Always look at percentage because Indy has less seats than most arenas. Should go up as Colts season winds down especially if the Pacers keep winning.
You can thank the ihsaa as well as malice for a lot of our problems. I’m on my phone but I’ll ride up an explanation shortly. Just getting off work off the back of the rim but those two are why we have such major issues
Such a great assessment of the local sports history I thought you may have lived through all this, then I got to this part…
‘Thugs’ and much worse was called about that team.
This was not said about the team locally after the Malice. The entire city and fan base were behind them. Did Artest take some heat locally? Yes. And he deserved it. Did the national media drag us? Sure did. But here we backed our team.
The thug perception came after Reggie retired. And that perception stemmed from Tinsley fighting one armed guys in wheelchairs at strip clubs among other incidents and if I recall arrests involving himself, Stephen Jackson and others. Do thug shit. Get branded a thug. It’s that simple. Stop with this dog whistle shit. It had absolutely nothing to do with skin color and everything to do with poor behavior and representing the team and city in a way antithetical to the working class town we are.
I can tell you from personal experience it was said by people to me directly at games or around the water cooler talk. I would not have said it otherwise. Acknowledging that some people couldn’t see further than Stephen Jackson’s cornrows isn’t a damnation of the city but of people that were flawed.
You backed your team. I backed the team. But I sat in half empty arenas and endured people slandering the players. And when asking people to come out, it was said directly to me. It made me sad and infuriated to hear people saying it, but I’m not going to ignore that part of it when I tell you that it happened. I lived in Haughville, so it could be where you lived, but to deny it happened or to call it a dogwhistle would be lying to you.
It’s strange how two people can live through the same situation and come out of it with different impressions or recollections but if you were on the west side I can kind of see why yours is different to mine. I just never heard any of it myself.
For instance my ‘depression era grandma’ hated Peyton and said the Simon’s should fire the entire team after the brawl and build around Artest and Reggie 🤷🏻
Obviously flawed people exist but imo that’s not what accounted for the declining interest. Reggie also retired at that time and I think that had as much to do with the lost interest as the off court incidents.
I feel a lot of this boils down to a couple things… A) Many can’t watch the games & how infrequently radio/tv push coverage or spend much time talking about the team…its usually 3-5min then on to the Colts or anything else but the Pacers. So its not like the casual fan feels they are missing out on because you just don’t hear much about them. B) Maybe the biggest reason is the income level around the downtown area is quite low, so to fill up seats the Pacers need to draw heavy from subs like Greenwood/Brownsburg/Carmel/Plainfield/Fishers/Westfield etc. and those fans its a bit more of a commitment on the drive. I would bet most the fans in attendance are from one of the these subs vs Indianapolis. Only way that changes is Indy draws people with large incomes and spare spending money to move downtown or the Fieldhouse was located North or Southside where the money is there and fans feel a little safer going to the games.
I’m reading a bunch of excuses for the market. Frankly, we meet all those excuses head-on and people still haven’t turned out. The ONLY outstanding one is a return to playoff contention. And if you are basing going to a game on that, come on, get your priorities in order.