1967 ABA Charter Founding

Lore & Background

The ABA was conceived in the mid-1960s by a group of promoters and investors who believed the NBA's conservative structure left room for a faster, flashier product. The league's first season tipped off in the fall of 1967, and the Indiana Pacers were among the eleven original clubs. For Indianapolis, the arrival of a professional basketball team was a cultural event; the city had long felt overlooked by the big leagues, and the Pacers gave local fans a banner to wave, a jersey to wear, and a reason to fill the stands on a Tuesday night. The early Pacers were not contenders. The ABA's first season was a proving ground for every franchise, and the league's pace—three-point shooting, full-court press, and a ball that bounced differently—was still being figured out. What the Pacers brought to the table was identity: a blue-and-gold uniform, a home crowd in the Midwest, and the stubborn belief that a team from a city of a few hundred thousand could compete with the flashier coastal franchises. That belief, more than any single win or loss, defined the founding era. By the time the ABA-NBA merger was finalized in 1976, the Pacers had survived a decade of a league that many had written off. They carried their ABA history into the NBA as one of four surviving franchises, and the 1967 founding became the franchise's origin story—the year the Pacers stopped being a concept and started being a team.

In Their Own Story

The gym smelled like fresh varnish and floor wax. It was October, 1967, and the first ABA regular-season game in Indianapolis was hours away. A small crew in blue-and-gold warm-ups ran loose dribbles under the high lights, the ball—red, white, and blue, unlike anything they'd seen in college—bouncing with a slightly different snap. A fan in the third row, a young kid in a hand-painted Pacers jersey, pressed his face to the glass and shouted something no one could hear over the PA system testing the speakers. The coach called a huddle, pointed at the blackboard where the three-point arc was chalked in for the first time in any professional gym, and said, 'They don't know what we're going to do out there.' The lights dimmed. The crowd, maybe three or four thousand, rose. And the Pacers, a brand-new team in a brand-new league, stepped onto the court for the first time.

Reader's Guide

The defining front-office push was to get a professional team into Indianapolis, and the defining on-court reality was a league still finding its footing. The three-point line appears in professional basketball for the first time, the ball is a different color, and the pace is faster than anything the NBA has allowed. The Pacers, like every other ABA team, are learning the rules as they go. The era ends when the first season wraps and the league proves—barely—that it can survive another year, setting up a decade of ABA play that will ultimately deliver the franchise into the NBA in 1976. What defined this stretch was not talent or trophies. It was existence. A team in a city that had been told it was too small. A league that had been told it was too late. The Pacers' 1967 founding is the moment both of those 'no's' got answered with a tip-off.

Did You Know?

• The ABA used a distinctive red, white, and blue basketball, visually separating the league from the NBA's traditional orange ball.
• The Pacers were one of only four ABA franchises—along with the San Antonio Spurs, New Jersey Nets, and Denver Nuggets—to survive the 1976 ABA-NBA merger.
• The ABA launched with eleven charter teams, and the Indiana Pacers were the only franchise based in the state of Indiana.