I was boiling up in the way-too-warm bleachers at Purdue’s aquatic center on Sunday evening, waiting for my oldest son’s final swim race of the weekend, when a funny thing happened. The public address announcer took advantage of a brief moment between events to proclaim to the crowd that the Indiana Pacers had defeated the New York Knicks in Game 7 of their playoff series.
The news drew a decent amount of applause, and even among that swim-centric crowd, it wasn’t entirely surprising to hear. I had been watching bits and pieces of the game here and there on my phone as I was able, and I certainly wasn’t the only one in the building doing so; Franklin Regional Swim Team head coach Zach DeWitt was spotted on the pool deck watching over a colleague’s shoulder during portions of the evening warmup session.
For the first time in a decade, there’s genuine excitement in Indiana about the local NBA outfit. A team that sat in purgatory for years, neither good enough to make a playoff run nor bad enough to earn a high lottery pick, has now climbed its way back to relevance.
The Pacers matter again.
And unlike the last almost-a-contender version of the Pacers, the Paul George-Roy Hibbert incarnation that made the Eastern Conference finals in 2013 and 2014 before being felled by the greatest basketball player of all time, they’re actually a ton of fun to watch.
Myles Turner has shown the best version of himself at the most opportune times. T.J. McConnell has overachieved his way to cult hero status. Pascal Siakam has been more or less exactly what Indiana paid that hefty winter ransom for — a playoff-tested second banana who’s capable of getting big buckets in big moments. The team’s up-tempo pace has made for highly entertaining basketball all season long.
And Tyrese Haliburton has become the type of star that the Pacers have been missing since the days of Reggie Miller (depending on how you feel about the artist formerly known as Ron Artest). The Wisconsin native has been exactly what this franchise needed — an All-NBA talent with a marketable personality to match.
It’s an easy team to root for, whether you’re from Indiana or not. As a basketball fan in general, the Pacers are pretty damn hard to dislike.
That doesn’t mean we can’t still be honest about what’s happening here.
There’s little denying that the Pacers’ road to this point was paved clean by injuries. The Milwaukee Bucks were without former league MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo for the entirety of their first-round series, and All-Star Damian Lillard also missed a pair of games. The New York Knicks were a MASH unit in round two, with such key pieces as Julius Randle and O.G. Anunoby missing and several of their teammates hobbled for large chunks of the series.
And those weren’t exactly elite teams even when healthy — the Knicks won 50 games and the Bucks 49 during the regular season. So we might want to pump the brakes before we start throwing around words like “contender.” Indiana is nowhere near capable of winning an NBA championship right now.
In all likelihood, the party is going to end before the month of May does. The Boston Celtics are a prohibitive favorite to win the East, regardless of whether injured center Kristaps Porzingis comes back against the Pacers or not. And given that Indiana has never been a hot free-agent destination, it’s going to be difficult to make this team substantially better in the short term unless Bennedict Mathurin (who’s missed this whole playoff run) can blossom into a star.
No honest assessment of the Pacers reaches the conclusion that this group is a title contender as currently consistuted. But it doesn’t matter. The injury situations that made it significantly easier to advance past Milwaukee and New York steer us toward the fairly obvious conclusion that this run to the conference finals is fool’s gold. It does not matter.
What does matter is the fact that the Indiana Pacers matter again. No matter how many or few games they last against the Celtics, they’re playing with house money (the exact term that DeWitt used to pre-emptively throw water on any trash talk that might come from obnoxious Boston fans like me over the next week or two). Anything good that happens from here on out is indeed gravy.
For the first time in a while, the most basketball-mad state in the country has a pro team it can be proud of and enjoy watching. Not quite the stuff you hang banners for, but a win nonetheless. Celebrate it.
Ryan O’Leary is the sports editor for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
