Pro sports are a bottom-line enterprise. Yet there must be honor in defeat, or there can be no honor in victory.
If you can’t see that in the Indiana Pacers, that’s a level of cynicism to be rejected. After all, how many franchises have been saved by a telethon?
In the deciding Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Pacers 103-91 Sunday night. The Pacers went down without playoffs hero Tyrese Haliburton, felled by injury in the first quarter.
By most measurements, the Pacers were the biggest underdogs in NBA Finals history. In 23 playoff games, their opponent was favored in 17.
The Pacers’ whole exceeded the sum of the parts. They became the first team in NBA history featuring eight players with 200 or more points in a single playoffs.
Still, no matter how against-the-odds the Pacers’ run has been, the evolution of a small-market franchise is more improbable than you imagine.
Would you believe their road to glory didn’t even begin on a road? It began an ocean away.
Or that a men’s basketball franchise was rescued by a woman? Nancy Leonard deflected the credit in an interview before the Game 7 loss, but that’s what happened.
“I was a nervous wreck,” she recalled of almost losing the team in 1977. “I knew if we lost these players, lost this franchise, we’d never have another one back. We’d already had one in the ’50s that we lost.”
The former Indianapolis Olympians folded in 1953 after four seasons. During the days of the ABA, Nancy, now 93, was the assistant general manager and ran the front office. Her husband, Bob “Slick” Leonard, was the coach and general manager.
A long-ago telethon set the stage for 2025’s title run
In June 1977, the couple were in Hawaii to watch a college basketball tournament. The setting was so beautiful — condo on the golf course, oceanfront view — that they decided to stay a week.
Then the phone rang. Gotta come home now, the caller said. Nancy asked why.
“‘Because we don’t have any money.’ So we had to pick up and come back immediately,” she said.
The Pacers were one of four ABA teams joining the NBA as a result of a merger. The NBA was charging a $3.2 million entry fee to each former ABA team. So unless the Pacers had 8,000 in season-ticket sales by the end of July, the team would be sold and probably leave Indianapolis.
Nancy said the team had commitments from season ticket-holders . . . but not the money. She called a staff meeting and floated the idea of a telethon. One staffer “looked at me like I’d lost my mind,” Nancy said. A telethon takes a year to organize, she was told. The Pacers had about 10 days.
WTTV-TV, an independent station, agreed to hold it July 3-4 if enough entertainers could be booked.
“We had more people volunteer than we could use. It was like the whole city,” Nancy said.
Ten minutes before the 16 ½-hour telethon ended, the Pacers made the announcement: The 8,000 had been sold.
“That was it. We saved the Pacers,” Nancy said.
With considerable justification, she said it was her late husband who laid all the groundwork. Slick Leonard’s Pacers won ABA titles in 1970, 1972 and 1973. He is in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, as are three of his players: Roger Brown, Mel Daniels, George McGinnis.
After Slick Leonard’s coaching career, he endeared himself to Pacers fans as a radio analyst with this familiar “Boom Baby” call for made 3-pointers.
“I said to someone the other day, I was sitting in the seats at the game and looked up in the stands, there were all those shirts with ‘Boom Baby’ on them. And I thought to myself, ‘I wonder if Bob knows what he brought to his city?’ ” Nancy said. “If it hadn’t started with something really fun to watch, that wouldn’t have happened.
“The telethon was just one thing of a lot of things to get the organization going with relatively little money.”
Carlisle brings back memories of ‘Slick’ Leonard
Although it remains to be seen whether the Pacers put anyone else into the Hall of Fame, Nancy sees commonalities between the 1970s teams and 2025. First, she said, is trust in the coach. Rick Carlisle, at 65, was the oldest ever to coach in an NBA Finals.
“Rick could have coached our team,” Nancy said, “and Bob could have coached this team, and it would have been the same thing.”
Ultimately, the near-impossible by the Pacers became that. Impossible.
The Thunder, trailing 48-47 at halftime, built a 13-point lead during the third quarter. Super-sub T.J. McConnell scored 12 straight Pacer points in the quarter, but there was no epic comeback forthcoming.
Haliburton was the first player ever to make three 3-pointers in the first quarter of a finals Game 7, shooting the Pacers into a 14-10 lead. Then he slipped to the floor, yelling in pain, pounding the court in frustration. His father, John Haliburton, told ABC his son has an Achilles tendon injury.
“What happened with Tyrese, all of our hearts dropped,” Carlisle said at a postgame news conference. “But he will be back. I don’t have any medical information about what may or may not have happened. But he’ll be back in time. I have the belief he’ll make a full recovery.
“He authored one of the greatest individual playoff runs in the history of the NBA, with dramatic play after dramatic play. It was just something no one’s ever seen.”
Leonard cheered on Pacers behind the bench
The Pacers were the No. 4 seed out of the Eastern Conference. Only two teams — the Houston Rockets (No. 6) in 1995 and Boston Celtics (No. 4) in 1969 — won titles as such low seeds. And the Rockets and Celtics were defending NBA champions.
Before the season, the Pacers were 50-to-1 long shots, the worst such betting odds for a finalist since first calculated in 1985.
In that way, the Pacers resembled another Indianapolis basketball team, the Butler Bulldogs.
Using figures by a statistician, the odds against Butler making successive NCAA championship games in 2010 and 2011 were 33,333-to-1. The Bulldogs didn’t win it all, either, but did win the hearts of this city, this state and much of the country.
So did these Pacers. Thousands turned out downtown for a Game 7 watch party at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.
Nancy Leonard attended all the home playoff games, sitting two rows behind the Pacers’ bench.
“It was bone-chilling to be able to go back,” she said. “It was very emotional, very emotional.”
Seven different teams have won the past seven NBA championships. If Haliburton is sidelined all of next season, the Pacers’ next run might be delayed until 2027. After the injury, the Pacers’ odds for 2026 were downgraded from fifth-best (10-to-1) to seventh (16-to-1).
This franchise has survived worse. Indianapolis nearly lost the Pacers. We can wait.
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David Woods is a Mirror Indy freelance contributor. You can reach him at dwoods1411@gmail.com or follow him on X: @DavidWoods007.
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