In 1993, it was announced that the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, or COBE (pronounced like “Kobe” Bryant), had made hundreds of millions of infrared temperature measurements which showed that 99.97 percent of the energy of the universe was released from an initial explosion. “This is the ultimate in tracing one’s cosmic roots,” John C. Mather, the NASA scientist leading the COBE project, said then. A few months after the findings were announced, the New York Knicks and Indiana Pacers would face off in the playoffs for the first time, in what would become a near-annual matchup that would help define the era of ’90s basketball and redraw the lines of what an NBA rivalry could look like from a broader cultural lens. The Knicks-Pacers feud had its own big bang sequence. And perhaps we have John Starks to thank for creating the ripples in space and time that created the gravity of this very moment.
Both the Knicks and Pacers are back, and possibly better than ever. They will face each other for the second consecutive postseason, a rematch of last year’s seven-game series that was marred by injuries and palpable fatigue. This season, both teams enter largely unscathed, handling business amid the atrophy in front of them. They’ve done what they’ve needed to do, setting up one half of the most compelling pair of conference finals series in recent memory. Out West, the Minnesota Timberwolves and Oklahoma City Thunder will clash, as their respective alphas will decide who gets to inherit the future; there is more subtext, more history on the Eastern front. Now comes the fun part: watching as past and present converge before our very eyes.
But first, back to the big bang moment. Game 1 of the 1993 first-round series between New York and Indiana. Starks, the incendiary off guard for the Knicks then, was tasked with defending Pacers star Reggie Miller, the greatest sharpshooting shit talker this side of Larry Bird—two Indiana legends, go figure. In the opening minute, Starks was called for two quick fouls on successive possessions: an elbow at Miller’s chest (which Miller has claimed was aimed toward his neck) and a forearm shiv to Miller’s back. Bitch, it’s going to be like that all series, Miller remembered Starks telling him after those two fouls. I’m just going to let you know that right now.
“Well, first of all, you don’t ever call me ‘bitch.’ I call you that,” Miller wrote in his 1995 book, I Love Being the Enemy. “That’s my game, my house.”
Starks’s deliberate hyper-physicality was about setting the tone for Game 1; little did he know he was setting the stage, from ’93 ’til infinity. The iconography of the series is manifold: Starks’s notorious headbutt of Miller in 1993; Miller’s 25-point fourth-quarter performance in the 1994 Eastern Conference finals, capped off by the iconic choke gesture in the direction of Spike Lee; Eight Points, Nine Seconds in 1995, one of the most improbable scoring bursts in NBA history; Larry Johnson throwing up the “L” after a pivotal four-point play in the 1999 Eastern Conference finals.
What do we talk about when we talk about the Knicks-Pacers rivalry? We talk about a game that exists either within or outside the game, depending on who you ask. Because it sure as hell isn’t about rings. Neither team has won a championship since 1973, the year the Knicks and Pacers reached the mountaintop of the NBA and the ABA, respectively. Rivalries rely on regularity. In the eight seasons spanning 1992-93 to 1999-2000, the Knicks and Pacers faced off in the playoffs six times; 10 of the 35 games in that period of time were decided by no more than three points. The Pacers lead the postseason head-to-head record 26-22 and have won five of the past six series, but it still feels like a spiritual dead heat between the two franchises because of the power and influence of myth. This is a rivalry born of Miller’s David vs. Goliath struggles against the heavily favored Knicks. That is the rightful alignment, the way the basketball gods intended. To reemerge over these past two seasons with everything in its right place—it’d be a bald-faced lie to say it feels like no time has passed. So much time has passed! But when they say basketball is better when the Knicks are good? The unspoken clause at the end of that statement is especially when the Pacers are waiting for them on the other side.
For a large swath of the NBA media covering the 2025 series (myself included), our early, formative fandoms were shaped by the drama that emerged from these fated matchups—if not because of regional allegiances, then certainly because of the clarion call of “Roundball Rock” thrumming over the course of an NBC Sunday tripleheader. A 2014 study exploring the nature of childhood memory found that emotion (both positive and negative) plays a significant role in the survival of a memory after two years’ time, but the strongest predictor of a memory’s survival rate is theme, or the narrative focus and clarity that comes from a specific, recurring subject. What do we talk about when we talk about Knicks-Pacers? We’re talking about a core memory that’s lived in the back of our minds for nearly a third of a century. One that’s resurfacing at the perfect moment. This is more than just a team making the Eastern Conference finals. It’s an opportunity to open oneself up to history. How often do these full-circle moments actually arise? How often does the joyous backdrop of one’s youth become the backdrop for subsequent generations—in a way that doesn’t involve an ill-advised Disney live-action remake? This is a moment of intergenerational legend-building in real time. It’s the kind of communal catharsis that would compel you to rabidly ascend telephone poles. Maybe.
Tyrese Haliburton was barely 3 months old by the end of the 2000 Eastern Conference finals, the last time the Knicks and Pacers faced off at that vaunted stage of competition. Jalen Brunson was a 3-year-old scampering around Madison Square Garden. His father, Rick, was literally on the team, albeit as a benchwarmer who played 23 total postseason minutes for New York across three seasons. In both body proportion and colorway, the clash between each team’s respective franchise players is kind of like pitting Bert and Ernie against one another. Brunson and Haliburton are their own players and impress their own style upon the game, but they are also avatars bridging past and future.
Brunson finds leverage at a subatomic level. Who better to lead the Knicks in this game within the game than a player who seemingly turns every nanosecond on the court into an opportunity to gain the upper hand? The separation he creates from his defender is merely the end result of an endless competition he seeks to win, one frame at a time. A subtle jab feint one way, a subtle eye movement the other; a head tilt, a bump, a stepback that turns into a step-through. Stack enough wins across frames, and the brilliance of Brunson’s deliberate, thousand-cut game turns lethal. The reigning Clutch Player of the Year has a shot at scoring the most fourth-quarter points in a postseason run; in that sense, the spirit of Reggie lives in the enemy. Brunson is already one of the great crunch-time scorers in league history; he could easily wind up becoming the greatest Knick of all time before long.
Haliburton is living proof of basketball reincarnation. Of course the savior of Indiana basketball would be another willowy weirdo that a significant portion of the league and its fans think is overrated, who relishes the opportunity to play heel both on and off the clock. “I’m at my best when people are talking shit to me,” Haliburton told GQ last July. His unique comportment on the court creates a sort of aesthetic bias against him—he plays the game like he’s working through the physics of an oil slick in real time, slip-sliding past defenders, neither in or out of control. He is simply maintaining the flow of momentum, however it presents itself.
Within that flow, Haliburton has conducted some of the most miraculous comeback wins in recent memory—all in the past few months. The spirit of Reggie is even more apparent in Haliburton. Reggie’s talked about the origins of his unorthodox shooting mechanics, born of an inability to get his shot off against his older sister Cheryl, one of the greatest women’s basketball players of all time. The only way he could muster the strength to achieve a high arc was to shoot two-handed, with his hands converging, criss-crossing over the other upon release. Haliburton’s wonky mechanics were similarly a way to compensate for his frailty—he used to dip the ball down to his knees just to get enough leverage to shoot properly. But he resolved to find a way to keep the ball above his shoulders at all costs—and the cost was endless Mikan drills around the basket until his arms gave out. The result? A bizarrely versatile shot form that allows him to access deep range from just about any base. I once described it as “the shooting mechanics of a septuagenarian YMCA gym rat.” Can’t argue with results: Haliburton’s career 3-point shooting percentage is only a tick under Miller’s.
Soon, all eyes will be on the court, processing the advantages each team has over the other. How will the Pacers’ depth and physicality interface with the Knicks’ insistent postseason endurance training? Haliburton leads the Pacers in minutes at 34 per game. Every player in the Knicks’ starting five is averaging at least 36, with Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby, and Brunson each logging at least 39. Can a team with such a condensed rotation survive Indiana’s strategic full-court press? The Pacers have played beautifully in a pass-happy, efficient offense built around Haliburton’s ability to create panoramic windows for his teammates; will Hali still find his openings against New York’s triumvirate of wing defenders? Can the Knicks neutralize the Pacers’, err, pace, by extending possessions on the glass? The Knicks scored 68 points in one game in the 1994 series, the lowest point total across the 48 postseason games between these two clubs; the Knicks have scored 123 points once in these playoffs and the Pacers have scored 129 points twice thus far. Might one of these teams double up some of these scores from the ’90s, just to show how far we’ve come? There will be plenty of time to see it through.
But in this space of anticipation, of memory and anxiety intermingling, I find myself once again cocooning into the theater of it all. This has been a postseason defined by an almost startling uptick in physicality—skirmishes that largely amount to nothing more or less than a collective harvesting of adrenaline to cross the finish line, but have nonetheless set the perfect nostalgic backdrop for this Eastern Conference finals. (There is a “fight comp” from Game 3—and only Game 3—of that initial 1993 first-round series. It is almost six minutes long.) The atmosphere in the arenas will carry the weight of history. The teams will play with full recognition of the generational opportunity at hand. It’s the stakes that make these matchups worthwhile. And yet, through hindsight, we know that these matchups were never a jumping-off point to a greater arc of triumph. This Knicks-Pacers rivalry never amounted to anything more than the moments they had together. Can that still be the case in 2025? Does that past mean anything today?
I’m thinking about a perfect moment at Madison Square Garden last June, during a taping of WWE’s Friday Night SmackDown. Brunson and Haliburton were both invited to take part in a segment during a match between LA Knight, the babyface, and Logan Paul, the heel. The two stars were brought into the mix separately; they didn’t know they’d be interacting with one another until the day of the show. Together, Haliburton and Brunson mapped out the drama that would unfold between them. Haliburton would supply Paul with illegal brass knuckles to secure a cheap victory; Brunson, ever New York’s guardian angel, would stop him. It wasn’t Dennis Rodman and Karl Malone on WCW in 1998—and thank god for that. They merely stood there as symbols of good and evil, as conduits of a greater story.
“One of the best things about WWE is the entrances—the pops you get,” Brunson said on his podcast last July. “Hopefully the next time I [make a WWE appearance], I would do it in Indiana. ... Might as well keep the story line going.”
Brunson and Haliburton may not actually feel the same animosity their forebears felt, but it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the passion of it all, be it earned or borrowed. In the 2010 30 for 30 documentary Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks, there is an unmistakable charge of glee on the faces of both former Knicks and Pacers players alike discussing their disdain for one another. New York and Indiana always have been perfect rivals: two longtime, long-suffering also-rans who found meaning and reason in a mutual, identity-shaping disrespect, where the line between love and hate had dissolved. Or, rather, the hate had become so all-consuming as to reach a state of absolution. It’s a state of passion that the best wrestling feuds aspire to reach. Not to be that guy quoting Roland Barthes to anyone who’ll listen … but Barthes once wrote, “Wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result.”
Reggie Miller will be at the announcing table for Game 1 at Madison Square Garden. He will undoubtedly get another round of “Fuck you, Reggie” chants that ride the line of contempt and homage the way “Cena sucks” does these days. Josh Hart, ever the appreciator of a bit, might remind Miller once more what the fans are saying. And it will be art. It will be theater. But winning time awaits. For years, the Knicks-Pacers rivalry found meaning beyond ultimate victory. But with everything on the line, it could finally be time to find a true champion in the game—and not just the game within it.
