Pacers' Carlisle: It's obvious we're not playing well
Indiana Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle offered a blunt assessment of how his team is playing after losing 130-113 to the Houston Rockets on Wednesday.
"We're not playing well, that's obvious," Carlisle said postgame, per FanDuel Sports Network Indiana. "Our connectedness is not where it needs to be. Our collective spirit is not where it needs to be. And I'm going to look very closely at the film tonight ... and we've got to come up with answers.
"At a time like this, there's only one thing that I've ever seen that gets you out of a hole in a difficult period, and that is unbridled, collective hard play and consistent hard play ... We have not had enough of it, and so that's gotta change. We've got a significant amount of work to do. There's no switch that we can flip here and change everything."
The Pacers fell to 6-9 with the defeat. Indiana has played a road-heavy schedule, only winning two out of nine contests as a visitor.
Third-year guard Quenton Jackson led the Pacers in scoring with 24 points, while Pascal Siakam added 21. All-Star guard Tyrese Haliburton struggled, scoring eight points on 3-of-8 shooting. The 24-year-old has a career-worst 46.3% effective field-goal percentage this campaign.
Indiana has dealt with injury issues, losing centers James Wiseman and Isaiah Jackson for the rest of the year due to Achilles ailments. The team has also been without Andrew Nembhard for the last six games and will be without wing Aaron Nesmith until December.
The Pacers are coming off a 47-35 campaign in which they reached the conference finals for the first time since 2014.
Indiana takes on the Milwaukee Bucks in an NBA Cup contest Friday.