INDIANAPOLIS — You make a right, and then another right, and South West Street turns into Martin Luther King Jr. Street, and then you hop on I-65 for a mile and a half. Then two more rights, a left, and East Westfield Boulevard turns into Broad Ripple Avenue. It takes about 20 minutes to travel those eight miles.
The eight miles between where Mike Woodson will lead the Knicks into the fray tonight — when they hook up with the Pacers in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals — and where he first began to understand the fervor and the frenzy that go part and parcel with Indiana basketball.
“I feel fortunate,” Woodson said during a private moment last season, in one of the rare times he has agreed to talk about himself. “I got to experience two of the capitals of the game of basketball. I grew up in Indiana, played high school and college basketball there. And I got to play in New York City. Two very different basketball cultures that both revere the game.”
So Woodson knows what his team is in for tonight, and Tuesday night, when they will need to steal a game at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in order to have a reasonable shot of winning this series.
He played for Broad Ripple High in the Indiana High School Basketball Tournament, in which the roar sometimes lasts for all 32 minutes because there are thousands of people rooting for both sides. He played for Bob Knight at Indiana University, where Assembly Hall sometimes feels like a spaceship taking flight when 17,000 Hoosiers fans lend their voices to an important cause like beating the hell out of Purdue or Iowa or Michigan State.
Now he brings a team to the Fieldhouse that wants to take back what the Pacers have: home-court advantage, earned through a victory in Game 1 in this series.
“We put ourselves in a position where we have to go to their building and take back what we think is ours,” Woodson said. “It isn’t going to be easy, but then these are the playoffs. Nothing is easy.”
Woodson never has coached a playoff game in Indianapolis, but Knicks fans have seen plenty of them. They can reinforce just how difficult an environment it is. Back at old Market Square Arena, the incessant sound effect of a buzzing Indy car engine could drive lesser players to distraction. The Fieldhouse is a bit more sophisticated but no less intimidating.
For stretches this season the Pacers have had to answer questions about their home crowds, which weren’t always robust. They drew 662,399 people, an average of 16,156 in the 18,165-seat Fieldhouse, the eighth-lowest total in the 30-team league.
But that won’t be an issue tonight, or Tuesday, when you can believe the people will come with the same force and the same fury as they did in 1994 and ’95, in 1998 and ’99 and 2000, the very heart of the old-school Knicks-Pacers rivalry. We tend to remember all the times Reggie Miller walked into Madison Square Garden and broke the Knicks’ hearts, but the Knicks won would-be elimination games at Market Square in ’94 and ’95 and they won twice in the East Finals in 1999.
A year earlier, in a script somewhat similar to the one they face tonight, they welcomed back an injured star in Indianapolis. In 1998, that was Patrick Ewing, who missed the last 56 games of the regular season and the first six games of the playoffs before suiting up for Game 2 of the Eastern semis against Indiana. Ewing was rusty, the Knicks overmatched, and they lost in five games with him when, in all likelihood, they would have lost in five without him.
Fifteen years later, these Knicks will ask far less of Amar’e Stoudemire than those Knicks asked of Ewing, but they are hopeful Stoudemire can bring a presence inside and length they desperately need against the Pacers’ Redwood frontcourt. And that maybe he can add a little something on offense, too, just enough to get them what they need.
Enough to steal one tonight — or Tuesday.
Enough to escape what promises to be a loud, lively funhouse of a fieldhouse with their season alive and their ambitions fully intact.