There was a mini-dust-up between Danny Granger and Kevin Love late in the third quarter during Indiana’s 109-99 win over Minnesota earlier tonight. It was most likely one of those “he-did-he-thought” things. Love clearly reached out and smacked Granger with his arm extended and also sorta grabbed Granger’s shoulder while he was fouling him and lost his balance. But Danny, not having eyes in the back of his head (as anyone who has seen him pass can attest … ZING), thought Kevin was doing it more-on-purpose than he likely was. Perhaps he was up to something a little more nefarious. Love said it was a “hard foul.”

Either way, nobody was harmed, Danny yelled, Love just sorta stood there, Michael Beasley and Frank Vogel rushed over, and nothing really happened. But then something did happen.

Granger, who was already having a whale of a third quarter (15 points in the period up to that point), scored 14 more points following the fracas as his team pulled away. And he was ultra-physical and aggressive while waging his little one-man army campaign in a way that you know he was all sorts of charged up. As the philosopher Billy Hoyle once prophesized, Danny, unlike most guys, seems to play better when he’s mad.

After the win, Roy Hibbert wanted to make sure the rest of the NBA knew that Love had erred in his ways. So as a word of advice, he took to Twitter let everyone know they shouldn’t make the same mistake of angering his captain.

Great win tonight. Lesson to the league don’t get @dgranger33 mad. Y’all been warned!!

So take that to heart, league. You’re on notice about getting Danny Granger mad, according to Roy Hibbert.

The foul that started it all.

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 … or two probable serial killers?

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Roy Hibbert generally plays well against traditional big men. For example, Roy has usually scored efficiently and generally played well against Tim Duncan and against Andrew Bynum and against Andrew Bogut. On the other hand, he often has been an abject disaster against a lot of smaller guys, like when he plays Al Horford and goes up against teams featuring Amar’e Stoudemire.

There are likely many reasons, but one explanation I have always leaned on is that Roy plays his best when he is in his comfort zone. He likes to establish positions and show big against guys who stand behind him and react to his moves. When the defender is rushing around trying to front, playing side position and using other fancy techniques (pulling the chair, for example), some of Hibbert’s effectiveness gets lost in the muddle. He thrives among organization and reliability but falters amidst chaos and improvisation. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s just a general observation I have developed over time.

One tradition center he has generally struggled against, however, is the only great one left: Dwight Howard. Not only have the Pacers gone 2-9 in their 11 head-to-head match-ups since Roy entered the league in 2008, Hibbert has had some real struggle games whereas Howard has put up some monster numbers.

It will be interesting to see if Hibbert’s excellent play so far this year continues tonight as the Pacers host the Magic, a team that managed to score only 56 points last night against the Celtics. In the lead up, here’s a breakdown of how each has fared individually when Indiana and Orlando has clashed. I’ve highlighted the individual “winner” for each in yellow — which means I highlighted Dwight’s name 10 times. (Roy did notably score a career-high 26 points against Dwight in January 2010.)

Game 1 – November 21, 2008: Orlando 100 – Indiana 98

Game 2 – November 29, 2008: Orlando 110 – Indiana 96

Game 3 – January 27, 2009: Orlando 135 – Indiana 111

Game 4 – February 6, 2009: Indiana 107 – Orlando 102

Game 5 – December 14, 2009: Orlando 106 – Indiana 98

Game 6 – January 5, 2010: Indiana 97 – Orlando 90

From the 89ps recap: “The Pacers beat the Magic, 97-90 and Roy Hibbert was the star of the game, dropping a career-high 26 points. To think going into this game that Roy was going to shut down the NBA’s premier center, this game should have been a sell-out.”

Game 7 – January 20, 2010: Orlando 109 – Indiana 98

From the 8p9s recap: “Hibbert was virtually worthless this time against Dwight after having perhaps the best game of his career against Superman last time out. 3 points and 3 boards in 18 minutes. Thanks for coming out.”

Game 8 – April 12, 2010: Orlando 118 – Indiana 98

From the 8p9s recap: “What last night reminds us of was how thin the margin of error is for this team.  It reminds us that, if Danny can’t get it going, and if Roy can’t get it going, then it’s all over but the shouting.”

Game 9 – November 20, 2010: Orlando 90 – Indiana 86

Game 10 – January 26, 2011: Orlando 111 – Indiana 96

From the 8p9s recap: “the Orlando Magic made 16 of the 34 triples they took (47.1%) on their way to to a 15-point win that felt more like a shutout.”

Game 11 – April 13, 2011: Orlando 92 – Indiana 74

From the 8p9s recap: “The Pacers took this opportunity to rest Danny Granger and Jeff Foster and did not play Roy Hibbert and Darren Collison in the second half.”

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Below are two really good screens that Hibbert set in the fourth that gave Pacers’ shooters wide-open looks. How’s your face feeling Dorell Wright?

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Great stuff from Tom Lewis on Indy Cornrows setting up tonight’s Pacers game vs. the Warriors, which, as you should know, are now coached by Pacers legend Mark Jackson. If you didn’t see Mark in an Indiana uniform, you missed out. He was the definition of “floor general” and is arguably the best combination of pure point guarding and flashy passing this side of Magic Johnson and Jason Kidd.

In previewing he game, Lewis discusses the 800-lb gorilla now in the room: the Pacers offense against the zone. He links to this piece from Sactown Royalty’s Tom Ziller that breaks down every Indy possession against the Kings zone. And he notes that Golden State, as of three days ago, plays more zone than any other NBA team, implementing it on 10.3% of their defensive possessions, according to MySynergySports.

To recap: the team that plays the most zone tonight faces a team that just looked like the worst offense in history against a zone two days ago. I think we can go ahead and slot this in as a “Ruby Tuesday Hanes Her Way Key to the Game.”

Mike Wells of the Indianapolis Star asked some of the team members why the Pacers played so poorly against the Kings’ zone.

“We just have to work on (our zone offense) more,” Pacers point guard Darren Collison said. “I think we were caught off guard. Still, no excuse. We were up pretty much the whole entire game. We know how to work against a zone.”

The team’s new power forward offered the following.

“It was kind of their last-ditch effort to try and junk the game up,” Pacers power forward David West said. “. . . They’re not a good defensive team. I don’t think they did anything overwhelmingly well. We just played into their hands.”

It will be interesting to see if the team handles it any better. Wells, among others, criticized Coach Frank Vogel for going small since it was presumably done to match the personnel the Kings put on the floor. It’s a fair criticism but, to me, it ignores the fact that Roy was a disaster against the zone during the 4:51 he did play in the fourth quarter.

Here are the possession breakdowns from Ziller directly involving Hibbert.

7. [Jason Thompson] stops Roy Hibbert in the post, but the loose ball squirts to Granger for an open jumper. MAKE. Thompson defended the ball beautifully, but bad bounces happen.

Going to the film, we can see that this was a rushed post move. Roy took a near-airball hook shot that missed the rim and hit only the opposite backboard. He gets no credit for the subsequent fracas that led to a Granger jumper amid chaos.

8. Cousins blocks Hibbert’s shot in the post; after an offensive rebound, Granger gets a quick but contested three. MISS. This was similar to the previous possession, except the Kings recovered well, balanced up and contested the shot. The Kings earned this empty possession twice.

Looking at the video, we see that this was Roy, who after three nice Pacers swing passes around the perimeter, catching the ball very open in the middle of the paint on a nice entry by Darren Collison. He could do nothing useful with it, despite having the undersized Cousins on his back, and did some drop-step, over-dribble, reverse layup thing that took long enough for a double to come over and bother his weak shot attempt.

9. Evans doubles down on Hibbert, who is backing down Cousins in the post, and forces a turnover. TURNOVER. Hibbert began the game schooling Cousins in the paint. Things turned all the way around in the fourth, and help down from the guards/wings certainly made a difference.

Again, if we watch the video, we see that the Pacers perimeter guys again did a decent job forcing the zone to move and react by swinging it to George on the wing. He tosses a nice entry to Roy with Cousins on his back deep in the post and the Indy lead now down to four (84-80 with 5:50 to play). Roy takes one dribble into the paint the spins back baseline with his head down. The outside defender hedges down, executes a simple dig and strips the ball from an apparently-not-paying-attention Hibbert. It bounces off his leg out of bounds. Kings ball.

The first two bad possessions from Hibbert there were bad moves. The third reflected what was more problematic: his seeming inability to know where the other defenders on the floor were. This time led directly to a turnover but he got a few other touches that looked similar. This isn’t a condemnation of the guy. He just hasn’t played against a zone much and his instincts aren’t well-formed enough for him to anticipate how the defenders will rotate. He was caught off guard.

Hopefully, the Pacers spent some time yesterday and in shootaround today discussing this stuff. It’s a forgivable sin to be caught off guard by something you didn’t expect and haven’t prepared for.

But if it happens again …

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The rolling Indiana Pacers are now picking up bandwagon followers, including including the perennially-pessimistic Indy Star columnist Bob Kravitz (though he does take the time to pepper in a few Colts references). With last week’s lone loss coming under an abbreviated squad against the number one team in the NBA, the Pacers appear to be more of a playoff contender than a beneficiary of a cake-walk early schedule (sixth easiest through 12 games).

The next two weeks will be very revealing as to the team’s potential. The season’s only western road trip features some winnable games before the final stop in Los Angeles than a homecoming to face the surprisingly strong Orlando Magic, a team enjoying the calm before the ensuing trade deadline storm. Six of the next seven are on the road, however, where the Pacers have been a model of inconsistency.

Roy Hibbert’s Contract Year

The big man is earning himself a lot of money. With his rookie contract expiring at the end of this season, Hibbert could garner a lot of interest from around the league. It seems likely that he would want to extend his stay in Indiana, and Larry Bird will probably be willing to do what it takes for that to happen.

Hibbert is now a double-double machine and defensive menace anchoring the league’s fourth-best defense. Though his scoring hasn’t been phenomenal, his shooting percentage and points per game have improved from last season. In a match-up against a team without an effective post-defense, Hibbert could be a first or second-round nightmare in the playoffs.

Area 55 could look a lot bigger next year.

Hicks vs. Geriatrics

In my last column, I discussed the growing (and mainly fabricated on my part) beef between the Boston Celtics and Pacers after Ray Allen said that West’s “ego kicked in” and he “wanted the dollars” when deciding to sign with Indiana. That was followed up by somewhat insulting piece lauding the Boston tradition and lambasting a man that didn’t want to be a part of it.

In other news, the Pacers have man-handled the Celtics twice in eight days. With that, I would like to end each column by tracking each team through the season. You know, just to help my ego kick in. What else is there to do in these cornfields?

As of January 16:

Pacers 9-3 (4th in East)
Boston 4-8 (9th in East)

If the 2012 playoffs* started today, the first round match-up would be …

#4 Pacers vs. #5 Hawks

*Boston not present

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Gracias to OutsideTheNBA for the video.

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Roy Hibbert has been playing fantastic basketball this season. He hasn’t had any one over-powering night that left you double-taking at the stat sheet. (A “Kevin Love Game,” if you will.) But he has been so consistent and reliable that this I’m pretty sure this is the best 10-game stretch of his career.

Through 10 games, he is easily averaging career-highs in points (14.1), rebounds (9.9), FG% (54.5%) and — perhaps most encouragingly — minutes (29.2). In advanced stat news, he is also posting personal bests in PER (21.6), true shooting percentage (56.5%), rebound rate (18.6%), defensive rebound rate (26.4%), offensive rating (108) and defensive rating (95).

Between all this, and him logging his sixth double-double of the year during Indiana’s dominating win over Atlanta last night (he had 12 points, 11 boards, 4 blocks in 24 minutes), it was no big surprise that NBA TV’s “Gametime Live” program tapped him for a post-game interview.

In answering questions from Greg Anthony, Dennis Scott and host Vince Cellini, he spoke on the team’s acquisition of David West and his own conditioning, among other things. But the best insight came from his talk in general about why the team’s offense has, at times, looked better than the past few years (and at the very least, looked different).

“The teams I’ve been on here in the past were just come down, one pass, shoot three,” said Hibbert. “Right now, we’re a physical team. We like to go inside-out. We have very capable passers. And the guards know that when we get the ball down low in the post, if they cut hard and if they space the right way, we’ll get them open shots. And that leads to less double teams, and us bigs going to work in the post.”

Watch the rest of his thoughts below.

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Of course, there was a reason Horford left the game. And it was due to his shoulder getting banged up when Hibbert and Paul George sent a tag-team swat team after two of his shot attempts.

The result was the easily the best Pacers sequence so far this young season. Horford gets swatted, regathers and gets swatted again. Vlad Rad picks up the loose ball and gets his attempt block nearly before it even leaves his hands.

Then it’s off to the races the other way as Paul George adeptly leads a break, but slows it down rather than forcing a drive (perhaps due to the fact that he, not so surprisingly, almost lost his dribble). He finds a posting Hibbert, who had hustled down the court and looks poised to a make a move. But instead sees a wide-open David West cutting through the lane for to turn the Indiana power-play (Horford was lying on the floor at the other end) into a dunk.

Ball movement city.

* UPDATE: Didn’t know about the severity of Al’s injury when originally posting. In the grand scheme of things, this play really sucks. Al Horford tore his left pec during the exchange and will now be out up to 4 months. Crappy, crappy stuff. No insensitivity intended. Was unaware.

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Even before he has put on the uniform, the George Hill acquisition is paying dividends. At least twice this summer Hill went down to San Antonio to work out with Tim Duncan and a few other of the Indiana native’s former San Antonio teammates. And he was nice enough to bring along his new teammate Roy Hibbert, who expressed his happiness about being able to “pick up sum pointers” from Duncan.

Yesterday, to Mike Wells of the Indianapolis Star, Roy further expounded on his time around the best power forward in NBA history.

Hibbert said he added about 15 pounds of muscle during the offseason to help him not get pushed around. He had a tendency  last season to start  in his comfort zone in the paint only to end up five or six feet away from the basket by the time he caught the ball.

Hibbert talked about his time working with future Hall of Famer Tim Duncan in San Antonio during the offseason.

“He taught me a lot of things, in terms of things I’m not comfortable with,” Hibbert said. “Like turning and facing, shooting off the glass and just working on things that are out of my comfort zone. He took me to dinner, we ate and talked, we chopped it up. He’s a real good guy.”

Don’t be put off by those last two sentences. I know it sounds like how a girl might describe a first date with a guy who was nice and gentlemanly but has no chance of getting a second date. But, really, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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