Beating the Utah Jazz handily without Victor Oladipo wasn’t just a statistic — the Indiana Pacers were 0-7 in games without him, unless you count the game he was injured in as one — it was a way of showing the NBA and themselves they weren’t just his sidekicks.
In the seven games, three of them were to teams with losing records and they rarely looked competitive in any of them. They looked hapless without their best player on the floor.
The first time Oladipo went down, it was only one game and in a loss the Boston Celtics.