Scott Van Pelt knows the national sports media did a poor job covering the Indiana Pacers during a season in which they are now playing in the NBA Finals for the first time in nearly three decades.
During the latest episode of his SVPod, Van Pelt acknowledged that ESPN and the rest of the people covering the NBA “missed” Indiana. The SportsCenter host believes any other team with the bona fides of the Pacers would be “celebrated,” but this team was instead a contender hiding in plain sight that went overlooked all year long.
“I’ll bet money that First Take hasn’t done any segments on the Pacers during the season,” Van Pelt said. “But that’s not knocking them because I know, having done our show, we didn’t lead SportsCenter with the Pacers. Like, ever. Unless they were playing another star-laden team. They were the other team opposite the Lakers, the Bucks, whoever. That’s on all of us who missed it.”
While Van Pelt reminded his audience that the Pacers lingered around .500 until around the trade deadline, he also noted that the team has a championship-winning head coach, a championship-winning veteran forward, and a budding star point guard that demanded more attention.
Said Van Pelt:
“The things that we collectively missed is you’ve got a guy in Rick Carlisle who is an NBA coach who’s won a title. You’ve got a guy in Pascal Siakam who’s been on a title-winning team and a significant contributor, who’s capable of scoring 30-plus multiple times in a conference final and won the MVP … then you have Haliburton, who’s an All-Star starter.”
Comparisons between the NBA and NFL are sometimes foolish in terms of media coverage, but Van Pelt pointed out how outrageous it would be if a team with Indiana’s pedigree was overlooked during an NFL season.
“You’re checking a lot of boxes here for what we, in media, should be celebrating,” Van Pelt added.
“I tried to make the equivalent in my head of, if there were an NFL team with a coach who had won a Super Bowl, and a player who is an All-Pro or All-Star, a player who was a major contributor to a Super Bowl-winning team, they’d never be ignored the way the Pacers mostly were. So all I can say is it’s great that they are going to get their attention now. But looking back … I’ll just give myself a failing grade as it relates to acknowledging the Pacers as potentially being what they were.”
There’s another problem that Van Pelt forgot. The Pacers made the Eastern Conference Finals in 2024!
To overlook them in 2025 was to simply decide that their postseason performance a year ago was a complete fluke. Clearly, that wasn’t the case.