Support the Pacers before it is too late, with unthinkable consequences

By Matt Barnthouse
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The Indiana Pacers are rebuilding, that should be a surprise to no one, they’ve been doing it for a while now. However, that does not mean we need to stop going to games. If the people of Indiana continue to ignore Pacers games, we may suffer a similar fate to the citizens of Seattle when their Supersonics moved to Oklahoma City (team name is now Thunder).

Seattle is still hurting from the loss of their NBA franchise. According to noted economist Lon Hatamiya, the Seattle Supersonics gave Seattle 1,300 full and part-time jobs a year. Hatamiya also found that the Supersonics generated an average of $187,842,290 into the Puget Sound (Parts of Washington and Canada) area. Hatamiya estimates that Seattle loses, and Oklahoma City gains $171,737,588 annually. This staggering amount of income may be deadly for Indiana if the city is to lose the Pacers.
Rumors of a possible Pacers move to Kansas City, MO floated up in the spring of 2009 due to the dwindling fan base and financial troubles of the Pacers. The possible move has since been delayed due to the Capital Improvement Board paying $33.5 million over three years to keep the Pacers in Indianapolis.

Fans from Indiana have been proven through the years to be fair-weather fans time and time again. Before the Peyton Manning era, when the Colts were a losing team, people were on their hands and knees begging people to go to games, but now that they are winning, it costs an arm and a leg to even get seats in the nosebleed section.

The Pacers have been going into similar turmoil ever since the infamous 2004 Pacers-Pistons brawl that left the team in shambles. Citizens in central Indiana had the opportunity to redeem themselves and continue going to games through the losing seasons, but once again, they failed.

The Reggie Miller era of the Pacers was that team’s golden age. Fans expected annual trips to the playoffs, and sold-out games were nothing out of the ordinary. When Miller played for Indy, the team had five trips to the Eastern Conference Finals and one trip to the NBA Finals. With all these victories, money poured into the Pacers bank and enjoyed an economic boom that would last for 18 years.

Fans seemed very loyal during those 18 years, and it seemed the Pacers would have dedicated fans for life. However, just before Miller retired, the leadership in the locker room vanished, and recurring incidents with the law with players like Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson took hold of the team. Still, though these players constantly got in trouble with the law, fans still came to Pacers games because they were winning.

The Pacers have since attempted to rectify the situation. In 2007, Pacers president of basketball operations Larry Bird, sick of his players’ constant brushes with the law, had shipped all of their talented but poor-character players to different teams for high character but mediocre talent players. Even though the Pacers had cleaned up their image, they started losing games left and right. When they started losing, fans stopped coming to games. The Pacers financial crisis began.

The bailout gives fans three years to show the support of the Pacers before a final decision is made. We need to keep the Pacers in Indiana in order to save the city’s blossoming economy. We need to make the most to keep the Pacers in Indianapolis, as we won’t know how important they are until they are gone.