Day: May 7, 2025

A crazy few hours Tuesday night.

Holy Shit, Pacers!!!

I knew the Pacers were in trouble when I saw, about an hour before game two of the Eastern Conference semifinals, that Cleveland would be missing three starters. THREE. How did I know they were in trouble? Because any time the Pacers faced a situation like this in the regular season, they laid a huge egg, either losing to a bad team or having to work like crazy in the fourth quarter to avoid an embarrassing L. In fact, there are multiple memes in the Pacers-verse about how the team plays like champions against good teams, and ass against bad/injury riddled teams. Just last month, as the regular season wound down, Indiana played the Cavs who were resting all their starters after locking up the top seed. Those replacement Cavs gave the Pacers starters everything they had for about ¾ of the game before the Pacers finally eeked out the win.

While the nation might have expected an easy Pacers win, I knew better.

So most of the game was no surprise. The shots that were falling in game one for Indiana kept bricking off. Cleveland played inspired, especially on the defensive end, and Donovan Mitchell was wearing his Superman cape. The Pacers trailed by 20 multiple times. By 14 going into the fourth quarter. As much as I wanted to expect a late-game rush like last month, the playoffs are a different animal and Cleveland was playing like their season was on the line while the Pacers just couldn’t find the right gears.

The margin was seven with under 50 seconds left. Five with 27 seconds left. Three with 12 seconds left. Two with 1.1 seconds left. And the Pacers won.

In that stretch Aaron Nesmith had a SICK follow dunk off a Pascal Siakam missed free throw.

Then he drew an offensive foul from Mitchell.[1] Tyrese Haliburton went to the line down three with 12 seconds left and swished the first. Then I’m pretty sure he missed the second on purpose, wiggled through traffic to grab the loose ball, and drained a step-back 3 to win the game.

There was screaming and yelling all over Indy, including in our living room, when the ball ripped through the net.

2–0 out of nowhere and who knows what the Cavs’ health, physical and mental, will be going forward. Mitchell took a beating, some of it self-imposed because of how he plays, and was hobbled late in the game.

I found this insane stat in ESPN’s story this morning:

Since 1997–98, playoff teams have won only three of 1,643 games when trailing by at least seven points in the final minute of the fourth quarter or overtime, according to ESPN research.

The Pacers have accounted for two of the wins in this postseason.

If the Pacers win this series, Haliburton’s 3 and Nesmith’s dunk will go down in franchise lore, shots that are shown in montages for decades.

At this point you have to at least consider the possibility that the Pacers are on some charmed run. And the Celtics seem a little banged up and blew their game one against New York. The NBA doesn’t usually have Cinderellas but maybe…

Of course now the Cavs will probably win games three and four in Indy and turn it into a best-of-three series.

High Speed Chase

I was about to wrap up things and head to bed Tuesday night when I heard loud car sounds. We live just off a very busy street and while it was after 11:00, we do get the occasional fool who takes advantage of the lighter traffic to rip down the road.

But this was different. There seemed to be a lot of engines racing. And then I noticed a lot of police sirens. I looked out our front door and saw five police cars fly by. We get emergency vehicles up-and-down that street all day but I’d never seen cops driving this fast. They were going so fast I heard their engines before the sirens.

Seconds later our power flickered, which seemed really weird. It flickered twice more in the next minute or so, and I thought I heard a transformer blowing somewhere.

Then two more cops flew by. And then two more.

C, the only other person awake, texted me saying “So many cops!”

And then more cops raced down the street, followed by a fire truck.

This continued for a while. In total, at least 20 police cars passed our house in about a 10 minute stretch.

I finally came to my senses and launched a police scanner app to try to get an idea for what was going on.

From what I could gather, a high-speed chase started at least two suburbs away, continued through Carmel, and then cut through our part of northern Indy. Three or four blocks from our house the car being chased crashed, taking out a power line in the process. We were lucky; about 300 people lost power for several hours but ours just blinked those three times.

Most excitingly, it seemed like driver of the car had fled the crash on foot and cops were setting up a perimeter to nab him. The Indy Metro Police network pulls in calls from all over the city, so it was very hard to follow as calls about a shooting on the east side, a fight in a parking lot downtown, and a couple welfare checks in other parts of the city slipped between the calls from the officers working the chase. I was able to hear cars checking in from various intersections in our area where they had posted up. There was a momentary thrill when one cop radioed in the intersection right outside our house, although I think the feed was delayed and he had already moved closer to the action. I could also hear cops from different cities involved in the chase coordinating their search. It sounded like they had the guy pinned down, or at least had an idea where he was and were using both a dog and drone to get a better view.

Eventually the calls dwindled and it was midnight and I had to get up early so I checked out. Naturally I can’t find a thing about it on any local TV station’s new page or on the paper’s site. I had to take L to PT and then school this morning. On my way back I drove through the neighborhood where the search was and couldn’t find any evidence of a wreck, damage to a power line, or remnants of police activity. Disappointing.

In our nearly seven years here we’ve now had a murder half a mile away that we could hear the shots from, a crazy person having a brief armed stand-off with cops a half mile the opposite way, a homeless person die while sleeping outside the grocery store around the corner, some idiot empty a clip on their handgun in the street two doors down, and now a high speed chase. I’m not sure if that’s going to be a selling point when it comes time for us to downsize but it makes for interesting evenings.