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.”

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.”

GO DEEPER

Tyrese Haliburton, Pacers stay true to themselves to set up matchup with Boston

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)

Maybe you’ve seen him.

Perhaps his sideways glance and piercing blue eyes have crossed your timeline. His smirk might be all over your TikTok. If you follow baseball or if your algorithm has decided you like livestock, you may have encountered McCreamy, the muscular mascot of the Danville Dairy Daddies.

The brawny bull with a bright pink nose dons blue jeans and a “DD” belt buckle but no shirt, propping one hoof on his hip while the other rests against a bat standing by his feet. His unveiling went viral, providing a level of exposure not usually seen for a collegiate summer baseball team from an unincorporated Virginia city of 42,000 people in the regional Old North State League.

But this was no accident. The Danville Dairy Daddies knew exactly what they were doing.

There’s a story behind their name, a thought process behind their color palette and an award-winning designer behind their logo. Such is the case for many of the eccentric team names filling the minor leagues and collegiate summer leagues in recent years. The magic lies in the quirks that tie the clubs to their communities. The fun comes from the winks, nods and Easter eggs that teams incorporate in their branding to tell locals, “Hey, we know what makes this town special, and we’re leaning into it.”

That’s partially how a topless bull came to represent a team in Pittsylvania County, which boasts three of the five largest dairy farms in Virginia. The Dairy Daddies moniker was initially suggested to general manager Austin Scher as a potential name for Danville’s first collegiate summer team, the Otterbots, in 2021. Over the next three years, the alliteration stuck in Scher’s brain, and when he learned of the local connection, there was no denying the divining of the Dairy Daddies and their main man McCreamy.

“While it is quirky and silly and somewhat tongue in cheek, there is a very real community connection,” Scher said. “The blue and pink are designed to elicit feelings of newness, of birth, of rebirth. You see those two colors together and you might think of a gender reveal party or a nursery. Then you look at this muscle-bound cow, and you’re thinking, ‘Well, that’s not a baby. That’s very much full-grown.’ Danville and all of southern Virginia are in the middle of this massive resurgence.”

Good mooooorning fam. pic.twitter.com/a11eFunPhT

— Dairy Daddies (@DairyDaddies) February 29, 2024

Each component of McCreamy conveys a characteristic of his community. Paul Caputo, host of the “Baseball by Design” podcast, which explores the origin stories for minor-league nicknames, sees that same quality in team names across the country.

“You can tell the story of America by understanding why minor-league baseball teams have the names that they have,” he said.

The Dairy Daddies are just the latest in a long line of lower-league baseball teams that shirk traditional names in favor of more eye-catching identities. Pinpointing the origins of the trend is difficult — you could trace it all the way back to the late 1800s, when a team called the Dudes existed in Pensacola, Fla. — but the recent surge of silliness stems in part from Major League Baseball’s downsizing of the affiliated minor leagues from 163 teams to 120. Forty-three franchises lost their affiliation in 2020. Many of those teams played under the same names as their former MLB parent clubs and had to rebrand. Former rookie-league teams like the Burlington (N.C.) Royals and Pulaski  (Va.) Yankees re-emerged as the Sock Puppets and River Turtles to play collegiate summer ball in the Appalachian League.

Teams that maintained their MLB affiliations have also jumped on the funky name train with hopes of invigorating their brands. Pick nearly any league, at any level, and there’s a nickname or logo that will make you stop and gawk. The Carolina Disco Turkeys. The Montgomery (Ala.) Biscuits (formerly the Orlando Rays). The Minot (N.D.) Hot Tots. The Rocket City (Ala.) Trash Pandas (formerly the Mobile BayBears). The Wichita Chili Buns (an alternate identity of the Wichita Wind Surge).

Without the constant media coverage and cash flow MLB organizations enjoy, lower-league teams have to get creative to stir up engagement, increase exposure and keep their franchises afloat.

“I see pictures of people visiting the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal and they’re wearing Trash Pandas shirts when they do it,” Rocket City’s director of marketing Ricky Fernandez said. “It blows my mind that someone’s like, ‘We’re going to the Eiffel Tower today! I better get my finest raccoon astronaut T-shirt on so I can snap a selfie!’”

Eiffel Tower 📍
Paris, France 🇫🇷https://t.co/5tFZEz6w5X pic.twitter.com/A88VZCgBdQ

— Rocket City Trash Pandas (@trashpandas) June 23, 2022

Advertisement

Even with a local connection, an unusual name can take time to accept. Take the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp. The Miami Marlins’ Triple-A affiliate played as the Suns from 1990 to 2016, when new ownership took over. Though the new team name has a tie-in to the local shrimping industry, the public wasn’t immediately sold. Noel Blaha, Jacksonville’s vice president of marketing and media, said the antipathy was expected and they planned the reveal accordingly.

“We very purposefully had some elementary school kids in the front row of the press conference because if things turned sideways and people were throwing tomatoes, they weren’t gonna go after the kids,” he said.

Still, someone started an online petition to change the name back to the Suns. Five thousand people signed within two hours.

“We got angry Facebook posts. We got some very offensive emails,” Blaha said. “People were pissed, point blank.”

But slowly, the tide turned.

“What it resulted in was incredible merchandise sales in the months leading up to the start of the season, and then the season started and we set an attendance record that weekend,” he said.

The DubSea (Wash.) Fish Sticks (previously the Highline Bears) experienced the same rejection-turned-resurgence after their new identity won an online poll pitting Fish Sticks against Seal Slingers as the two options for the team name.

“I had zero people get angry about the name the Highline Bears. I also had zero people get excited about it,” team president Justin Moser said. “Before we rebranded, I don’t think we ever sold anything online. Maybe one or two t-shirts as the Highline Bears.”

Despite social media comments calling the new name stupid and “a disgrace to the area,” the Fish Sticks have since shipped orders to all 50 states and nine countries. They recorded five sellouts last summer and announced that their June 1 season opener sold out on April 23.

These days, teams that aren’t getting creative with branding can seem a bit stale, said Caputo.

“Being named for a local animal just feels very 1990s,” he added. “It feels old.”

That’s where sports branding companies come in. In the minor-league baseball space, there are two heavy hitters responsible for most of the new, splashy nicknames: Brandiose and Studio Simon. Team staffers work with designers to brainstorm an identity linked to the local history, industries, cuisine, natural landmarks or traditions.

“Every community has a story waiting to be told, and the goal is that when you visit a sports experience, particularly in minor-league baseball, we want you to step into a whole other world,” Brandiose co-founder Jason Klein said. “We want you to step into a story, a nine-inning vacation as we call it. But that story is the story of your hometown.”

Anchoring each team’s story is its logo, the main character of the narrative. Amarillo Sod Poodles GM Tony Ensor knew that nailing his Texas League team’s logo would be key to winning over naysayers, so he went to Brandiose with detailed instructions.

“I want the mouth to be John Wayne,” he said of the animated black-tailed prairie dog, “and the eyes to be Clint Eastwood.”

The Amarillo Sod Poodles are the Double-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks. (Photo: John E. Moore III / Getty Images)

Scher, the Dairy Daddies GM, had similarly specific requests for Studio Simon creative director Dan Simon when molding McCreamy. Simon envisioned the bull as having a dad bod. The response was a swift “no.”

“They wanted him built but not Arnold Schwarzenegger-built. He’s fine-tuned,” Simon said. “This cow was going to be kind of a ladies’ man. Or, in this case, a male cow is a bull. So he’s a cow’s man.”

Partially inspired by McDreamy, the surgeon Patrick Dempsey portrays in “Grey’s Anatomy,” McCreamy also embodies the spirit of another beloved TV character. Simon sees the bull as boasting the charisma of Joey Tribbiani from “Friends” with a facial expression that seems to ask, “How you doin’?”

These flirty, wacky, happy characters do get some blowback for deviating from traditional logos, or for being kitschy tactics intended to sell T-shirts. But Simon, Klein and the teams that proudly play as Sock Puppets, Trash Pandas and Sod Poodles shrug off that notion.

“The sports fans are going to go to the games anyway,” Simon said. “These identities are drawing people who wouldn’t otherwise come, and hopefully when they do come, they go, ‘Hey, this was fun! I’m going to come again!’ It’s not like you drew them in under false pretenses. It’s not that at all. Minor-league and collegiate summer league baseball, it’s fun! It’s fun to go to those games, so you bring in new fans and you’ve made new fans who hopefully come back.”

The players, whether they’re college athletes trying to get on scouts’ radars or minor leaguers assigned to the clubs by their MLB organizations, also benefit from the increased exposure and engaged crowds.

“I’ve heard from several players that it’s like a little taste of the majors before you actually make it to the show,” Fernandez of the Trash Pandas said. “The old team we had before they moved, we were getting like 200, 300 people a game. It was kinda sad to be at a game because there’d be so many empty seats. Here we’ve led the league in attendance every single season. We average 5,000 people a night.”

Los Angeles Angels starting shortstop Zach Neto, who played 37 games for Rocket City (based in Madison, Ala.) on his path to the majors, had a pair of custom Trash Panda cleats made and said he still rocks the team’s merch.

“We got to play there in an awesome atmosphere every night,” he said. “Even to this day, I still see myself as a Trash Panda.”

The college kids feel it, too. East Carolina catcher Ryan McCrystal, who spent the last two summers as a Burlington Sock Puppet, said the North Carolina community embraced all the players but admitted it can take a bit of effort to convince friends and family you’re playing for a real team.

“They think it’s a joke, but I think it’s really cool because it’s easier to rally around a team with that kind of name. It’s easier to build up a community around a team name that is something that brings people together,” he said.

“It’s the only sport that you can really do it where it makes sense. It’s something small but beautiful about the game.”

(Illustration: Daniel Goldfarb / The Athletic; top photos courtesy of Rocket City Trash Pandas, Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp) 

Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books and stories that have gone on to find new life in the form of movies, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats. This week’s quiz highlights animated films that draw inspiration and source material from beloved literature.

Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their screen adaptations.