WASHINGTON – The Indiana Pacers have a player availability puzzle to put together down the stretch of the 2025-26 season, and it involves all three of their players on two-way contracts.

Currently, the Pacers have Jalen Slawson, Ethan Thompson, and Taelon Peter signed to two-way deals. Thompson and Peter have been helpful at different points this season, and all three players are healthy right now. They each project to have a bigger role in the Pacers’ final outings of the season.

But they can’t all play in every game thanks to two-way contract rules, and the Pacers will have to juggle the availability of each player. Indiana has already played multiple games since the All-Star break with just one or two or their two-way contract signees available to play.

That’s because two-way agreements come with a limit – players on such contracts can only be active in 50 games per season (or a proportionate ratio of 50/82 games at the time of signing based on the number of days left in the season). The Pacers couldn’t get by without their two-way contract players at various moments this season due to injuries, with Peter being active for 23 of the team’s first 25 games and Thompson during every game from December 1 through January 17.

During those stretches, Indiana needed their two-way players to field a team or a rotation that actually made sense. It wasn’t a poor use of their active days. But that two-way usage early in the season now requires the Pacers to be strategic down the stretch of 2025-26. They have 22 more games this season but won’t be able to use their two-way talents in all of them.

Peter, a rookie selected in the second round of last June’s NBA Draft, had a rush of games to open the campaign, and he’s allowed to suit up 14 more times this league year. “He’s figuring out what being a professional basketball player is about,” Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle said of Peter and his in-season growth earlier this month. “It’s about being who you are all the time, regardless of make or miss. Just keep playing, just keep staying aggressive.”

Thompson was signed on November 30, which permitted him to appear in 39 games this season. He’s only got 10 left – Thompson was effective right away with the Pacers and played often after his signing. He was named to the NBA G League Next Up game, effectively the G League All-Star game, for his performances this campaign.

Slawson signed his contract earlier today and is eligible for 13 appearances the rest of the way for the Pacers. So, with 22 games remaining, none of the team’s two-way contract players can be active for each remaining game. The team will have to figure out the best strategy when it comes to managing two-way player availability during the final months of the season.

Another consideration for the franchise is that two-way players, by virtue of their contract, can be transferred down to the G League at any time. Peter, Slawson, and Thomspon have combined for 64 appearances with Indiana’s G League affiliate team, the Noblesville Boom, this season. Once the Boom’s season ends – their final scheduled game is March 26 but the team currently holds a playoff spot – then the G League is not an option for two-way players.

So the Pacers have to figure out the best way to deploy, and evaluate, their two-way contract signees during March and April. It’s a lot to manage.

“We’re trying to save games for him,” Carlisle said of the Pacers decision to keep Quenton Jackson, who was previously on a two-way contract, inactive for a game earlier this month. “We want to conserve those games as much as possible.”

Jackson had his contract converted from a two-way deal to a standard deal earlier today, and Slawson filled his two-way slot. It was sharp business for the Pacers, but they lost some available two-way days as a result – Jackson had more than 13 games remaining, but Slawson gets fewer because of the day he signed his contract.

“Two-way guys, your life is a lot of unpredictability of where you’re going to be from day to day,” Pacers general manager Chad Buchanan shared in February.

If the Pacers want to keep their two-way talents around the NBA club as much as possible, their best course of action could be to keep two of the three active in every game and occasionally just have one of the three available. If the team can get to a spot in which they have 15 games left on the schedule and all of their two-way talents have 10+ games left in which they could be active, two of the three could play every night during the final 15 outings. Using all three at once could be difficult, though Indiana may choose to deploy each of Thompson, Peter, and Slawson on the second night of back-to-backs as they manage injuries down the stretch. Putting any of the trio in the G League for a few days is an option, too, but comes with injury risks.

Slawson has not appeared in a game for the Pacers yet this season. Peter is averaging 3.3 points per game while shooting 35.8% from the field while Thompson is posting 4.9 points per contest and knocking down 36.7% of his shots. The Pacers are 15-45 with three back-to-backs remaining and three games left against teams near them in the inverse standings.

MANHATTAN — David Castillo sank his free throw to finish off a three-point play to cut TCU’s lead to two late in the second half. Kansas State had a chance to play spoiler to a team that was on the NCAA Tournament bubble.

For the previous 36 minutes, the Wildcats were more engaged than they had been all season. You wouldn’t have recognized they were just under two weeks removed from their head coach getting fired. The Wildcats were in the middle of a competitive basketball game when there haven’t been many this season.

And then the final four minutes happened, and the Wildcats lost once again.

Kansas State pulled within one score six different times in the second half against the Horned Frogs, only to never take a lead, and then go 4 minutes, 4 seconds without a point after Castillo’s late bucket, leading to a 77-68 loss.

K-State interim coach Matthew Driscoll compared the loss to a broken record, when the Wildcats have been close late, only to fall apart in the end.

“We get there, and then, for whatever reason, we can’t break through,” Driscoll said. “When we got it to a one-point game, I thought that this was when we were going to turn the corner. It just seems like we keep getting close, and we can’t break through that wall.”

Kansas State (11-18, 2-14 Big 12) has been within striking distance in a handful of games this season, only to go on lengthy scoring droughts and come up short in the end.

While there are plenty of games in which the Wildcats were blown out or didn’t show half the effort they showed against the Horned Frogs, there have been enough games that if the Wildcats finished, they wouldn’t be fighting to not finish at the bottom of the Big 12 standings.

K-State’s Feb. 25 loss to Colorado is another example, having two five-plus-minute spurts in which it didn’t score a point. The Wildcats held late leads against West Virginia and Oklahoma State, and in their first game against TCU, only to choke away those leads.

“There’s a lot of frustration,” Khamari McGriff said. “It’s been a fight to continue to focus on the next right thing and let whatever has happened in the past, and just try to get to a point where we can compete for 40 minutes. We gotta look at it with the perspective that we’ve been close a lot of times, and we just gotta figure out how to take that next step.”

Kansas State is running out of opportunities to achieve that “next step.” The Wildcats have a home game on Tuesday, March 3, against a beatable West Virginia team before closing the regular season at Kansas on March 7. After that, it would be surprising if the Wildcats get more than two games at the Big 12 Tournament.

But Driscoll hasn’t seen his team quit, which is almost all he can ask for after what has been a season to forget.

“We just haven’t completed the deal,” Driscoll said.

Wyatt D. Wheeler covers Kansas State athletics for the USA TODAY Network and Topeka Capital-Journal. You can follow him on X at @WyattWheeler_, contact him at 417-371-6987 or email him at wwheeler@usatodayco.com