*raises hand*

I'm a lifer around here too, I'm 35 and remember the Pacers when they held the telethon to save the team from folding. I remember the playoff runs of the 90s and early 2000s very well. I remember taking Boston to 5 games as an 8 seed and Chuck Person damn near beating them (1989 I think). The Knicks and Pacers was a fantastic rivalry. The 1994 team overacheived for sure. I think the 1995 team was very good, the best game of that run was against Orlando, the game where the lead changed 4 times in the last 12 seconds. Smits fakes Tree Rollins in the air and shoots the jumper at the buzzer to win by a point. One of the best games I've ever seen. The late 90s version of the Pacers, leading up to the Finals run, was awesome too. Reggie broke the Knicks' hearts in the Garden with a 3 there, too, I believe it was on Mother's Day (my birthday) that year, great birthday present. Couldn't quite get over the Bulls hump, had some battles there too. Notably the game where Reggie pushed off on Jordan and nailed the game winning three. The 99 series against the Knicks was terrible. Poorly officiated for a lot of it, I do think there was a large market bias, but admittedly, the Knicks were the last team we wanted to see. I would have rather seen the Heat that year. Beating the Knicks in 2000 to get to the finals was very sweet, to say the least. Perkins, Mullin, Miller, Smits, Best, and Davis that was a very good, cohesive core, with guys that knew their roles and played together. Could have kept ourselves toward the top of the East, battling with Detroit, had the brawl not occurred. Funny how far that put the Pacers behind, after all of the fallout.

I always thought that Rik Smits was a bit underappreciated. I thought the year after he retired and that team got blown up a little bit, that he would be the piece that they missed. Turns out to be right, too. They needed a center that could score and O'Neal wasn't there yet. Smits was highly frustrating, though, because at 7'4" he should have gotten half a dozen rebounds just by accident. He never did really rebound well, and played next to no defense. But he was a reliable scorer, and I have seen few big men shoot an 18 foot jumper as well as he did. Ewing, Malone, and who else? And he had a jump hook from the side of the lane that was nearly unstoppable.

Thanks for the memories, guys! I didn't catch this last night but I believe I need to now....

Also, KK, where did you grow up? Where are you now, loosekanen?

@vix--I think the brand of basketball is better and more freeflowing now, but I think the rivalries suck. Nowhere do you see the hate of the Lakers/Celts of the 80s, the Pistons/Bulls of the late 80s and early 90s, or the Knicks/Pacers and Kings/Lakers of the late 90s....

Romantically this is a nice thing to say but it doesn't work out in practice.

Thing that is better now: rule changes that limit defensive hand-checking and contact, opening up play a bit and getting away from the brute force style of ball most successfully demonstrated by the Pistons circa 1990 and the Knicks a few years later.

Thing that is worse now: overly punitive penalties/fines/suspensions for players who get into altercations. People pay to watch players play, not be suspended, and also appreciate emotion, not automatons. The league is so wrong about this it's baffling. Maybe they actually do make more money by appealing to people who otherwise view the league as "thugs" and other thinly veiled racism but decide to tune in because the league regulates the emotion out of the game and makes sure they look tidy on the sideline when they're not playing. But I doubt the suspension-heavy policy is worth the collateral damage that comes with it.

It might not be better, but I loved those low scoring games of the mid 90's. Every point mattered a lot more, so you never knew if an offensive rebound in the 1st Qtr or a dive to save a ball from going out of bounds in the 3rd would be the difference between a win or a loss. I loved being on edge as a little kid for 48 minutes, ready to scream at the TV for any little mistakes my team made.

so glad that the truth of the whole matter was brought to light in the beginning.. these playoff series' were only of great importance because of the semi-retirement of MJ

Yeah if the NBA was still like this, I would definitely be more inclined to watch. I love basketball like that, which is probably why I watch college a lot more than the NBA.

I started watching in the mid 80s, but I have the best memories of the NBA during the 90s as well. I think it's the NBA on NBC theme, that makes anything better.

Any Canadians who want to see this, it's on TSN tomorrow night at 8:30 and TSN2 at 11:30.

QFMFT

Another point to mention is that the peak of the Pacers directly coincided with the death of Indiana's two biggest sporting identities, the CART/IRL split that killed the Indy 500 in 1994 and the death of the single-class high school basketball tournament in 97 I believe. My dad took the death of that tournament harder than the death of his own mother. I remember going to the Wigwam in Anderson for regional Saturday (the equivalent of NCAA round of 64 and 32 games... played in the same freaking day) and never seeing more passion than on that court.

for reference... 9000 capacity and standing room only. Some classic 1988 youtube footage from a regional final there when the tourney still mattered:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VoHQAS7VPE

Suddenly... it was dead. Not to mention that 1993 was the last time Purdue or IU basketball was truly relevant. From a state that bleeds basketball this was hard to take.

So Indiana NEEDED the Pacers in those years.

What's the story there, why'd it die?

The IHSAA didn't want as unbalanced a tourney so they broke it down by size of school, just like football. It was a hugely divided choice and still is.

I'll elaborate more tomorrow, I'm bowling right now.

To explain further, a point of view and some history:

"I prefer to keep it at four classes because I think it levels the playing field and gives our athletes a lot better opportunity to compete with their peers at different levels based on their talent pool," said Northwest High School Principal Larry Yarell.

"In 1995, a study committee recommended multiclass tournaments in boys and girls basketball, along with soccer, baseball, softball and volleyball. The IHSAA board approved it 12-5 the next spring, and a referendum among the state’s principals upheld the vote."

Basically, there was a vocal portion of coaches, principals, and fans that wanted to see more teams with a realistic chance to win. Just how big that percentage was is up for debate but that was the motivation behind the move.

The class system makes sense for sports like football, physical sports with large teams, as the breakdown is by school size. In basketball, a sport with 10-14 players, there's not a ton of difference between a 1A school and a 4A except obviously drawing from a larger pool is more likely to find stars.

The Wigwam is the single best place I have ever watched a sporting event--pro, college, doesn't matter. I've seen my share of each, too. I grew up about 5 miles east of Anderson, where the Wigwam is, in a little town. Watched plenty of games there even though I went to a small school out of that county. Spent countless weekend nights as a boy listening to games from there.

Consider this--this high school conference, the NCC, had 8 teams. At least 5 of the top ten capacity HS arenas in the nation-yes, nation, were in that conference. The movie Hoosiers was an embellishment, but not by as much as you think.

The IHSAA really screwed up when they killed that piece of magic.

In my eyes it was a money grab. The idea of bringing four sets of towns to Indy for state championships was good on paper... because surely HS basketball is so popular that nobody will care, right?! But in reality it just disenfranchised the entire tournament.

Consolidation had a lot to do with it too. You had large 4000 kid mega campuses opening up and the idea was that the little schools just couldn't compete anymore. So why not give everyone a realistic shot at being state champs? These administrators either didn't realize what they were doing, completely doubtful in my eyes, or there were economic projections that won them over... much more likely imo.

My mother is an Indiana public school superintendent, was a principal at the time (mine, huge beat ldo) and despite the pleas of the rest of her family and community voted in favor of the split. I kind of haven't forgiven her 13 years later. It's a big ****ing deal to the people of Indiana even though people my age are the last ones that really care.

Current Butler University head coach Brad Stevens brought our town their last sectional title that will ever mean anything and that was 15 years ago. That's the last happy memory I have of watching HS basketball... and I played through HS.

But yeah... Hoosiers have hijacked this thread... my original point stands. This doc captured a lot of what defined me and my childhood. I imagine there are a few hundred thousand Hoosiers out there who feel the same way about certain points in our lives. We all remember where we were when these series went down.

And even though I appreciate New Yorkers as basketball fans I still resented them for living in New York. If they lost their series they've still got that amazing cosmopolitan city to be in and keep them busy until next year. If we lost in Indiana all we had then was to think about next year.

I don't understand why that would kill the tournament? Weren't the big schools usually winning? Why didn't the tournament for big schools just become the de facto tournament that everyone followed?

From what I've read on it, there were some smaller schools that had established basketball programs, and they kind of ended up having nobody to play in the smaller divisions. It took away the sense of accomplishment from some of these schools, and just made the whole event a lot less prestigious. I saw a coach who said he would much rather win his sectional championship in the old tournament than a state championship in the new one.

Equate a small school winning a sectional and then regional with George Mason beating Mich St and UConn. That's what kept it alive.

This sums it up. For example, my school, Shenandoah, enrollment of 450, made the Final Four in 1981. My school's girls teams have won state and made 3 final games in the multiclass system. Both are looked upon well, but guess which one is legendary around those parts?

Yeah, the class splits sucked :-/

I grew up in Kokomo (also in the NCC) and would have gone there if I hadn't moved up here (Detroit) the summer before my freshman year of high school.

Highlight of my non-golf athletic career was hitting a game winning three at the end of the 8th grade county championship at Memorial Gym.

This. You had the traditional rivalries. There would be a few large schools, a few medium schools and a couple podunk ****holes in a sectional... but if podunk had a decent 5 then as Slick Leonard said in the 30 for 30 doc the entire community completely shut down for that sectional game against the neighboring "metropolis." If you were on a team that beat the big school in a sectional, congrats, you are now town hero on the level with a guy returning from war. I'm not saying it's right, it just meant that much.

And there was no sight greater than an ENTIRE community coming together behind 5 kids to win a tournament game. I'll never forget seeing it happen with a little school Alexandria, couldn't have been more than 5,000 people in the whole town, that won the sectional and regional with two kids that ended up starting at MAC schools and three bruisers. Half the 10,000 people in that gym were from that little town and there has never been more passion/vitriol in a gym that I've seen.

With the change to classes you had communities that weren't all that connected traveling to play one another for small school tournies that didn't matter. Sure, the big schools still have exciting games and players, Oden and Conley were doing it for the same team in high school the year before they did it at OSU, but there was never that chance for the amish school with 8 kids named Yoder to get that shot to slay goliath.

I'm really not making much sense anymore. I don't think I could adequately explain it. The only thing I'm thinking to equate it to is the passion you feel for a first love, and then continued pain and reminders of how someone took it from you.

No, as a matter of fact, you make perfect sense.

You're right about the rivalries now. There really isn't one.

I was a senior when they had the last single class tourney, we won it. It was a pretty big deal.