INDIANAPOLIS – The Indiana Pacers look to take a two-game lead in their first-round playoff series against the Milwaukee Bucks on Tuesday night.
Game 2 tips at 7 p.m. on FanDuel Sports Network Indiana and NBA TV.
The Pacers topped the Bucks 117-98 in Game 1 on Saturday, leading by double digits most of the way. Six Pacers finished in double figures, with Pascal Siakam leading the team with 25 points.
For the Bucks, All-Star Giannis Antetokounmpo led all scorers with 36 points.
All eyes on are Milwaukee star Damian Lillard, who was out of the lineup for Saturday’s game but still managed to pick up a technical foul in the fourth quarter.
Lillard hasn’t played for more than a month after being diagnosed with a blood clot in his right calf. He’s listed as questionable for Tuesday night’s game.
“It’s more them, the doctors, than him,” coach Doc Rivers told reporters this week. “He’s close. He looks great to me. But he’s getting close.”
The Bucks sorely need him. While Antetokounmpo scored at will, the rest of the team struggled mightily to help him out.
With Lillard in the lineup, Milwaukee went 3-1 against the Pacers. He averaged 18.3 points, 9.3 assists, and 5.5 rebounds in the regular-season series. During last year’s playoff series, which the Pacers won in six games, Lillard averaged more than 31 points per game.
“You’re putting a first-ballot Hall of Famer into the lineup,” Carlisle said of Lillard’s potential return. “We’ve played against him enough, we have an idea [of what he brings to the team], but we can’t overanalyze things.”
Carlisle said winning Game 2 would be “exponentially” more difficult than winning Game 1.
“Expect hard. Hard things are hard. Winning the second game in a playoff series after you’ve won the first game is hard. We’ve got to expect hard, we’ve got to embrace hard,” Carlisle said. “I think our fans have a lot to do with our success, not just in Game 1, but this entire season. We need them. We need them, but it’s our job to get them into it.”
Even though Game 1 looked like a blowout on paper, guard Tyrese Haliburton knows the team has plenty of room for improvement.
“There’s a still a lot we can do better,” Haliburton said. “I feel like there’s still a lot for us to improve on from what happened in Game 1. You go back and watch the film, there’s still a lot of avenues for us to get better, and we’re understanding of that. We know the areas we need to play better in.”
The Pacers have not won the first two games of a playoff series since 2013, when they beat the Atlanta Hawks in a six-game first-round series.
Home court has been kind to the Pacers in the playoffs. They’re 7-2 in their last nine home playoff games, with the two losses coming against the Boston Celtics in last year’s Eastern Conference Finals.