Joining us now on the Java House Peel and Poor guest line, Chris Dineri, who used to probably haunt the streets of Westfield, Indiana back in the day for trick-or-treating. Chris, when you were a kid trick-or-treating, tell me the candy that used to anger you when people would hand it out where you would look in the bag and be like, dude, are you serious? I would say black licorice. I never was a fan. I like the red liquorish.

So as I got older, I I would say black licorish. I never was a fan. I liked a red licorice.

So as I got older, I began to appreciate black licorice. But when I was a kid, I had no tolerance.

Okay, fair enough. All right, tonight, the Pacers and the Atlanta Hawks. And, you know, there are two ways to look at this from the Indiana standpoint.

And the first is, there are times where teams get off to slow starts and they are winless and

you start going, what in the world is going on? And then there are times when it happens and you

say, yeah, I'm actually pretty impressed that they've had a puncher's chance at a couple of

these games based on who they have not had on the floor and the piecemealing they've had to do for it.

I choose the latter with this team, and let's go to the Dallas game, for example.

What buttons was Rick Carlisle able to push or what combinations were they able to use to keep them

within range at the end of that game? And I know they didn't win, but my point being they were

there in the thick of it. What lineup was the one that worked best? That's a great question, Jake,

because through the first four games, they have used 85 different five-man

lineup combinations, 85. I mean, that averages to 20 per game. I mean, it's just remarkable what

they've had to do. You know, clearly, you know, having Pascal Siakum on the floor and even despite shooting it as poorly as he did,

Aaron Neesmith, I mean, having those two guys on the floor with any combination of three other players,

I think, you know, is advantageous right now for the Pacers because those are the two guys with your most experience.

But, you know, I thought down the stretch,

Ray J. Dennis played well. I mean, at one point, I think they had four players on the floor

that had played in more collective G-League games than they had played in the NBA. So it's a

little bit of a hard question to analyze just because you have guys that have such little experience in playing at the NBA.

But I do think that Ray J played very well on Wednesday night.

...