The Indiana Pacers have been living in the shadow of the snobbery of others for far longer than they deserve. They don't play in a cool town, or a cool state. They don't tell a cool story. They play a fun, fluid style of basketball, but the team itself isn’t cool. They're just the team that kicks your arse more often than you kick theirs, and if it’s mostly the arse-kicking part that might make you sad, it surely adds some insult to that injury that they're not telling a fashionable story while doing it. They're a four-seed in the Eastern Conference, from the 25th-largest media market in America, and so they're easy to ignore until they aren't. Like now, and maybe only for a moment.
And here they are, in this moment, back in the Eastern Conference Finals for the second year in succession because, well, up yours. They don't have a better answer than that, and truthfully, they don't need one. They're here and you're not, so spin on that, you snotty, arrogant, elitist bastards.
It's not that difficult to process why this is, of course. In a culture in which everything must tell a story, Indiana's is a couple of paragraphs, tops. They like to play fast and get in your way, and they are quietly adept at both. Their most recognized player, Tyrese Haliburton, made his bones with the absolutely invisible Sacramento Kings and is best known for being voted the most overrated player by his peers—this season. They are the perfectly anonymized four-seed in the less respected half of the playoff bracket; fourth seeds have never won a title and only come close three times. They are meant to take the knee to the conference's elite, and under no circumstances to beat them, convincingly, in five games. On the rare occasions that teams like this advance beyond their station, they tend to get no credit because everyone is having too much fun slagging off their vanquished superiors as frauds.
Plus, it's Indiana, which has a barely discernible backstory, either contemporarily or historically. They do not have the tragic lyricism of the Tatum-less Celtics or Curry-less Warriors, the celebrity-and-angst-powered Knicks, the increasingly singlehanded Nuggets or the new-car-smell FOTL fascinations of the Thunder or Timberwolves. They do not have a local weepy-eyed superfan in the mold of Bill Simmons, or maybe they do and no one has heard of him. In their own sport, they are the celebrity warmup act to Caitlin Clark. They are also strikingly healthy and very competent without being easily defined or celebritized, the kind of team you'd happily take for your hometown team if you weren't already coveting about nine alternatives.
In fairness, the Pacers have tormented the Knicks in occasional postseasons, most recently in the second round last year. But that rivalry glowed most noticeably a quarter-century ago, powered by TNT parrot-on-retainer Reggie Miller. Indiana's last championship came in 1973, the same year New York won its last one, but that was in a league that has been dead for nearly half a century and is only remembered for having introduced a colorful basketball nobody uses and the three-point line that everybody does. The Pacers have reached one final as a current league member, in 2000, and ran directly into Shaquille O'Neal in his prime and Kobe Bryant at 21, which means you don't remember them for that, either.
Yet there is something to this Pacers team that a certain stripe of basketball psycho has recognized, which is that they produce offense with a level of ease that few teams have, and defend with a quirky stubbornness that casuals catch onto only after the games end. They lead the league in nothing but are better than average at everything, all of which was on clear display Tuesday when they closed out the Cleveland Cavaliers, 114-105. Cleveland took a 19-point lead four minutes into the second quarter, and as they say, the 19-point second-quarter lead is the most dangerous lead in basketball. Haliburton went on a Curryesque heater to reduce the Cavs' halftime lead to four, and Pascal Siakam and Thomas Bryant highlighted a dominant third quarter in which the Pacers smothered the Cavs after looking like the smotheree for most of the first half.
You might be forgiven here if you don't know Bryant's name. Few do outside Indiana, in part because that's where he went to school; he’d been a backup for four NBA teams over eight seasons before being dealt to the Pacers earlier this season. He fits right in that way; the Pacers’ rotation outside of Haliburton, Siakam, a ringholder with Toronto, and perpetual name-floated-in-trade-rumors Myles Turner, does not possess many easily recognized names—quick, first names for Mathurin, Nesmith, Nembhard, or Sheppard, and no peeking. Head coach Rick Carlisle is never the first answer to the question, "Who coaches the Indiana Pacers?" even though he's been there twice.
It is too facile to say that this is how the Pacers want it, to be unnoticed and only remembered in passing. They assuredly don’t, and would like to be famous just as much as anyone else. They'd appreciate it if you remembered that they got to the conference final just last year, so their return is hardly a fairy tale. But their claim to fame, on balance, is that they have no claim to fame. They just do enough things well to make casual observers wonder why they are still doing it, and this will be increasingly true whether they end up playing the Knicks or Celtics, which is to say the Knicks. This will be in its own way a nostalgic ride, if only because Knicks fans have watched the Pacers work them more in May than the other way around; indeed, the last time Knicks fans watched their team win a playoff series at home was against the Pacers, 26 years ago.
But that's just Knicks fans trying to reignite an antique grudge they don't really feel in their hearts—it’s there, but nothing like the feeling they have for the Celtics, or the very concept of Trae Young, or even the Nets. Like everyone else, they won't notice the Pacers until they have to, which is rather the way the Cavaliers viewed the Pacers last night, and the Milwaukee Bucks a week before that. The Pacers are the perfect stealth team for this bizarre postseason. They seem fine if you don't recognize that until it's too late.
