Indiana Pacers fans are being asked to do something that feels almost impossible: believe again.
That’s a hard sell after last season, when the franchise finally got back to the Finals for the first time in a quarter of a century and then lost in heartbreaking fashion. To make matters worse, Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles tendon, leaving the Pacers staring at a 2025-26 gap year that brought Ivica Zubac but not the top pick that had once been promised.
So now the mood has flipped from disappointment to something more dangerous: hope.
The problem is that hope can get ahead of reality fast. Teams almost never go from awful to title contender in one clean jump. The examples people reach for usually involve a franchise already holding a top pick through a previous trade, like the LA Lakers landing Elgin Baylor or the Detroit Pistons getting Darko Milicic (lol).
Even the rare teams that do surge from the bottom usually stop short of the finish line. The Charlotte Hornets did it last season, climbing from the fourth overall pick to a decent team and still missing out in the play-in despite eye-popping advanced numbers.
That’s not really the dream in Indiana, though. Pacers fans aren’t hoping for a nice little improvement. They want to go straight back to championship territory, which is exactly where the team was just over a year ago.
If there’s a historical model worth chasing, it’s not a simple rebuild. It’s the Boston Celtics of the late 2000s, who had the third overall pick and used it to trade for Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett before winning the title right away in what stands as the best turnaround in NBA history.
Zubac is not Allen and Garnett. That much is clear. But Indiana does have something Boston didn’t: a stronger team around the centerpiece of Paul Pierce.
Still, the bar for a “successful” season can’t be set at something that almost never happens. Golden State’s 2022 title run came after two gap years, a pile of missed draft swings, and career-best seasons from four different rotation players who never reached that level again.
That’s the kind of best-case path people are really talking themselves into. And it’s exactly why the optimism feels so fragile.
Even so, there’s enough here to keep the belief alive. The return of Tyrese Haliburton and Aaron Nesmith gives the Pacers a jolt of life, and a roster with at least three top-40 players in harmony is enough to make the imagination run wild.
Fans are supposed to believe. That’s part of the deal. And nobody in Indiana should be in a rush to kill that feeling.
A return to a top seed would be enough to suggest the foundation is being rebuilt the right way. A conference finals appearance would show the Pacers are still a top-four team in the league when healthy.
Maybe history says that’s too much to expect.
But for this team, a successful season may be simpler than all that: one that brings hope back.
In Other News...
Pacers Bring Back A Familiar Name With One Big Catch
Kobe Brown is sticking around Indiana, giving the Pacers another familiar piece to work with as they continue shaping the back end of the roster. After spending his first three NBA seasons on a standard contract, Brown is back in a setting he already knows, and the move keeps a player in the building who has already shown he can blend into the teams style and tempo.
Browns return also says something about where the Pacers are right now: they are still looking for useful, system-fit depth as much as splashier headlines. He has already had a chance to settle in with the group and make a positive impression, and the next question is how much more he can carve out for himself in a role that now comes with a different kind of roster pressure. [Read more 🡒]
Pacers Fans Know What Those Pinstripes Still Represent
The pinstripes are coming back for the 2026-27 season, and for Pacers fans that means more than a clean throwback look. Those uniforms are tied to the Reggie Miller era and the run to the 2000 Finals, a stretch that still sits near the center of the franchises identity and the way it measures its best teams.
Indiana has spent years trying to climb back into that kind of conversation, and the return of the pinstripes only sharpens the reminder of what the standard used to be. The jerseys carry plenty of nostalgia, but they also bring back the expectation that comes with them, because in Indianapolis those lines have always meant the Pacers were close enough to matter. [Read more 🡒]