INDIANAPOLIS – Just two days stand between the Indiana Pacers and their offseason-defining date. May 10 is the 2026 NBA Draft lottery, and the Pacers have a 52.1% chance of keeping their first-round draft pick.

If the lottery places the Pacers top selection inside the first four slots, Indiana will keep that draft pick. If it falls to fifth or sixth, the only other possible outcomes, it will be sent to the Los Angeles Clippers as a part of the trade that netted the Pacers center Ivica Zubac.

“We were trying to protect our upside at the top of the draft mostly,” Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan said of the trade and draft pick protections in February. The Pacers would also have kept the first rounder if it landed between 10 and 30, but that became irrelevant after the Pacers ended the season poorly.

Now, the team has roughly a coin flip chance to hang on to their high draft selection this season. They have an offseason plan for any draft lottery outcome, but a top pick would be preferred. Any direction the Pacers go this summer will be determined by their lottery fate.

Buchanan had much more to say about the Pacers offseason during a recent interview on The Ride with JMV on 107.5 The Fan in Indianapolis. “When we made the trade, we knew there was risk involved just as there is in any other trade. But with the draft pick involved, you’ve got to look at the finances of the situation and the scenario where you keep the pick, the scenario where we lose the pick. We felt that both scenarios provided opportunities to help our team be better next year,” he said. The Pacers eyes toward championship contention right now made the trade worth it, even with the draft-related risk. “We feel like we have a team [that]… We’re in that [Contention] mix when we’re healthy.”

What will the Pacers do to stay contenders?

Buchanan admitted that while long-term thinking is generally prudent, the Pacers have a window right now with Tyrese Haliburton and Pascal Siakam on the roster. They want to go for it. Losing the top-four pick would hurt, but there are other opportunities for the team to get better.

“Should we lose the pick, there’s other opportunities to improve our team through free agency. We still have trades. We gain a pick that we can use in the future for a trade. We felt like there’s a way to improve our team either way with whatever the ping pong balls, however they fall for us. We’re not putting all of our eggs into one basket, that ‘Hey, if we don’t keep this pick, it’s doom and gloom,’ [thinking], because it’s not,” Buchanan said. “Because there’s other windows and other doors that open with that opportunity. If we do get the pick, obviously it’s a great opportunity to add a young player to this team. The core of it comes down to, Ivica [Zubac] is a great player. We’ve been a big believer, a big fan of him for a long time. This team has shown that it’s capable of doing some really special things, and we were missing a starting center that we felt could keep us in that mix.”

Buchanan and Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle have discussed the two directions the Pacers offseason could take. One is more draft focused, with the team’s major addition obviously being a top-four pick in that case. The other way Indiana could go is into free agency. That’s far more likely if they lose their first-round selection. They could use various salary cap exceptions to add talent in that reality, though the roster would still be expensive and near the luxury tax or first apron.

But if the team isn’t providing lip service about their belief that they have a contention window right now, they shouldn’t care as much about those spending barriers. Rather, they should be focused on adding to the team, and in particular replacing some key roles they’ve lost in the last few seasons.

While the Pacers core remains intact, some of their better reserves have either taken deals elsewhere or been traded across the last few seasons. Zubac replaced Myles Turner, but since the Pacers first made the Eastern Conference Finals in 2023-24, they’ve also lost the likes of Jalen Smith, Isaiah Jackson, Bennedict Mathurin, Doug McDermott, and Thomas Bryant. Along the way, most of those departures made sense for one reason or another – Jackson and Mathurin were traded as matching salary for Zubac, as an example. But the Pacers depth, a superpower in recent campaigns, has slowly dripped away.

That influences their needs in the offseason. “Can I say health? Does that count as a need?” Buchanan joked when asked about what the Pacers need next season. To his point: The Pacers had the second-most games lost due to injury and the most salary lost in player absences.

In terms of actual roster needs, Buchanan identified a few. The departure of Mathurin created a big hole for the team’s second unit, and they have some other questions to answer.

“I think one thing this season revealed for us is the need for some scoring off our bench… Probably from the wing position. Losing (Mathurin), you lose some of that. But I think this team, we have some depth. We still have some holes to fill,” Buchanan began. Some of the projected top-four picks in the upcoming draft could fill that role, as could a free agent acquired using some of the Mid-Level Exception.

Most of the Pacers rotation seems fairly set. Their starting five from the 2025 NBA Finals – minus Turner, plus Zubac – seems fairly set. T.J. McConnell and Obi Toppin have obvious roles off the bench. A draft pick could be in the mix, as could one or both of Ben Sheppard and Jarace Walker.

On the interior, Jay Huff currently projects to be the Pacers backup center. Buchanan did mention that position as a possible spot to look at in the offseason.

“I think you look at maybe the five position, do we have a backup center we feel comfortable with? We had (Huff) and (Micah Potter), both had good moments this year. Do we feel good about that position?” Buchanan wondered. Huff’s production given his contract is solid, and he’s never played with Haliburton. But his first season in Indiana was certainly up and down.

Buchanan also mused about the depth of the wing position on his roster, a natural thought with Johnny Furphy injured and Kobe Brown entering free agency. He also mentioned reserve point guard as a possible need – the Pacers cycled through many players in that role during the 2025-26 campaign.

Some of the team’s needs may be filled by internal candidates. And they won’t have a ton of spending power in the offseason. But they will look to make improvements as contenders, and they’ll explore every avenue to make it happen. Including, yes, trading their first-round pick if the right opportunity appears.

“You’ve got to consider everything. If you have a pick up there, you’re looking at obviously who are the players on the board to pick from,” Buchanan began. “But if we can find another player or multiple assets that help us with this team to try to compete for a championship, we’re going to consider everything on that.”

While there will be top-end stability for the Pacers, the offseason could come with changes to the rotation. How those changes look will be determined at Sunday’s draft lottery.

IOWA — Iowa’s new restrictions on SNAP benefits are drawing concern from advocates who say the changes could make it harder for families to buy food and could put future summer assistance for children at risk.

The state’s SNAP waiver took effect January 1, 2026, limiting what items can be purchased based on Iowa’s taxable food list. While that includes widely discussed restrictions on soda and candy, the policy also affects certain prepared foods, creating confusion for shoppers.

“Something as small as whether or not a utensil is included in a food item actually impacts whether or not you can continue to purchase that item using your SNAP benefits,” Paige Chickering, Iowa State Manager for the Save the Children Action Network, said.

Advocates say the rules can be difficult to navigate, especially for people relying on quick meals. Items like prepackaged salads or sandwiches may or may not qualify depending on how they are packaged.

At the same time, new legislation slated for the next session at the statehouse could make those restrictions more permanent by requiring Iowa to continue seeking federal approval for the waiver.

That’s raising additional concerns about the future of Summer EBT, also known as “Sun Bucks,” which provides food assistance to children when school is out.

“This makes that food assistance dependent on a decision made in Washington, D.C. that is just arbitrary and not really dependent on the needs of Iowans and Iowa children,” Chickering said.

The program is expected to help around 220,000 children in Iowa during the summer months. Advocates worry leaving it up to federal approval of the waiver could jeopardize that support if policies change. They also point out that SNAP plays a major role in addressing hunger compared to other resources.

“We know that for every one meal provided by an emergency feeding organization, SNAP provides nine,” Chickering said.

Advocates say they support improving nutrition but argue there are more effective, evidence based ways to do that without limiting food choices.

For now, organizations across Iowa are working to help families understand the new rules, while also pushing lawmakers to reconsider how the policy could impact food access moving forward.

At the University of Michigan’s recent commencement ceremony, history professor Derek Peterson delivered a five-minute speech in which he celebrated all those who have fought for justice at the university, my alma mater. Invoking our legendary sports-focused fight song, he asked the crowd to “sing” for suffragist Sarah Burger, who battled to get women admitted as students; for Moritz Levi, Michigan’s first Jewish professor; for all the students who fought for racial justice at Michigan as part of the Black Action Movement; and for the “pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Peterson’s address was a historian’s invitation to every student and parent in the Ann Arbor stadium to recognize that the fight for Palestinian rights shares roots with our greatest movements for justice, including the struggle against antisemitism.

The backlash, predictably, was swift. The university’s president apologized; the speech was condemned by pro-Israel Jewish organizations and outlets; and I know it upset many college parents, my Gen X peers — we who were raised to believe with all our hearts that Jewish identity and Zionist identity are inextricable.

But to me, Peterson’s speech was a reminder of one of the most important lessons I took away from my time at the University of Michigan: that questioning Zionism is a necessary part of any Jewish life that aims to center justice.

I graduated from Michigan in 1989, and spent much of my last year in Ann Arbor ensconced at Hillel, where I edited a magazine for Jewish students. I’d grown up going to Young Judaea summer camps and had spent a college semester in Israel, where I’d witnessed the beginning of the first Intifada. I returned to find a shanty in the middle of campus that had been erected, a student organizer told our magazine, “to bring the uprising to the community. It is to show the conditions of the Palestinians and the brutal oppression of the Israeli army.”

The shanty evoked those then prevalent on campuses everywhere to symbolize the struggle of Black South Africans against settler colonialism and apartheid. The new shanty on our campus asserted that these words also applied to Israel.

While I was strongly against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza — where Israel would not remove any settlements until 2005 — I was distressed and confused by the shanty’s silent, everpresent message about Israel’s past and present. Is Israel an apartheid state, I wondered?

So I put that question on the cover of our magazine.

The Hillel director called me into his office and somberly expressed his concern. But Hillel International had not yet officially clamped down on student activities that question Israel and Zionism.

So our cover story ran and we dropped our magazine in bundles across campus. At the time, I thought of myself as a liberal Zionist, and I secretly rooted for the student who tried to disprove the devastating charge. But as young journalists, my fellow magazine staffers and I were committed to exploring the views of those who erected the shanty, no matter their hostility to Zionism. We didn’t code the hostility as danger. No one thought we should report our ideological opponents — the kids who fell asleep on their books in the library just like we did — to the dean or to the government for arrest or deportation.

Over my time as an undergraduate, I’d come to recognize in these kaffiyeh-clad Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students the same history-minded, righteous hope that animated me.

Decades later, in the spring of 2024, we all watched as pro-Palestinian student activists — including many Jewish students — set up campus encampments around the country to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza. At Michigan, the encampment was set up on the Diag, the university’s public square, where on the day of my own graduation I’d protested the university’s military research. As the mother of a recent college grad, I was humbled by the determination of these kids, who put up tents, organized teach-ins, and then suffered as police turned off their bodycams and used pepper spray against them. They were lawfully protesting for the university to divest from Israel as it bombed the people of Gaza, the children of Gaza — which is now home to the largest number of child amputees in modern history.

What I understand, and Professor Peterson understands, is that the student activists that he lauded at the commencement are fighting not against Jewish life but for Palestinians’ right to survive daily, as people, and as a people. These activists have asked us to understand, finally, that Zionism is what it does.

“It has been hard work to examine my own mind,” Tzvia Thier, a Jewish Israeli mother, wrote in an essay in the 2021 collection A Land With A People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. As a child, Thier immigrated to Israel from Romania in the wake of the Holocaust. In 2009, Thier accompanied her daughter to “protect” her while she joined an action to fight the evictions of Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Thier was 65, and realized that it was the first time in her life that she had had conversations with Palestinians. She understood then that “it was not my daughter who needed to be protected, but the Palestinians.”

“Many questions leave me wondering how I could have not thought about them before,” she wrote. “My solid identity was shaken and then broken. I have been an eyewitness to the systematic oppression, humiliation, racism, cruelty, and hatred by ‘my’ people toward the ‘others.’ And what you finally see, you can no longer unsee.”

When that shanty went up on Michigan’s campus in the late ’80s, I began to question all that I’d learned about Israel’s founding. I began to question the very idea of an ethnostate — in the name of any people, anywhere — that enshrines the supremacy of one group of people over another.

By the time I became a mother, I’d become anti-Zionist. I understood — with a grief that does not abate — that, as Jews, our history of oppression has become an alibi for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

We must reject the bad faith accusations of antisemitism that have emptied the word of meaning and enabled authoritarian repression. When students on campuses today charge Israel with apartheid and genocide, they are echoing reports from B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization. I ask the parents of my generation to read these reports and do as Thier did — to allow themselves to see what we have not wanted to see.

I stand with the more than 2,000 University of Michigan faculty, staff, students and alumni who have condemned the university’s response to the commencement address heard round the world.

For the sake of all of our children, I ask that we each do all we can to open our community’s heart to Palestinian history and humanity. That we each join the urgent struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people.

This is the way that our Jewish college kids will find the deep and true safety of community: by leaving hatred, fear, and isolation behind; by honoring Jewish history by standing in solidarity with all who are oppressed; and by roaring in a stadium for freedom and justice, along with their entire generation.

You are surely a friend of the Forward if you’re reading this. And so it’s with excitement and awe — of all that the Forward is, was, and will be — that I introduce myself to you as the Forward’s newest editor-in-chief.

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