George McGinnes

Lore & Background

In the mid-1970s, the Pacers were a team that played basketball the way the city played everything: hard, physical, and without apology. McGinnes was the embodiment of that ethos. Standing at 6-foot-8 with a stocky, powerful frame, he did not rely on quickness or range. He relied on leverage, timing, and an almost stubborn willingness to absorb contact. Opposing centers and forwards learned quickly that a McGinnes screen was not something you shrugged off; it was something you felt in your shoulders for the rest of the quarter. His role in the 1977 Finals run against Portland was critical. The Blazers had size and scoring, but the Pacers had a forward who could anchor the paint, crash the boards, and make every shot in the restricted area a negotiation. That team's identity—tough, disciplined, collective—was built on players like McGinnes, and the fact that a franchise from Indianapolis could push the league's best to the brink of elimination in June was a shock to the NBA establishment. What made McGinnes endure in Pacers lore is not a single stat line but a feeling. Fans who were teenagers in '77 and '81 remember the sound of his body hitting a defender, the way he would set a screen and simply stay there, arms locked, daring the opponent to move him. He was the player who made the team feel like a unit rather than a roster. In a franchise that would later be defined by stars, McGinnes represents the era when the Pacers were defined by something harder to quantify: character.

In Their Own Story

The arena is loud, but inside the paint it's a different world. The ball bounces off the rim, and for a half-second nobody moves. Then McGinnes is there—shoulder first, elbows out, driving the opposing center back into the backboard with a grunt that the crowd swallows whole. The ball drops to his fingertips. He doesn't celebrate. He doesn't look up. He just turns, finds the guard on the wing, and fires a skip pass that threads a gap no one saw. The scoreboard ticks. The crowd roars. And McGinnes is already backing into the next screen, jaw set, eyes on the rim, already thinking about the next rebound. The black-and-gold jersey is soaked through, the number 23 blurred with sweat, but his stance hasn't changed. It never will.

Reader's Guide

#23. Six seasons in the black-and-gold, and every single one of them mattered. Here's the moment that still gets told at Pacers watch parties: 1977, Finals, Portland. The Blazers have the size, the scoring, the pedigree. And there's McGinnes, setting a screen on a 6-foot-11 center, and the center pushes. McGinnes doesn't push back. He just... stays. Arms locked. Weight planted. The ref whistles nothing. The center gives up. That one screen, that one refusal to yield an inch, is the whole team in a single frame. You don't need a highlight reel. You need that image. Signature moments and marks: four consecutive All-Star selections (1977 through 1980), two NBA Finals appearances (1977 vs. Boston), and a career defined by rebounding, interior defense, and the kind of physical play that made opponents' coaches adjust their game plans around him. When a Pacers fan says the name McGinnes, the sentence that follows is always the same: "That's who we used to be."

Did You Know?

• He earned four consecutive All-Star selections from 1977 through 1980, a run that cemented the early-70s Pacers as one of the league's top teams.
• McGinnes was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, a recognition that the league's broader history, not just Indianapolis, considers him a defining forward of his era.
• His playing style—physical, screen-heavy, rebounding-first—was a direct counter to the scoring-heavy forwards of the late 1970s, and opposing coaches had to build entire defensive schemes around his presence in the paint