Pacers and Racers: Indiana will be epicenter of sports world this weekend

The Indiana Pacers are set to begin the Eastern Conference Finals on Wednesday against the New York Knicks, giving them a chance to earn their first NBA Finals’ berth since 2000. While the first two games of the series will be played in New York at Madison Square Garden, for Game 3 on Sunday, May 25, the action will shift to Indianapolis and the Gainbridge Fieldhouse. 

On the same day, starting that afternoon, is the annual Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The “Greatest Spectacle in Racing” happening on the same day that the Pacers host an Eastern Conference Finals game is a real rarity, and makes for a massive sports day in Indianapolis that’s difficult to match.

The Indy 500 and the Pacers are linked beyond just sharing a schedule for a major event, however. The inaugural Indianapolis 500 race was run all the way back in 1911 — with its first INDYCAR event in 1996 — so, by the time that the team that would become the Pacers was getting its start in the American Basketball Association in 1967, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and motorsport, were already a significant and established part of Indiana’s history. 

Richard Tinkham, Chuck Barnes, Bob Collins, John DeVoe, and Chuck DeVoe were the original owners of the then-unnamed ABA team, which Indianapolis was granted the rights to thanks to their collective purchase of a franchise. When the team name was announced, general manager Mike Storen, per NBA.com, stated that, “we feel we will set the pace in the ABA, we will be playing at the Fairgrounds Coliseum across the street from where the (harness racing) pacers race at the fair, and the pace in auto racing is set in Indianapolis each May.” Indiana’s long history of harness racing wasn’t honored just because it was worth honoring, but because Chuck Barnes was a “horse racing enthusiast.” Barnes, who founded the agency Sports Headliners, also served as the business manager for a number of racers, such as Mario Andretti, Roger Ward and both Al and Bobby Unser.

Given that Indy’s motorsport scene utilized a “pace” car, and that the “pace” was one of two gaits allowed in harness racing, was there ever any other choice for the name of the basketball team?

There was, actually, as each of the investors were supposed to come up with a handful of options to mull over, but when “Pacers” was presented to the board to make a decision it was the clear choice given the double meaning that paid homage to Indiana’s history of racing — and the name came courtesy of Chuck Barnes’ wife, Lois, per NBA.com’s reporting on the subject, not the investors themselves. The team was nearly called the Indianapolis Pacers rather than Indiana, however, but since the original plan — one carried out for the first season of the team’s existence — was to play games all over the state, they instead went with that rather than the city name. 

The Pacers had a ton of success in the ABA, appearing in the Finals five times in nine seasons, while taking home three championships. In the NBA, though, things have gone much differently: they’ve made it to the NBA Finals just one time, in 2000 while coached by Hall of Famer Larry Bird, when they lost to a Lakers team led by Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. They have made it to the Eastern Conference Finals on four occasions since then, which lined the Pacers up with the Indianapolis 500.

In last season’s conference finals, the Pacers were swept by the eventual-champion Boston Celtics, but that’s not why the series didn’t match up with the Indy 500: the date of the race, May 26, happened to be an off day for the series, flanked by Games 3 and 4 in Indianapolis. So, a big sports weekend all the same, but not quite lined up. In the case of these three other Eastern Conference Finals trips, though, the Pacers played on the same day as the Indy 500 was run.

May 30, 1999: Pacers vs. Knicks

Fitting that the first such occurrence of the Pacers in the conference finals and the Indy 500 running on the same day went down against the Knicks, given that they’re Indiana’s opponents in 2025, as well. This was Game 1 of the series — a late, Memorial Day weekend start for the conference finals, but right on time for the Indianapolis 500 — which the Knicks would win against Reggie Miller’s Pacers, 93-90, before finally taking the series in six. New York would end up losing to San Antonio Spurs, who won their first NBA championship thanks to the “Twin Towers” duo of David Robinson and Tim Duncan, as well as the coaching of Gregg Popovich.

On the Indy 500 side, Swedish racer and 1998 Indy Racing League champion Kenny Bräck won the Indianapolis 500, shortly before tipoff in Indiana. It was his only Indy 500 win, but it was also the first-ever for a Swedish driver. Bräck would have another notable Indy 500 performance in 2003, when he returned and set the fastest qualifying time 18 months after surviving a horrific crash that saw him break his right thighbone, breastbone, lower back, and ankles. 

May 30, 2004: Pacers vs. Pistons

Once again, Memorial Day weekend was also in the final days of May, but this time, the conference finals were further in. The Pacers — led by Jermaine O’Neal — and Detroit Pistons were tied, two games a piece, as Game 5 kicked off in Indianapolis. The defensive-minded Pistons would end up taking Game 5, 83-65, going up 3-2 in a series they’d eventually win — like with the Celtics 20 years later, Indiana lost to the eventual champions, who defeated the Lakers in five games.

As for the Indianapolis 500, the victor was Buddy Rice, racing for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing in a dominating performance that saw him win the pole position, lead the race for the most laps, and even come away victorious in the pit stop challenge beforehand. 

May 26, 2013: Pacers vs. Heat

The Pacers, led by Paul George, took on the LeBron James-era Heat at the Fieldhouse, as Miami looked for its third NBA championship. The Pacers would lose to the Heat in Game 4, 102-90, and while they pushed the series to six games by winning Game 5 in Indiana two days later, the Heat would end things there with an emphatic 117-92 win to send them to the Finals once more. The Spurs would end up falling to Miami there in a seven-game series.

Things went better for Tony Kanaan than they did for the Pacers, as, in his 13th attempt to win the Indianapolis 500, he finally managed the feat. Given the Pacers are currently 0-3 in Eastern Conference Finals games that overlap with the Indianapolis 500, are 0-3 in the series those games happen in, maybe they’re setting themselves up for their own long-awaited Kanaan moment here against the Knicks in 2025.

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