CNN
 — 

The Indiana Pacers defeated the New York Knicks 125-108 to win the best-of-seven Eastern Conference Finals in six games and advance to the franchise’s first NBA Finals since 2000.

It was another hard fought battle between two teams with a storied past that was a tight game until the Pacers pulled away in the final quarter. Just like most of the playoffs, the duo of Pascal Siakam and Tyrese Haliburton led the way for Indiana, finishing with 31 points and 21 points respectively.

It was Siakam’s third game this series with at least 25 points which garnered him the Larry Bird Trophy – awarded to the MVP of the Eastern Conference Finals.

“It’s been such an amazing experience for me so far,” Siakam told the TNT Sports broadcast about his time in Indy. “From the first day I landed here like the love has been amazing. … First class organization. I’m just so happy to be here. I mean tonight, after a bad Game 5, we wanted to bounce back, I have like 100% belief in my teammates. Whenever we are down, we always find a way.”

The game also marked a historic moment for the broadcast; the Pacers victory was the last game in the long-standing relationship between the NBA and TNT. While “Inside the NBA” will continue on ESPN, the NBA on TNT ended at the culmination of the Eastern Conference finals.

Both teams kept it close in the first half, trading baskets despite the Knicks’ turnover issues that plagued them the whole game.

It was a quick 9-0 run from three consecutive 3-pointers to open the third quarter that made the difference for a fast-paced Pacers squad.

From there, the crowd on hand at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, which featured WNBA star Caitlin Clark, roared the Pacers to the very end.

Haliburton said he was “really proud” of the way his team played.

“We had a tough showing last game as a group so we wanted to respond. We did a great job at that,” Haliburton told the TNT Sports broadcast.

“I don’t even have words. It’s really exciting. We will enjoy this one for now and theres a lot more work to do against a really tough team. Just really proud of this group.”

It was a tough night for the Knicks All-Star duo of Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns. Towns finished with 22 points and 14 rebounds, while Brunson added 19 points.

New York struggled with the pestering Indiana defense, leading to 17 turnovers as a team. Pacers guard Andrew Nembhard had a game-high six steals.

Despite the Knicks appearing to inch their way back into the game multiple times, Indiana proved to be too much to handle as New York’s attempt to become the 14th team in NBA history to come back from a 3-1 series deficit fell painfully short.

The Knicks, who haven’t won a title since 1973, let alone advance to the Finals since 1999, again were eliminated by a team they consider one of their greatest rivals.

The two teams met in the playoffs eight times in their histories including six in eight years between 1993-2000. Last year, Indiana defeated New York in Game 7 at Madison Square Garden, setting an NBA record for the best field goal percentage ever in an NBA game, converting 67.1% of their shots.

Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau pointed to all the adversity the team faced this season with injuries and late additions to the rotation when asked how they can take the next step and get to a Finals.

“I’m proud of what these guys did,” Thibodeau told reporters. “There was a lot that we had to get through and I thought we handled that part well. … A lot of moving parts but they kept fighting and moving forward. And I’ve got great respect for that.”

The 28-year-old Brunson didn’t mince his words about another loss to the Pacers, saying it “sucked” but expressed the confidence in how the team will rebound in the future.

“The most confidence. Overconfident. Seriously. There’s not an ounce of any type of doubt that I’m not confident with this group,” Brunson said.

Towns added that the moves the Knicks have made were to “win.”

“It hurts not to bring an opportunity to the city for a championship,” Towns said. “We got a bunch of great guys in that locker room and we hope to – the plan now is to put ourselves in this position again and succeed next time.”

The Pacers face a tall task next, playing the NBA’s best regular season team – the Oklahoma City Thunder, playing in their second-ever Finals appearance – which starts on Thursday at the Paycom Center.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.

CNN
 — 

Welcome to Trendlines, your weekly installment of what’s trending up and what’s trending down in sports.

This week we’re talking about the sport of baseball and who is really America’s team. We’re trained to think America’s baseball team is the Yankees given all of their success in the 20th century.

But that was the past, and this is now.

The reigning World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers are who we’re talking about now.

So let’s start with a big upswing.

Baseball differs from football in that baseball is far more regionalized. Even the best teams’ games aren’t usually put on national television.

Google searches, however, allow us to capture the national sentiment of a team. More people are searching for the Dodgers on Google this May than any other dating back since 2004 (when Google started tracking searches).

The Dodgers aren’t just beating their own records, though. They’re also beating the Yankees, who have traditionally been a top team in Google searches and had beaten the Dodgers in search traffic in every May before this one.

And yes, the Dodgers are beating the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Rams in Google searches as well. They’re clearly the top of their state and town, too.

One of the things I always talk about with Google searches is I liked to see them backed up in the real world and not just on the computer screen.

That’s definitely the case with the Dodgers. They’re drawing more than 50,000 fans to their average home game so far this season. The Yankees are the next closest, and they’re pulling in fewer than 43,000 fans per home game.

Indeed, no team has pulled in at least 50,000 fans per home game since the Yankees and New York Mets did it in 2008. We’re talking about nearly 20 years ago.

The Dodgers themselves have never averaged at least 50,000 fans per game. If the Dodgers continue at their current pace, they’ll top the 4 million mark for total attendance for the first time ever in their history.

Being able to get your home fans to come out is one thing. Getting fans on the road is something else entirely.

This is something the Yankees have continuously done well. Whether it be from fans traveling from Los Angeles or having a fan base so large that fans in opponents’ cities come out for you, road attendance is a way to understand broad appeal.

This year, the Dodgers are beating the pace they set last season through 29 road games when they eventually became the first team since the 2008 season to average more than 36,000 fans per road game.

The Yankees, for comparison, are pulling in only about 31,000 on average, even when you don’t count games played in minor league stadiums (the Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays) or early season games played in cold weather Detroit. Counting those games, the Yankees have averaged fewer than 25,000 coming out for their road games.

The bottom line is the Dodgers are America’s baseball team, not the Yankees. They’ve actually won a World Series in the last 15 years, have greater fan interest and more fans coming out to their games.

Of course, the Yankees will see a big boost this weekend for their road attendance as they visit the Dodgers. Now, that’s good baseball.

CNN
 — 

Jesús Velázquez still has his old John Starks jersey at home. He remembers the New York Knicks going to the NBA Finals in 1994, Patrick Ewing’s infamous “finger roll” in 1995 and all the on-court fights with the Miami Heat. Last Friday night, Velázquez was one of hundreds of fans who waited in the rain to watch Game 2 against the Indiana Pacers in Central Park.

Velázquez has fond memories of the good times in the ’90s but also remembers the bad, which defined the team for most of the last 25 years. As bad as those times were, they don’t compare to watching his team so close to the NBA Finals – even if they did lose on Tuesday night and are now a heartbeat away from elimination.

“I never once put my paper bag on, but it came close,” Velázquez, 56, a long-suffering New York fan from Queens, told CNN Sports.

As heartbreak and desperation faded to failure over an excruciating 25-year period, Knicks fans are now overwhelmed, knowing their team has a chance at winning a championship soon – even as they face a 3-1 series deficit to the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals.

The return to sustained relevancy –- something that seemed next-to-impossible for over two decades –- is new for younger fans who never saw the beloved ’90s90’s teams. Those teams never won, but coming close became good enough for their older counterparts who clung to the memories of “almost” winning and tightened their grip on nostalgia as the hopelessness increased.

“It’s been a long drought. It’s been a heartbreaking drought because it’s not like we haven’t been close,” Velázquez said. “Last year, it was finally good to hear that song ‘Go NY Go’ because before it was not something you wanted to blast on your radio.”

This is the first time in 25 years that the Knicks have gone this far in the playoffs, but the gut punches the team and their fans have taken dates back further. From Michael Jordan’s three-peats to Reggie Miller scoring eight points in nine seconds, followed by Patrick Ewing’s missed layup in 1995 and the injury-riddled squad willing itself to the Finals in 1999, only to get crushed by the San Antonio Spurs, fans have had hope and then watched it get swatted away.

Those heartbreaking moments led to the slow and steady decline that started in the 2000s. Each move the Knicks made – whether it was bringing in Isiah Thomas as president of basketball operations in late 2003, trading for Brooklyn’s own Stephon Marbury, or then Knicks president Phil Jackson drafting Kristaps Porziņģis – the fleeting hope always gave way to despair.

The consecutive sellout streak of Madison Square Garden was gone and so were the A-list stars.

The Carmelo Anthony-led Knicks had a brief resurgence, even making the second round of the playoffs before they lost in six games to the Indiana Pacers in 2013. Jeremy Lin in 2012 caught fire and famously scored 38 points to beat the Kobe Bryant-led Los Angeles Lakers as one of the highlights of the short-lived “Linsanity” era.

But from that point, it was quiet at Madison Square Garden – until now. Despite being down 3-1 in the series, the Knicks are playing in the Eastern Conference Finals, something they haven’t done in 25 years.

“It’s decades of disappointment coming out. That’s what I hear,” author Paul Knepper told CNN of the cheers coming from Knicks fans.

Knepper, a longtime Knicks supporter, took his fandom several steps further and wrote “The Knicks of the Nineties.” The book chronicles the rise and fall of what could be considered the golden era of Knicks basketball for those who weren’t old enough to see Willis Reed hobble onto the Madison Square Garden hardwood for the championship clinching game against the Lakers in 1970 or the subsequent title in 1973.

Knepper, who grew up on Long Island, was watching Game 1 against the Pacers with his wife in Austin, Texas, where they live. Knepper said she’s not a Knicks fan but roots for them, even though the anxiety and pressure of seeing the historic collapse was almost too painful to watch.

“She’s like, ‘I don’t know how you do this. This is terrible. How do you watch games like this?’ And I said, ‘I’ve felt this pain before,’” Knepper said. “I felt this pain with Reggie Miller. I felt this pain when Charles Smith couldn’t make a layup in 1993 against the Bulls. I’m familiar with this pain.”

Knepper says he hears both joy and relief in the screams and cheers from fans.

“I don’t hear the Carmelo Anthony or the Jeremy Lin era. I hear Phil Jackson and trading Porziņģis and Charles Oakley getting kicked out of the Garden, which, for me, I think, personally, was probably the lowest point in this whole terrible, extended era,” Knepper told CNN Sports. “That’s the kind of stuff that I hear. I hear all of the times there was some degree of hope.”

Images of an army of Knicks fans spilling out into the streets flooded social media after the Knicks beat the defending champion Boston Celtics in Game 6 of the second round. Timothée Chalamet lowered the window of his SUV and dapped up fans as he left the building and Spike Lee was smiling ear to ear as he left the Garden – all while roughly 3,000 fans cheered in the streets. Nothing was damaged and there were only five arrests for disorderly conduct, according to a law enforcement officials.

“Everybody wants more, obviously, but this wasn’t just hope. This was hope fulfilled,” Knepper said. “We did it. We knocked off the defending champion Celtics. We’re in the conference finals. That’s what I hear when I think of it. Finally, after all these years, all these disappointments, finally, we broke through, and we’re in the conference finals, and we’re legitimate championship contenders.”

The vibe around the team wasn’t always so optimistic.

Former New York Daily News reporter Frank Isola covered the Knicks for the hometown newspaper and remembers the slow and excruciating decay at Madison Square Garden.

“We went from covering a team that every year, we held to the standard of winning a championship. Now, it’s like, they’re losing all these games, everyone’s kind of miserable, and we’re writing about it, and everyone’s getting mad,” Isola says. “The players and management are getting mad that we’re writing about how much the team sucks. I always thought that was weird.”

Isola believes the team looks to have finally got it right, making shrewd moves like signing Jalen Brunson as a free agent, who was seen running around on the Garden hardwood as a toddler when his father, now a coach on the team, was the 12th man on the roster. Current Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau was also an assistant coach the last time the Knicks went to the NBA Finals in 1999.

“What’s interesting about this team is you do have a connection to the last team that went to the finals, because Thibodeau was an assistant coach under (former coach Jeff) Van Gundy. Brunson was on the team as the 12th man, which is interesting, I guess, since (his son Jalen) is now the first man on the team now,” Isola says. “Having the coach and the star point guard kind of understand the way that it works in New York is important.”

This is the third year in a row New York has made the playoffs and each year the team has added players and improved its regular season record, something fans haven’t experienced since the 1990s. The improvement has led to a raucous crowd both inside MSG and after games on Seventh Avenue.

“I’ve always cherished the Garden in May. I’ve always thought the Garden in May is the epitome of sports,” iconic sports talk pioneer Mike Francesa told CNN about Knicks playoff basketball.

The legendary New York radio host made the Garden a second home during Knicks playoff runs while he was still doing his afternoon radio show in New York. This was especially true in the 1994 Finals run when he and his partner, Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, broadcasted from MSG before playoff games.

Francesa says he’s been courtside to watch iconic moments in Knickerbocker history during that time, like Reggie Miller’s eight points in nine seconds barrage in 1995.

“I think it’s exactly the same,” Francesa said of the energy inside Madison Square Garden. “I don’t think there’s any difference. You close your eyes and you’re there.”

Francesa said he was in the building when the Knicks won Game 4 against Boston this year. The difference between now and then was the expectation of that old team, led by Knicks icon Patrick Ewing and legendary coach Pat Riley.

“That night, to me, it could have been the Riley ’90s,” Francesa said. “That’s how it was, almost exactly the same energy.”

Francesa has seen the Knicks battle the Pacers in very intense and drama-filled matchups. Whether it was the Knicks winning in 1994, which featured Reggie Miller jawing with Spike Lee and taunting everyone by using the choke sign or in 1995 when the Pacers won and Ewing missed a last second layup, known as the infamous “finger roll” to lose the series.

This Knicks-Pacers series has so far been a nostalgia tour, featuring the same intensity, hard fouls and a nod to the old school, with Tyrese Haliburton using that same Miller choke celebration when he sent Game 1 into overtime. It was a shot that left the former Pacers sharpshooter, who was doing color commentary on the TNT national broadcast, giggling and speechless as Haliburton wrapped his hands around his neck and bugged his eyes out at the Garden crowd.

Francesa told CNN the series has taken on a life of its own and so far featured enough drama for both the die-hard fans and those who stopped watching when the team had no chance to win.

“If you were in your 20s then (during the ’90s), and you’re 50 now, I think you have a real good grasp for what this is. And you’ve waited a very long time, and they’ve now drawn you back in, maybe for the first time,” Francesa added. “Maybe they drew you back in last year, and now this year, you were casual about it, and then now, here they come again. And now you’ve been drawn in in a real way. And I think that’s real.”

Francesa is not a Knicks fan, but he rooted for players and coaches he knew well, like current Miami Heat executive Riley. The pair were close friends until Francesa and Russo criticized the then coach for leaving the Knicks following the heartbreaking 1995 season, according to the talk radio personality.

Riley has gone on to win three NBA championships with Miami. Meanwhile, the Knicks never got as close to winning a championship since the legendary coach left. Years later, the two had a poolside sit-down at a Los Angeles hotel to bury the hatchet and the two-hour conversation still wasn’t enough to patch things up, Francesa said.

Still, Francesa, who has missed the excitement of a Knicks playoff run, doesn’t want it to end and may even bring his kids to the NBA Finals – if the Knicks can come back and make it.

“This definitely brought me back to the ’90s, especially to the Riley years,” Francesa says. “I mean, Van Gundy had some real fun days and a lot of wild days, but this really brought me back to the Riley days. And the Riley days, I remember with great affection for the intensity, the energy, how special they were. They were special.”

Meanwhile, fans have been glued to the games, with watch parties in Central Park and inside Madison Square Garden for Game 3, which the Knicks won behind a massive fourth-quarter performance from Karl-Anthony Towns.

“I’m feeling like the new team is giving the same ’90s vibes. This is like an older blue collar Knicks team. It kind of has the same vibe. I hope they pull it off because these games are getting a little crazy,” said Rob Jurman, 46. “This is better than missing the playoffs. They were so bad for so long. This is so much better.”

Scott Caige, 64, is old enough to have seen the last Knicks championship. Caige said he isn’t a Knicks fan, but he’s rooting for them now, especially for star guard Jalen Brunson.

“Just to have a big city with a big market team not win a championship in so long, it feels like a fluke, but this might be the year,” Caige said.

The Pacers lead the series 3-1 after Haliburton had a historic performance in Game 4 to lead Indiana to a 130-121 win in Indianapolis. The Knicks have to win in Game 5 or else they become the latest painful chapter in Knicks history.

Knepper, however, said the fans have already won.

“If the Miami Heat went to the conference finals, there just wouldn’t be the outpouring of joy,” Knepper told CNN. “They’ve had a really nice 25- to 30-year run. Obviously, if you’re the Warriors, when you go to the conference finals, people aren’t celebrating in the streets.

“Any team that has had a decent amount of success over the last couple of decades, the fanbase isn’t going to react that way because it hasn’t been this pent-up disappointment and bottled up enthusiasm just waiting to explode. And now it’s like, ‘OK, we can explode. We can let it out. We can express joy.’”

Velázquez, who also attended the watch party outside of the Garden and found himself as one of the roughly 3,000 fans flooding Seventh Avenue after the Knicks beat the Celtics, agrees.

“I had people telling me on Facebook, ‘You’re acting like you won the championship.’ Well you know what, we did,” Velázquez said with a laugh.

“As New York Knicks fans, we’re not promised tomorrow. We haven’t partied like this in 25 years.”