Over the years the Indiana Pacers have survived some really interesting things take place. They lived through the ABA/NBA merger. They were a part of the most horrific brawl in NBA history. More than once the team faced the threat of being removed from the community that first embraced it.
Along the way, the story has not been straightforward or expected. That’s part of what has made Indiana Pacers history so much fun. An unconventional team in a small market leads to unconventional storylines.
Let’s look at five of the strangest stories that stick out in Pacers history. From trades to saving the team from bankruptcy in unconventional ways, there’s a lot of crazy stuff here. Buckle in!
Ron Artest asked for a month off to promote a rap album
Ron Artest’s (now known as Metta World Peace) time as an Indiana Pacers player was interesting in many ways. Obviously, there was his infamous participation in the Malice at the Palace brawl that highlights it all.
Artest was given the longest suspension in the history of the NBA and charged with assault as a result.
There was also the time Artest showed up to practice in a bathrobe for who knows what reason.
There’s a pool of Pacers/Arest stories to pull “weird” moments from, but once upon a time, Artest asked for a month off. He had a rap album that was set to debut in the coming months and his schedule outside of his normal day job was about to get busy to help promote it.
Artest was quickly given approval on his time off request, but not exactly what he had asked for. He got just two games off because head coach Rick Carlisle benched him.
Supposedly this was not a formal suspension with a cut in pay, simply a benching, which is more or less what Artest asked for.
When asked about the benching, Artest explained that he felt misunderstood and that he was simply hoping to rest his body.
"“My body has been aching, I was going to take some time off and I said it the wrong way,” Artest said. “Everything that happened wasn’t too negative. I kind of surprised the team by wanting to take some games off, just to get back together, maybe stay home for a little bit, rest a little bit and come back.”"
Running around doing promo work for an upcoming album is probably exhausting, I’ll give him that.
Metta World Peace was often misunderstood throughout his NBA career, this was just one of many times.
The Pacers held a telethon to save the franchise
If you needed to sell a ton of season tickets to generate enough cash flow to keep the Pacers in town, how might you go about it?
Maybe you’d sit outside a grocery store and pass out fliers. Maybe you’d try to secure some digital advertising on social media.
In the late 70s, you held a telethon.
Normally a format used to generate revenue for philanthropic or non-profit reasons, the Pacers turned to the telethon format with the goal of selling 8,000 season tickets, the amount the team needed to be somewhat stable financially, to keep the team in Indiana.
After joining the NBA in the ABA/NBA merger, the Pacers had to pay a large sum of dues to the NBA. They and the other ABA teams joining the league also weren’t permitted to share league-wide revenue for the first few seasons of their existence.
Already short on cash prior to the merger, this was a major hit for the team. They had been selling off star players and depleting their talent to remain afloat from a business standpoint, leading to a lower quality of basketball and less interest from fans. The negative cyclical nature of the team’s first decade in the NBA was hard to watch.
Still, Slick Leonard and his wife, also employed by the team, didn’t want to see what they had helped to build in the ABA go to waste. The team leaving Indiana would have been devastating for the community and for the Leonards.
And so Leonard’s wife, Nancy, suggested a telethon.
Slick hosted, the community rallied, and the team sold the tickets they needed to sell with not much time to spare. The Pacers would stay, at least until the next threat of relocation.
The Indiana Pacers traded a point guard for a marketing contractor
The 2020 trade deadline is two months behind us at this point. Though the Pacers didn’t make any moves at the deadline, most of us would assume that had Myles Turner been moved, it probably would have been for something like draft capital and some additional shooting on the wings to make up for the spacing that they’d be losing in Turner’s departure.
How oppositional do you think fans would have been if the team traded Turner for a week’s worth of work from a marketing executive from another team?
That’s similar to what happened in the early 80s.
As told by Ben Pickman at Sports Illustrated, contract work from Jon Spoelstra was traded to the Indiana Pacers for point guard Don Buse.
Spoelstra had just fashionably created a revenue stream for the Blazers by bringing the radio broadcast in-house, which according to SI generated more radio revenue for the Blazers than the rest of the league combined.
The Pacers were struggling. Just a few years removed from joining the NBA and incurred fees that gutted the team, the team’s owner was looking to sell. The threat of moving to Sacramento or another major market was present again, and Indiana faced the possibility of losing its team.
Bringing in someone like Spoelstra to help inject a freshness to how the team generates profits was seen as an ideal move. The team wanted him on a short contract, but the Blazers initially weren’t privy to the idea of letting him help a competitor.
When the Blazers lost their point guard to injury, the Pacers jumped at the opportunity to fill a need for the Blazers to retain Spoelsta’s services. They offered to send Buse to the Pacers if they agreed to let them utilize Spoelstra’s strengths for a short time.
Spoelstra worked for the team for one week and received a desktop computer he had been eyeing as a gift for his work with the team.
Of his time in Indy, Pickman/SI says:
"Initially, the NBA kept the details of the deal quiet, omitting Spoelstra’s name from the announcement. But he went off to Indiana anyway, working just a single week with the team. He met with prospective owners and helped Indiana learn more about Portland’s in-house radio success. A 1986 New York Times story also reports that he turned in an 100-page document of suggestions that Spoelstra said at the time “he would have been afraid to try in Portland,” but he has no recollection of that document."
Spoelstra helped the team stay in Indiana, as they were sold months after his visit.
Lance Stephenson got inside LeBron’s head
Lance Stephenson is chaotic, yet peaceful. An impactful NBA player intertwined with some of the mid-2010s greatest playoff stories, yet mostly just a role-playing NBA player. He’s the yin and the yang all at once.
The Indiana Pacers, facing off with LeBron James and the Miami Heat in the 2014 Eastern Conference Finals, needed something out of the ordinary to have any shot of beating the powerhouse that was Miami. Enter Lance.
Stephenson was tasked with guarding LeBron James, an assignment that no man will ever wish to have the chance to take upon himself. James had just come off a regular season in which he was averaging 27.1 points, 6.9 rebounds, and 6.3 assists.
And Stephenson did an OK job of defending James, as well as one can do with such an impossible task. The Pacers, Paul George, and Stephenson would take James, Dwyane Wade and the Heat to six games in the Eastern Conference Finals.
In Game 6, the Pacers were facing elimination on their home floor. Stephenson would need to dive deep to find a way to get inside James’s head and keep him from scoring at such a blistering pace to save the season.
And so he leaned down and blew in his ear.
Speaking to TheScore, Stephenson talked about why he did it:
"A lot of serious moments in the season where we were talking junk and going at each other. I was really trying to get him mad. Like, really trying to win the game, trying to get him unfocused. And I was trying anything. For you to do something to somebody and they don’t respond, they keep continuing and playing hard, it’s like, how do I, I was just trying to find stuff. I don’t regret it, but sometimes I look at it like, ‘Why did I do that? What made me do that?’ LeBron was such a good player, you know. I was trying to do anything to get him frustrated. … It’s going to be different, just trying to be friends with LeBron."
It’s one of the most memorable moments of the last 10 years for Indiana, but still one of the weirdest. And you know what? It kind of worked.
James scored just 7 points that night, had 5 fouls, and 3 turnovers.
While we can’t say the blowing in James’s ear actually got to his head and had an impact, the body of work that Stephenson put together was a force in the way of the Heat.
This is not how this was supposed to go, Pacers. pic.twitter.com/18xZaD60nC
— Caitlin Cooper (@C2_Cooper) June 19, 2017
A photoshoot killed the Pacers title aspirations
How superstitious are you?
Some sports fans have special rituals for game days that almost assuredly have no bearing whatsoever on the actual outcome of games.
Maybe it’s a lucky pair of socks, the exact right order of your evening leading up to tip-off, or a special song you play during commercial breaks.
Hey, if it’s not proven to not work, keep doing it…
Pacers fans are probably more superstitious than most, especially given the photoshoot that gutted the Pacers’ Finals aspirations.
iPacers detailed the photoshoot that ended it all gracefully.
The Pacers in 2013-14 looked like a legitimate threat to make the Finals. As we detailed just before, the Pacers took the Heat to six games in the Eastern Conference Finals.
Prior to that, though, an infamous GQ cover with George Hill, Paul George, David West, Roy Hibbert, and Lance Stephenson appeared.
After the photo was released, the Pacers went barely above .500 (14-13) to close the season after winning over 75 percent of their games prior to the photo’s existence.
The team would trip and fall into the Eastern Conference Finals, and lost in Game 6, as we know. Paul George would return for two more seasons, but this season was their best chance of making the NBA Finals.
We can’t prove it was the photo, but we can’t prove that it wasn’t.