INDIANAPOLIS — The scene spoke to this team’s hard luck history, all the way back to the night it nearly died.
The Indiana Pacers were on the verge of collapse in July 1977, broke and bereft of hope, desperate enough to host a 16-hour telethon on local TV in hopes of selling a preposterous number of tickets — 8,000 of them — just to climb out of debt and live to see another season.
Nancy Leonard wasn’t just there that night; along with her husband, coach Bobby “Slick” Leonard, she was the reason the Pacers survived. They sold 8,028.
The NBA’s first woman general manager sat courtside this past Saturday night at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, the second game Leonard has attended all season due to health concerns, and watched the team she saved from being sold and shipped out of town punch its ticket to the NBA Finals. Amid the celebration, the Pacers’ longest-tenured player weaved his way through the crowd and found the 93-year-old for a long embrace.
“You were with us every step of the way,” Myles Turner told her.
The path of these Pacers, embodied by the Leonards’ resolve in the late 1970s and Turner’s five decades later, has them four wins from their first NBA title, with Game 1 tipping off Thursday night in Oklahoma City. The franchise’s most improbable postseason run hasn’t merely stirred echoes of the past, from Slick’s three ABA titles to Reggie Miller’s 1990s heroics. It’s delivered a proud basketball state a moment it has craved for years.
In Indiana, hoops are as hot as ever.
“This is the first time I have real, real confidence we can win the whole thing,” said Matt Asen, whom Pacers owner Herb Simon has long referred to as the team’s No. 1 fan. (You probably know Asen as Sign Guy. Or Flamingo Guy. Or Hard-Hat Guy. He’s had seats under the Pacers’ basket for over three decades, and he’s hard to miss.) “After Reggie left, there was this big lull there … and it was really hard. But this has been so fun. The city’s pumped. It almost feels better than the Reggie days.”
Meanwhile, the biggest draw in the women’s game, Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, sat courtside for the Game 6 clincher over the Knicks. When she returns from a quad injury in the coming weeks, the raucous crowds that have filled the Fieldhouse recently won’t taper off. Same as the Pacers, the Fever pack the place.
Midway through last season, Clark’s first in the WNBA, the Fever reported staggering spikes in ticket sales (up 264 percent), jersey sales (up 1,193 percent) and corporate sponsors (up 225 percent). So far, there has been no Year 2 letdown.
“It’s hard to put a finger on a more unique sports moment here,” said Chris Gahl, executive vice president at VisitIndy, the city’s lead tourism agency. “The Pacers are in the NBA Finals. The Fever are red-hot. The WNBA All-Star game is coming, on the heels of (2024’s) NBA All-Star Game. It’s a very unique moment in our city’s history, and it’s tipping tourism to record-setting levels.”
Gahl noted that fans are traveling from all over the world to watch the Fever in person, and when his staff pitches convention organizers from across the country on which sporting events they can take in while in town — the Big Ten Championship Game? How about the NCAA Tournament? Or the Indianapolis 500? — it’s the Fever that are often “the most compelling invitation in luring people to our city.”
Not that the Pacers lack appeal. More than 10,000 are expected to fill Gainbridge Fieldhouse for Games 1 and 2 watch parties before the series shifts to Indianapolis next week. (Team brass also offered to fly out every full-time staffer to Oklahoma City for Games 1 and 2.)
After the Pacers dusted the Knicks in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals — or as Asen’s sign read, “Hicks in Six” — fans lingered outside the arena well past midnight, roaring as players pulled out of their parking spots. Truth told, the party has lingered for weeks in the Circle City: an estimated 350,000 were on hand for the 109th running of the Indy 500 on May 25, the same day the Pacers hosted Game 3. Some were brave (read: lucky) enough to pull the double: racers in the afternoon, Pacers in the evening.
“It’s bringing back the old days,” said Craig Emmons, a lifelong Hoosier who owns SOS Pub, a bar that sits across the street from Gainbridge Fieldhouse that has tripled its business over the last month.
Beyond Turner’s embrace with Nancy Leonard, another hug amid the celebration spoke to the Pacers’ tortured past and booming present. During the trophy presentation, Miller pulled in Tyrese Haliburton for several seconds. This was the franchise’s greatest icon and lone NBA Hall of Famer showing respect for the man who now carries the mantle. It was two weeks ago, after Haliburton’s Game 1 heroics in Madison Square Garden — complete with a Miller-esque choke sign that blanketed the tabloids the following morning — when Miller asked Haliburton during a TNT interview what it would mean to lead the Pacers to their first NBA championship.
“It was something I was never able to do,” Miller conceded, “and it haunts me to this day.”
For a moment, Haliburton weighed the possibility. The fifth-year guard smiled and tilted his head, his mind dancing at the thought. He went back to a ride he took during the Indianapolis 500 parade a few years back, and how the city’s streets were lined with swaths of people, too many to count.
“Triple that,” Haliburton finally said, imagining a championship celebration. “It would be ridiculous.
“It to happen.”
The torch has been passed, and even New York writers have noted the striking similarities between the two: string-bean shooter, awkward jump shot, late-game assassin. “The Curse of Reggie Miller is still very much in full force around here,” the New York Daily News’ Mike Lupica wrote after Haliburton connected on three consecutive fourth-quarter runners late in Game 6 that stretched the Pacers’ lead. A moment later, he drained a 32-foot dagger to seal it.
TNT duties aside, Miller had to be beaming. His team was .
He had dropped 34 in the Game 6 clincher in 2000 that sent the Pacers to their first finals; Haliburton dropped 22 and dished out 13 assists Saturday to send them to their second.
Indiana’s won six of its last seven playoff series against New York. Few things make this fan base happier.
“There’s a lot of fans who’ve never seen this kind of success from this organization,” Haliburton said. “They’ve never been alive for it.”
More than anyone on the roster, it’s Turner who can appreciate the long road here. The years of middling seasons and middling records, the persistent trade rumors and perennial disappointments, the superstars who had the city at their fingertips — Paul George and Victor Oladipo — only to decide they wanted out. Turner’s 10-year NBA odyssey feels like 15. To think: when he was drafted in 2015, Frank Vogel was still the coach. He survived the Nate McMillan and Nate Bjorkgren eras and now is thriving under Rick Carlisle.
There was a certain level of conviction — a conviction Turner has earned — when he spoke late Saturday about how the Pacers have climbed from mediocrity to contention for the first time in a decade.
This group, Turner pointed out, was “a new blueprint for the league.”
In other words: the anti-superteam.
Selfless leaders. Stoic coach. Dogged demeanor. Some late-game guile.
“I’ve done this for a long time,” said TV play-by-play man Chris Denari, who’s in his 19th year calling games for the team. “This is the closest locker room I’ve ever been around.”
The Pacers have been wholly embraced by a city and state that has long cherished the game. At one point, 12 of the 13 biggest high school gyms in the country were in Indiana. In 1990, more than 41,000 — still a national record — packed the Hoosier Dome to watch a high school state championship game. The list of icons goes on and on: Oscar and Larry, Wooden and Knight.
The game runs deep here. It always has.
Which is why, during the trophy presentation Saturday night, Carlisle spoke to the fans who’ve waited years for a moment — and a team — like this one.
“In 49 states, it’s just basketball,” Carlisle said. “But this is Indiana …”
Four more wins and the Pacers will celebrate something that would’ve been unthinkable the night of July 3, 1977, when Slick and Nancy Leonard saved the franchise from collapse. Without that telethon, the team would’ve been sold and shipped to another city. Indianapolis would’ve lost a part of its identity.
Carlisle knows simply getting here isn’t enough. Bring home an NBA championship, and his team will live forever in these parts.
“It’s an all-or-nothing thing,” the coach said. “This is no time to be popping champagne.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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