Culture
Aldridge: Pacers shake things up and earn their moment in the sun
NEW YORK — As ever, Knicks Nation was cogent and discerning watching its team lose Game 7 at Madison Square Garden to the Indiana Pacers.
“(Bleeping) scrubs,” one well-reasoned fan said as he exited MSG in the closing minutes of the 130-108 loss.
The home fans were bitterly disappointed. No one on this island believed the Pacers could come in here and big boy the Knicks, depleted though they may have been, in a winner-take-all tilt for a conference finals spot, as long as Jalen Brunson was healthy and New York could keep grabbing fistfuls of offensive rebounds. ESPN certainly seemed clear in its coverage plan. But the Pacers bowed their necks to show what they’d learned and how they’d grown during the last few months. They woofed at the Knicks and their well-heeled fans on celebrity row. They noted how few national reporters had been around much this season. Their coach seemed to delight in pointing out the disrespect his team had endured.
And Tyrese Haliburton came to the postgame news conference wearing a Reggie Miller hoodie, with Reg in classic “Knicks choked” mode, a tribute to the franchise’s all-time greatest player and enfant terrible in Gotham.
“I just like to be comfortable on the plane,” Haliburton said, tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Tyrese Haliburton in a Reggie Miller sweatshirt after winning Game 7 at the Garden 😈 pic.twitter.com/TKuOc3t1zu
— Indiana Pacers (@Pacers) May 19, 2024
Even as they shattered the previous record for the highest field goal percentage by a team in a Game 7, shooting an NBA playoff record 67 percent for the game – 53 of 79!! – and made 13 of 24 3-pointers, Pacers coach Rick Carlisle came back, again and again, to the defense his team played when it mattered the most.
“They have flipped the script,” Carlisle said. “They won the series with grit and guts and physical play. Pressing 94 feet. And that’s how we beat Milwaukee (in the first round), too. You have to give these guys a lot of credit for, not a total change, but a very significant change in the attitude toward defense, the defiance about, the importance of defense, and what they did today. I don’t want to make things about shot making.”
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Indeed, the Pacers’ metamorphosis since the first month of the season, when Indy was cosmically bad at the defensive end, has been profound. It required the grunt work of getting connected and louder on defense. But it also required Indiana to get out of its comfort zone and put all its chips to the middle of the table, acquiring Pascal Siakam from Toronto in mid-January in a three-team deal that also included New Orleans, with no guarantee after these playoffs that the two-time All-Star and rising, unrestricted free agent will stay.
“My focus coming into the game was just settling everybody in,” Siakam told The Athletic. “I came in aggressive, just making sure everybody calmed down. Once everybody calmed down, (Haliburton) took over. And he can do that with the best (in) the game. And, obviously, the back and forth gets you going.”
Siakam made his first five shots from the floor en route to 20 points. Haliburton hunted 3s in the first quarter, including a dead sprint to the left wing for a 26-footer in transition, giving him 11 points in less than two minutes. Indiana scored 39 in the first quarter and led 70-55 at halftime. The Pacers’ offensive output was stunning in its completeness.
“It’s just the old-school way of thinking, that you can’t play this fast in the playoffs,” Haliburton said. “But I think, opportunistically, you can do it. If we can get stops, of course we can.”
But, Carlisle was right. Indiana may have had better defensive nights numerically against the Knicks in the series, but given the stakes of a Game 7 on the road, this was Indiana’s finest defensive hour. Before Brunson left the game in the second half after breaking his left hand, he was just 6 of 17 from the floor. T.J. McConnell, again, was disruptive off the bench. And after getting beaten decisively on the glass in the first two games of the series, Indy outrebounded New York in four of the last five games and won all four of those games.
(Speaking of which: Man, the NBA is so bad at rigging games! It had Boston-New York on a platter, chock-a-block full of potential sweet ratings gold, featuring the No. 1 and No. 8 TV markets. And it let the Pacers run roughshod over the Knicks! It didn’t foul out Haliburton or Siakam. And this continues a troubling trend. The league never gave us a LeBron-Kobe NBA Finals; it put the ratings-sapping Spurs in the finals six times, with San Antonio winning five titles between 1999 and 2014; it hasn’t gifted New York a championship in more than five decades! If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times — because so many of you spout off and yell “conspiracy” this time of year: If the NBA’s mission is fixing playoff games so that it gets the biggest superstars from the biggest markets every postseason, it truly, and uniformly, sucks at it. Get better writers, people. What’s Eric Bischoff doing these days?)
Indiana’s defensive metamorphosis began with its run to the In-Season Tournament final in December, as Haliburton’s star rose nationwide. But even then, Indy came crashing back to earth, getting smashed in Las Vegas in the IST final by the Lakers. The Pacers got L.A.’s best shot and learned what they were doing wasn’t good enough. The Lakers’ attention to detail defensively, how much they stayed locked into the scout on Indiana’s team, impressed Haliburton.
“I think the biggest thing was experience,” Pacers center Myles Turner said. “We had a lot of guys who hadn’t played high-level basketball or games that mattered. The In-Season Tournament, it was like a heightened sense of urgency in all those games. We know how we started the year defensively, but we all came together, and we told ourselves, if we could just go from 30 to average, we can be a hell of a team.”
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Carlisle blew up his starting lineup the day after Christmas, putting Andrew Nembhard, Aaron Nesmith and Jalen Smith in alongside Haliburton and Turner. That group had a net rating of minus-4.6, with a defensive rating of 120.8. Not great by any stretch, but at least the defensive bleed wasn’t as profound as it had been for the first two months. Once Siakam came aboard, the Pacers’ D really took off; in 25 games of Haliburton-Nembhard-Nesmith-Siakam-Turner, Indiana’s defensive rating was 107.2, with a net rating of 6.4.
There was a lot of soul-searching, McConnell said.
“I think it was being masked by the hellacious offense that we were playing with, but it just wasn’t good enough,” McConnell said. “You don’t get to this point without turning things around defensively. Credit to the coaching staff and everyone for … just looking in the mirror at getting better at that end.”
Getting Siakam not only meant trading three first-round picks to Toronto — two this season, one in 2026 — but also moving veteran forward Bruce Brown, whom Indiana had signed last offseason to great fanfare after Brown had helped the Denver Nuggets win the title. Brown didn’t fit with Indy hand in glove, but he had a champion’s pedigree. So does Siakam, of course, having helped the Raptors get a ring in 2019. But Brown is under contract for next season. Siakam isn’t.
Siakam has been impressed by the Pacers’ way of doing things, beyond Haliburton’s rise (though that, too, matters). With president of basketball operations Kevin Pritchard and general manager Chad Buchanan, Indy has veteran front-office stability and a definite vision for how to build around Haliburton. In Carlisle, the Pacers have one of the game’s great tacticians, who always seems to get the absolute most out of his roster.
“After the In-Season Tournament, we just made a decision as a staff that we needed to be better,” Carlisle said. “… I just told our guys, we are going to make a stand, and we’re going to get better. We were on a historic pace offensively, but to get where we are at this moment and where we want to get in this next round and in the future, what we were doing offensively was not sustainable. It just simply was not. Not if you can’t consistently guard and rebound.”
The task of beating top-seeded and well-rested Boston, starting Tuesday at TD Garden, is Indiana’s biggest challenge to date. The Celtics may be without center Kristaps Porziņģis for the start of the series, but they’re otherwise healthy. They’ve been the best team in the league all season. They’ve had a relatively easy path to the conference finals.
Yet here come the Pacers, playing with house money, still far from dominating the sports headlines in town. Next Sunday will be the 108th running of the Indianapolis 500, and there is a rookie guard on the WNBA’s Indiana Fever who’s, apparently, drawn some attention.
The Pacers will continue flying under the radar, and loving it.
(Photo of Pascal Siakam: Elsa / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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