Indiana Pacers’ have surprising presence at the NBA Finals

The Pacers haven’t been to the finals in just over two decades, at least one in which they were playing. However, the Pacers were well represented at Denver’s Game One win over the Miami Heat.

The Indiana Pacers twitter account posted a photo of two Pacers’ teammates enjoying themselves watching Nikola Jokic dismantle Jimmy Butler and the Heat.

This comes off of the back of Bennedict Mathurin serving as an NBA Finals correspondent, where he has been asking players like Jamal Murray some interesting questions. It appears that Myles Turner also came out to the Mile High City to take in the finals games and hang out with his teammate who just finished his rookie campaign.

It’s great to see Bennedict being an ambassador of the franchise and putting the Pacers in front of eyeballs across the country watching the NBA finals. Additionally, it’s good to see the Pacers player supporting players from other small-markets such as Denver, who has organically built much of their team from the draft, a strategy that the Pacers will have to use if they want to reach the same summit at the Nuggets are currently closing in on.

This likely corroborates what we have been hearing all year- that the Pacers have a phenomenal team culture and locker room.

All season long we have heard players like Haliburton say that the team culture is healthy and that many of the players on the team are actually more like friends than coworkers. Having both Turner and Mathurin out in Denver seems to corroborate this a bit and speaks to the type of leadership that Haliburton has likely brought to the Pacers locker room.

And while the Pacers are watching the finals from afar this year, the hope is that they will soon be playing for a championship themselves in the coming years.