New York Knicks

Lore & Background

The 1994 Eastern Conference Finals remains the spiritual bedrock of this rivalry. Indiana, riding Reggie Miller's explosive scoring and Rik Smits' mid-range game, met New York's physical, foul-heavy Knicks led by Patrick Ewing. The series was a grind—five games of elbows, screens, and Starks' crossovers against Miller's catch-and-shoot. The Knicks took it 3–2, and the bitterness of that loss lingered in Indianapolis long after the season ended. It established a template: the Knicks as the team that makes you earn every single possession, that turns your home crowd's energy into their own fuel. Then came March 28, 1995. Down twelve with under twenty seconds left, Reggie Miller scored eight points in nine seconds to steal the win from the Knicks in a regular-season game. It remains one of the most replayed, most celebrated individual performances in Pacers history, and the fact that it came against New York only sharpened the rivalry's narrative. For a decade after, Pacers fans would point to that game as proof they could beat the Knicks on their own terms—until the playoffs reminded them otherwise. The 2010s rekindled everything. The Knicks, in various states of rebuild and partial contention, kept landing in Indiana's first-round path. The 2013 first-round series, which stretched to seven games, became the modern touchstone: a war of pace, physicality, and late-game heroics that left both fanbases exhausted and embittered. The pattern of the Knicks prevailing in those early-round clashes—sometimes in five, sometimes in seven—fed a narrative that the rivalry was not about trophies but about who could outlast whom in a grueling, low-margin fight. For Pacers fans, the Knicks became the opponent you dread seeing on the bracket, not because they are the best team in the East, but because they make you play their game.

In Their Own Story

The arena is half-empty by the fourth quarter, but the noise is a living thing. You can feel it in the floorboards, in the way the hardwood vibrates under the sneakers of a Knicks forward setting a screen that looks more like a tackle. The scoreboard reads 87–84, and the clock is bleeding down. You are in the lower bowl, three rows back from the scorer's table, and your hands are cold despite the March heat. The Pacers guard brings the ball up, calls the play, and for one breath you think—maybe, maybe this is the one. Then the Knicks' big man rotates, takes the charge, and the whistle cuts the arena in half. You look up at the jumbotron. You look at the Knicks bench, where they are already clapping, already smiling. You look back at the court. The ball is inbounded. The clock reads 2:14. And you know, with the quiet certainty of a man who has watched this exact sequence four times in six years, that you are going to drive home in the dark and not say a word until you pull into the driveway. The Knicks don't need to be the best team in the building. They just need to be there, in the round, in the way, in the way that turns your season into a footnote and their season into a story they will tell for a decade.

Reader's Guide

The rival: New York Knicks. The era the rivalry peaked: the mid-1990s (1994 ECF, 1995 regular season) and the 2010s (recurring first-round clashes, especially 2013). The war story: the 2013 first-round series, seven games. You remember the noise in the building, the way the Knicks made every possession a chess problem. Game seven, the final minutes, the crowd on its feet and then the silence that hits when the Knicks hit the shot you thought was impossible. You drove home. You did not turn on the TV for two days. You still think about that last possession when you're in traffic. Current status: the Knicks and Pacers still meet in the regular season every year, and the Knicks remain a plausible first-round or second-round playoff opponent depending on seeding. It is not the same electric, must-watch rivalry it was in '94 or '13, but the grudge is there. Every time their name appears in the bracket next to Indiana, something tightens in your chest. You do not hate them. You just never, ever want to see them again. And yet the schedule says October, and the bracket says April, and there they are. You lost. You lost to them. And the worst part is you know next year they'll be there again, and you'll be right back in that lower bowl, hands cold, watching the clock bleed down.

Did You Know?

• Reggie Miller's legendary 8-points-in-9-seconds performance on March 28, 1995, was a regular-season game against the New York Knicks, not a playoff game.
• The 1994 Eastern Conference Finals between Indiana and New York is one of the few times the two teams met at that stage of the postseason, making it a rare high-stakes clash compared to their more common first-round enco
• The Knicks' mid-1990s 'Run TMC' era, featuring Patrick Ewing, John Starks, and Charles Oakley, produced some of the most physical and foul-heavy series against the Pacers, defining the rivalry's tone for a generation of
• In the 2010s, the Knicks repeatedly landed in the Pacers' first-round path, and the 2013 series stretching to seven games became a modern reference point for the rivalry's intensity.