A Sportswriter Goes to Conseco for the First Time — And of Course Loves It

Conseco Fieldhouse is routinely named one the best NBA stadium. Even those who don’t give it top honors put it in the top few and talk glowingly of its friendly confines that ooze nostalgia. This is all the more impressive since The House That Reggie Built is barely over a decade old.

Not surprisingly, Andrew Unterberger, who is currently on a 60-day trip to visit every NBA stadium, had (almost) nothing but good things to say about the Pacers home court as well.

Upon stepping into Conseco Fieldhouse, I instantly understood the acclaim. The entry pavilion designed to look like a train station, there was immediately a sort of personality, a distinctiveness that most of the other stadiums I’d visited so far couldn’t seem to have cared less about conveying. Even with the potentially-gimmicky train station motif, the whole thing still looked organic, old-school even, like a stadium that had already lived through several generations of Pacer fans. So many of the other East-Coast arenas seemed intent on pushing a kind of forced modernity that this low-key, high-character stadium felt like Wrigley or Fenway by comparison.

Once I got inside and started to walk around a little, I found that the stadium’s interiors were even more impressive. There were your requisite concession stands, swag shops and kid-attractions, but surrounding all of them was this pervasive sense of history. There were countless displays of Pacer cultural artifacts — classic uniforms, old newspaper clippings, signed photographs, just about everything short of Roger Brown and George McGinnis offering handshakes outside the men’s bathroom. It was educational, it was visually compelling — “Like a museum,” a fan named Bob sitting behind me at the game aptly put it. When Bill Simmons (60/30 Sports Guy Reference Counter: 2) suggests that the Basketball Hall of Fame rightly belongs in Indiana, this is why.

As I mentioned, Andrew will be continuing to tour the nation’s arenas and cataloging his thoughts on The Basketball Jones (which is one of the two or three best NBA blogs in the world and you should be reading anyway).