Play Now Still, those Pacers won 58 games and pushed Michael Jordan to the absolute brink, coming six points away from toppling the Without brawn, they needed to win with brains. site: media | arena: nba | pageType: stories | Michael Jordan once insulted Reggie Miller and their relationship has never been the same since then.
This cut off Jordan's preferred mid-range jumper, but it also forced Smits to scamper back into position afterward.
He started Toni Kukoc at power forward for most of this series to combat Indiana's flawless defensive shot profile. In the Bulls, the Pacers had finally run into a team capable of punishing them for the tactically brilliant but risky strategies on which their success was built.
Jordan just punished the Pacers so thoroughly from the post that it didn't matter. At least they can take solace in coming closer than anyone to ending the Bulls dynasty. Well for starters, Phil Jackson is a pretty good coach in his own right.
The 1997-98 Pacers finished 28th in offensive rebounding rate and reaped the rewards on defense. 2:24 pm ETI agree that CBS Sports can send me the "CBS Sports HQ Newsletter" newsletter. Aside from their point guards, every Pacer in Bird's playoff rotation measured at least 6-6. The Pacers would have a 20-point lead in the 2nd quarter, and eventually won by 33 – it was the worst Lakers NBA Finals loss since the 148–114 loss to Boston in the 1985 NBA Finals , known as the "Memorial Day Massacre." The Pacers have not made it back to the NBA Finals since Miller’s retirement and have only made it to the Eastern Conference Finals twice.Reggie Miller never won a championship during his career, but his play was stellar enough for him to make a lot of money.
Both Miller siblings were gifted athletes. After missing the playoffs in his first two seasons, the Pacers only missed the playoffs once the rest of his career.
While they feasted on 3-pointers generated by post-doubles, they themselves avoided doubling at all costs, even against Michael Jordan, instead staying home on perimeter shooters in an effort to limit the damage of mismatches to only two points.
Watch how patient Dale Davis is in drawing Scottie Pippen away from Mark Jackson.
His offensive coordinator was a young Rick Carlisle, and his fingerprints are all over the style run by the '97-98 Pacers. Plenty of teams from the 1990s can sympathize, but there is something especially tragic about Indiana's poor timing.
Guess who won the foot race between Rik Smits and Michael Jordan?The Bulls spammed the Jordan-Luc Longley pick-and-roll relentlessly down the stretch of Game 7, and while the dunk stands out, the most common outcome was a foul. section: | slug: last-dance-reggie-millers-pacers-not-michael-jordans-best-opponent-but-the-smartest | sport: basketball | route: article_single.us |
Parking the 7-4 Smits at the basket was a fairly effective deterrent, and when teams used the pick-and-roll to draw him away from the hoop, the Pacers usually had a spare rim-protector in either Dale or Antonio Davis to rotate over to the basket. Reggie Miller is one of the greatest players of all-time. The 1997-98 group wasn't quite as analytically-inclined, finishing 12th in attempts in what was still a massive jump from 24th in Brown's final year.
Fortunately, that is something that Larry Bird has in abundance.
The Pacers hit their first 6 three point shots in the game. They lost to However, in 1999-2000, the Pacers finally reached the NBA Finals. Who needs an NBA championship?© Copyright 2020 Endgame360 Inc. All Rights Reserved. CBS Sports is a registered trademark of CBS Broadcasting Inc. Commissioner.com is a registered trademark of CBS Interactive Inc. So how did they do it?
He watched Indiana do it firsthand in this series.
After years of playoff disappointments, Bird took over as head coach for the Pacers in the summer of 1997 and reinvented them into a harbinger of the basketball revolution that would soon come, adopting many of the modern principles that teams take for granted today. Players like Miller, Rose and the aging Derrick McKey may not have been elite defenders at that point, but they were long enough to contest just about anything from behind the arc. Jackson led the way with 8.7 assists per game, and Travis Best chipped in another 3.4, but the wild card for Indiana was a young Jalen Rose. Cheryl led her USC teams to two NCAA championships.