Pacers HC Rick Carlisle Provides Major Injury Update on Aaron Nesmith, Ben Sheppard

The ailing Indiana wings have already missed a significant chunk of the season.

Dec 4, 2024; Brooklyn, New York, USA; Indiana Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle reacts during the third quarter against the Brooklyn Nets at Barclays Center. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-Imagn Images / Brad Penner-Imagn Images

The Indiana Pacers are off to a disappointing 10-15 season start, good enough for the No. 9 seed in the lowly Eastern Conference.

It's a bummer of a beginning for Indiana, who finished 2023-24 with a solid 47-35 regular season record and the East's No. 6 seed, but managed to capitalize on some opponent injuries and their own solid pace-and-space offense to sneak into the Eastern Conference Finals.

Indiana is dealing with some major ailments of its own this year. Backup centers James Wiseman and Isaiah Jackson are done for the year with season-ending Achilles tendon tears. The Pacers earned a pair of disabled player exceptions for both.

Read More: Indiana Earns Multiple Disabled Player Exceptions, Could Help With Trade Talks

Starting wings Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith missed much of the year's first quarter with ailments of their own. Nembhard recently returned, and helped shore up Indiana's defense in the process, but Nesmith remains on the shelf — as does reserve shooting guard Ben Sheppard.

The 6-foot-5 Vanderbilt product has only been healthy for six of the Pacers' 25 bouts thus far. In those games, the 25-year-old small forward is averaging 9.2 points on a hyper-efficient slash line of .528/.545/.846, 4.0 rebounds and 1.0 assists a night.

Per Dustin Dopirak of The Indianapolis Star, Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle recently shed some light on the availability of those two swingmen.

Second-year shooting guard Sheppard, a 6-foot-6 Belmont product, is averaging 5.8 points while connecting on 42.4 percent shooting from the field (40.4 percent from long range), 2.2 rebounds, and 1.3 assists a night in his 13 available bouts (five starts). The 23-year-old has enjoyed some solid moments for Indiana this year.

Carlisle revealed that Nesmith remains “weeks away” from returning to the floor, while indicating that Sheppard could return sooner than that.

Indiana has slipped mightily of late, having gone 1-5 across its last six contests, including defeats to four sub-.500 squads in the 10-15 Detroit Pistons, the 7-18 Toronto Raptors, the 10-14 Brooklyn Nets, and most recently the 7-17 Charlotte Hornets this past Sunday. That's pretty darn grisly. That said, the Pacers have an opportunity to best two more of the league's worst clubs by record (though both are fairly talented on paper), the 7-15 Philadelphia 76ers on Friday and the 5-20 New Orleans Pelicans on Sunday.

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