Against the Houston Rockets last night, the Indiana Pacers were trailing the Houston Rockets by three with about 30 seconds left in the game.  The Pacers did a fantastic job of forcing the Rockets into a tough shot and were able to secure the rebound.  However, after grabbing Mike Dunleavy Jr. made a pretty big mistake:

Mike Dunleavy Jr. takes two dribbles forward after securing the rebound, advancing the basketball, before calling a timeout.  Now, that doesn’t seem like that much of a big deal, but in the NBA if a player dribbles, advancing the basketball before calling a timeout, you can’t bring the basketball to halfcourt.  So instead of at halfcourt, the Pacers had to inbounds the basketball from an awkward spot on the court.  Here is the result:

The basketball is too far away from midcourt that Jim O’Brien can’t really run any of his SLOB (sideline out of bounds) plays, so he calls a standard halfcourt set.  However the timing just seems off.  The double staggered screen for Danny Granger doesn’t really knock his man off of him, so when Granger catches the ball on the wing, his defender is right on him.  Eventually, Granger has to kick it to Darren Collison who misses a contested three.

I’m not saying that if the Pacers were able to inbound the ball at halfcourt, they would have sent the game into overtime.  But, you want to be in the best position to do so, and Mike Dunleavy Jr’s taking two dribbles before calling a timeout put the Pacers in a worse position.