An Indiana Pacers Blog
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The Fieldhouse is still the Fieldhouse but its sponsor changed its name so the building has subsequently done the same. John Schumann of NBA.com summed up how everyone should feel about the news.
Conseco Fieldhouse is now Bankers Life Fieldhouse. Adjust your life accordingly.
It is interesting that they went with Tupac for the new spokesman though.
This is a fake, joke image.
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As you may have heard, NBA players are still locked out. So there isn’t much going on in real news. But we know you guys need your Pacers fix, so here’s a list of links to marginally interesting goings-on from the past week or two that at least sort of relate to your fine team.
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According to Forbes, there are only eight NBA franchises worth less than $300 million. The Indiana Pacers are one of them, ranking 27th in the league at a paltry $269 million. That puts them right below the league-administered New Orleans Hornets and ahead of only the Memphis Grizzlies, the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Milwaukee Bucks.
The lesson here?
Don’t buy an professional basketball team in a city that starts with the letter M. Or in Indianapolis, probably.
The numbers are of course very troubling, but we knew this already. For now, Herb Simon remains around, and I think there is some semblance of location/ownership stability until he gets on a little further in years and the team becomes either a toy for his heirs or goes up for sale. That’s when things could become truly strained and fans can become truly concerned about the future of the franchise in this state.
Perhaps the impending lockout and the new CBA will do something to reverse the team’s fortunes.
Here are a few charts that Dan Feldman of Piston Powered made based on the Forbes data showing how all the league’s teams stack up financially. (I edited his originals to highlight the Pacers’ rankings.)
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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).
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