Bucks’ Myles Turner opens up on free agency, says Pacers ‘changed their mind’

Did the Indiana Pacers do Myles Turner dirty? According to the Milwaukee Bucks’ new center, the Pacers led him to believe he’d “be taken care of” in free agency, but, when it was time to negotiate a new contract last summer, they didn’t come with the kind of offer that he’d expected. In an appearance on teammate Thanasis Antetokounmpo’s podcast, Turner said he had a “vision for myself with Indiana, the organization,” but found out that the franchise was looking at the situation differently.

Turner ended up signing a four-year, $108.9 million contract with the Bucks, who used the stretch provision on injured star Damian Lillard to clear the cap space to make it happen. On “Thanalysis,” Turner contrasted his experience with several of his former teammates’ — after the Pacers made the Eastern Conference finals in 2024, they re-signed Pascal Siakam (four years, $189 million), Obi Toppin (four years, $58 million) and T.J. McConnell (four years, $44.8 million) and signed Aaron Nesmith to a contract extension (two years, $40.4 million).

“We had a great run, everybody got taken care of, everybody got paid because we won,” Turner said. “Then you go to the next year. We surpass what we did. We go to the Finals. And all everybody told me was, ‘Myles, just keep your head down. You keep your head down and work, and then you’re going to get taken care of.’ And then you hear the rumors of, you know, Indiana, we’re going to go into the luxury tax for the first time ever, yadda, yadda, yadda.”

Indeed, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported in June that, in order to re-sign Turner, the Pacers were willing to go into the luxury tax for the first time in two decades. Turner implied that their calculus changed when their franchise player, Tyrese Haliburton, tore his Achilles in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.

“Everybody gassed me up all year long, said, ‘You’re going to get taken care of, you’re going to get taken care of.’ And then the unfortunate situation happens in the Finals with Tyrese and then I guess the front office and ownership just basically changed their mind and was like, ‘Well, you know, yeah, we told you all these things,’ or, ‘Yeah, you know, you helped us get to the Finals and the Eastern Conference finals, but we had to pivot.’ And that’s basically what the sentiment was. And we were just very far apart on what we thought the future should be.”

Turner said he was “elated” when Bucks general manager Jon Horst reached out to him, as he’d been disappointed by what he’d been hearing from Indiana.

“[Milwaukee] was an organization at that time that saw the potential in me and wanted to value me, where I was on my career,” he said. “And when I was in Indiana, I took a very team-friendly rookie extension and I took an even more team-friendly extension off that. So for me, personally, I was — I’m 29 years old, I’m coming off some of my better years in the league and I was like, you know, this is the time for me that I needed to secure even more wealth for my family. And when our visions didn’t align, it was very frustrating. And I had to take the emotions out of it and realize it was a business.”

The Pacers drafted Turner No. 11 in 2015. He was there for Frank Vogel’s final season, Paul George’s trade request, Victor Oladipo’s All-NBA leap and T.J. Warren’s scoring binge in the bubble. He was there for the brief, tumultuous Nate Bjorkgren era; the miraculous, franchise-changing Haliburton trade and the franchise’s first Finals appearance since it was in the ABA. Turner was often in trade rumors during his 10 years with the team, but it never ended up trading him. In May, the Players’ Tribune published a love letter from Turner to Indiana. All things equal, he clearly wanted to stay, but Indiana didn’t offer him a deal longer than three years or worth more than $22 million per year, according to The Stein Line’s Jake Fischer.

The Pacers’ side of the story is that they were blindsided. “We were fully prepared to go deep into the tax,” team president Kevin Pritchard said in July. Pritchard said that he was negotiating in good faith with Turner’s agent, Austin Brown, and “felt like we were working towards a deal” until the Bucks jumped in. Pritchard said he was “shocked” when he saw the news of Turner’s departure on social media, and he would have been open to a sign-and-trade, but “we didn’t get to that point, unfortunately.”

In an interview on 107.5 The Fan in August, Indiana coach Rick Carlisle said that he assumed the Bucks had told Turner that its offer was contingent on him keeping it quiet rather than using it to get a better deal from the Pacers.

“I think what happened was they talked to Myles’ agent or Myles and his agent and said, ‘Look, we have this offer. This is a number, presumably a number that you guys are trying to get to. We need to know that, if we offer this, you guys are going to take it, and you can’t shop it,'” Carlisle said. “That’s a frequent tactic of negotiation. And so, pretty clearly, they took the offer. It’s their right to do it.”

It’s unclear exactly how much Indiana would have been willing to pay Turner had it known that Milwaukee was in the mix. It’s also unclear how Turner’s individual performance during the postseason affected what the team was willing to offer, but The Athletic reported that it was a factor. Turner shot just 31.8% from 3-point range in the conference finals against the New York Knicks and 21.4% in the Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder. In both series, the Pacers had issues on the glass during Turner’s minutes, too.

In fairness to Turner, he was playing through an illness for at least some of the games against OKC in which he was missing wide-open 3s. It’s notable, though, that Indiana played Toppin over Turner in several clutch situations in May and June. More broadly, Turner had declined as a defender in recent years, so a deal as long as the one Turner got from the Bucks — assuming he picks up his player option, he’ll make $29.1 million in 2028-29, the season in which he will turn 33 — may have been unappealing to the Pacers for basketball reasons.

On Monday, Turner and the Bucks will visit Indiana. It will be the first time Turner has played at Gainbridge Fieldhouse as an opponent. Despite — and, in some ways, because of — the strange way his tenure ended, it will surely be emotional. You can expect a nice, long tribute video.