01
0
1994–2000
Indiana
Pacers
Boom Baby
Nine seconds were enough
0
Title
6
Years
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May 7th, 1995, Madison Square Garden, Game 1 of the conference semi-finals. Eighteen seconds left and the Knicks lead by six.
Reggie Miller hits a three. Six seconds later he steals the inbounds pass and scores again.
There are 13.3 seconds left. The game is tied. He is not finished: two free throws later, Indiana has won.
Eight points in nine seconds. It is the most famous sequence in the franchise's history, and it misleads if taken for an accident.
Because the Pacers of that decade were built for exactly this. A slow team that controlled tempo, that was content to let a game sit within three points in the closing minutes, because it knew that at that moment it had the best player on the floor.
Reggie Miller was not fast and did not jump high. He ran constantly without the ball, which is more tiring to guard, and he shot with a release nobody could contest.
They lost four conference finals in seven years. Three of them to the Bulls or the Knicks.
Then in 2000, with Larry Bird on the bench and Miller aged thirty-four, they finally cleared the hurdle, only to meet the Lakers of Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. It was the last chance and it arrived a year or two late, which is the most honest summary of the whole period.
Context
The era
You need to know what basketball means in Indiana to understand this team.
It is the only American state where the dominant school sport is not football. High school gyms there sometimes hold nine thousand people, in towns of ten thousand. The single-class state tournament, with no divisions by school size, produced the 1954 victory of Milan, five hundred pupils, which eventually became the film Hoosiers.
A professional franchise in that state inherits a crowd that knows the game better than it does.
It showed in the team's choices. Indiana never tried to be spectacular. It played a basketball of fundamentals, screens and prepared shots, precisely the game taught in the state's gyms, and its crowd returned the compliment.
The paradox is that its star was the opposite of a model citizen.
Reggie Miller taunted, trash-talked, sought out Spike Lee in the crowd, mimed a choke towards the opposing bench. In New York he was the outright villain. In Indiana that went down very well, because a state used to being looked down on appreciates someone talking loudly on its behalf.
He played eighteen seasons for one team and never won anything. His statue stands outside the arena.
The players
The architects
The players who defined this era.
02
Rik Smits
03
Mark Jackson
04
Dale Davis
Philosophy
The system
A slow, deliberate game organised around Reggie Miller's constant movement off screens, until a defender lost half a step. Rik Smits offered a reliable post-up when the outside shot would not fall, Mark Jackson slowed everything down from the point, and the defense did the rest. A team designed to make games close at the end, because that was the ground on which it was best.
Market Square Arena then Conseco Fieldhouse, a state where high school basketball fills nine-thousand-seat gyms
Key moments
The defining games
The moments that sealed the legacy.