of Tyrese Haliburton's drives also came with him pushing the ball downhill toward his right. Needless to say, with the exception of Bennedict Mathurin's tendency to jab-and-go to his left while playing out of triple-threat or, maybe, the velocity that Andrew Nembhard gets throwing lefty darts to the opposite corner while snaking and moseying to his spots in the middle of the floor, this is largely a right-hand dominant team, at least as it pertains to the guard position.

Enter, Kam Jones - a lefty, with the casual and confident panache to go from a pound dribble into a one-handed scoop, drawing contact against a switch.

Also, enter Kam Jones - a lefty, who readily makes live-dribble passing reads to the opposite corner out of stack action while toying with tertiary defenders.

There's a lot to like here! He rarely gets sped up, and he often toggles between playing off two-feet and stepping-through back to his left with a second thrust or dribbling into methodical backdowns and spinning into reach outs, scoop shots, and sweeping hooks with his combination of footwork and touch. He can dominate with his left hand, but he's also fairly left-hand dominant. Not because he never finishes with his right, but rather because his handle doesn't always allow him to readily access that side of the floor.

Just look at this "get action" out of pistol. When the defense takes away his ability to drive downhill following the hand-back, the offense stalls and gets fairly herky-jerky as he searches, to no avail, for an avenue to get back to his left.

Later on, Marquette attempted to flip the action to other side of the floor so that he could still maintain access to the screen for the purpose of attacking to his left.

Notably, despite the fact that he had all kinds of room to reject the screen and drive baseline to his right, he opted to dribble left off the pick against the switch.

Then, when he re-attacked with his right, he ended up trying a quick spin under the rim from a weird angle after running out of real-estate rather than simply pulling-up.

In the second half, Marquette also went through a lot of rigmarole at times trying to find ways for him to shake his shadow anytime his defender was shading him right.

Here, he gets off the ball and immediately screens away, before flipping around to get the ball back.

Then, he waits for the ball-screener to come off an off-ball screen, presumably to delay the ball-screen coverage, with a screen adjustment for him to attack left.

Granted, the defense at Summer League isn't going to be as tailored to player tendencies as that which was schemed for by St. John's in a tournament game, but it will still be interesting to watch to what degree he goes out of his way to find his way left and whether he is still able to out-maneuver his defender into clever finishes.

Remember, the Pacers only played a total of 590 minutes with Tyrese Haliburton on the floor last season in the absence of both Andrew Nembhard and T.J. McConnell, compared to 1848 minutes with at least one of them on the floor next to him. Without Haliburton, the ability to play multiple ball-handlers at once might arguably be even more vital, at least as it pertains to maintaining the temperature of Nembhell the full-length of the floor against top perimeter options with Nembhard also (presumably) stepping into the role of primary initiator.

Defensively, Jones had some similar snafus in this game to those of the Bennedict Mathurin variety, wherein he created domino effects away from the ball after getting clipped on a screen, relaxed after his first effort when a second effort was still needed, never ran the seam after getting snagged, and unknowingly got his shoulder pinned behind a screen while he was loading up at the nail. Those might be aberrations from his full-body of work on the season or a product of too much usage (again, this is just what was noticed from this one game); however, while he might not be quite ready to make things Nembeasier on Nembhard against top assignments; it would be quite the boon if the Pacers found a potential third-string point guard in the second round of the draft, capable of playing with other point guards while occupying different spots on the floor, though hopefully not only being confined to just one side of the floor.

Taelon Peter - All hands on deck

Just as Taelon Peter's journey to being drafted by the Pacers as someone who led college basketball in true shooting percentage while averaging 13.7 points in less than 23 minutes per game as a transfer senior is winding and somewhat wild (especially since he wasn't even at the G League camp or NBA combine), so too were some of his possessions with Liberty.

Behold, the Taelon Peter experience. After ripping the ball away while playing defense in the gaps, he leads the fast-break going the other way.

Then, he gets off the ball only to get it back and dribbles out behind a screen and fires away. Regardless of time and lopsided score, this is the greenest of green lights!

It's possible he might turn the court into his personal playground with the Summer Pacers (which, intrigue!), but it seems highly, highly unlikely that he would have that sort of latitude with the Actual Pacers. More telling, at least with regard to his ability to carve out a role at the next level as a bouncy, off-ball mover, will be how he navigates laterally as a wheel greaser between actions.

At times, in Liberty's NCAA Tournament loss to Oregon, he could be seen shimmying out of triple threat to rip the ball baseline to his left before reading the weak-side zone and finding the cutter with a push pass under the basket.

At other times, however, his ability to operate as a connector wasn't quite as smooth. Here, when the backdoor cut gets taken away, he automatically flows into a hand-off with a pindown in the middle. The only problem is, he didn't exactly maximize his initial dribble to improve his angle while being chased.

Rather than pausing to square up at the top of the key, if he pushed the ball into space with his inside hand, he could've improved his movement efficiency to create a more threatening "north-south" attack. Andrew Nembhard, for example, has mastered this technique of "finding the inside track" out of hand-offs.

Peter spent the majority of his time at Liberty wheeling around off-ball screens, spotting-up, and running the floor in transition, while only attempting a total of 14 shots out of drives, which isn't that atypical from the way in which Ben Sheppard operates within Indiana's offense. That said, if Peter wants to give himself a leg up on that end of the floor, he could start by alternating which hand he pushes the ball downhill with out of hand-offs.