Pacers

INDIANAPOLIS -- When Indiana Pacers coach Larry Brown walked into his team's locker room before Game 3 of its Eastern Conference finals series with the New York Knicks, he said he wasn't sure if anyone in the room believed they could beat New York.By late afternoon, the Pacers had not only beaten the Knicks, they had dissected them. And the sellout crowd of 16,530 at Market Square Arena had everyone's ears ringing with its never-ending cheering.Patrick Ewing, the Knicks' 7-foot, 240-pound Goliath, had just one point and went 0-for-10 from the field, as the Knicks scored a record-low total for a playoff game in losing, 88-68.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Tom Gugliotta pointed to one key statistic in last night's box score: 12 assists for the Washington Bullets."Look at how many assists we had," Gugliotta said after the Bullets lost their eighth straight game, 106-87, to the Indiana Pacers. "To me, that says a lot. We're not making the extra pass."We get caught up in running a play for one person, and he's going to shoot. That's not necessarily selfish; he's trying to get things going. But we're doing it on our own and we're getting away from what we did at the beginning of the season.

INDIANAPOLIS -- One-point-three seconds?Piece of cake.There may have been better basketball games, but there have never been 13.3 seconds like yesterday's, when the Orlando Magic and Indiana Pacers swapped the lead three times before Rik Smits made a 14-footer at the buzzer, giving Indiana a 94-93 victory and a 2-2 tie in the NBA's Eastern Conference finals.An hour after the game, there were still crowds of happy fans on the streets and cars cruising downtown, blaring their horns."That was great," said Pacers guard Reggie Miller.

LANDOVER -- Pervis Ellison will never come right out and say that he's being vindicated. He's much too unassuming for that kind of braggadocio.But his play in the middle of the Washington lineup is speaking volumes. Last night, he carried the Bullets to a 127-118 double-overtime victory over the Indiana Pacers at the Capital Centre.Ellison scored 27 points and pulled down a career-high 22 rebounds -- 16 after halftime -- to pull the Bullets back into the game.The 6-foot-10 center, in his third year from Louisville, is fewer than 12,000 votes behind the New York Knicks' Patrick Ewing in fan balloting for Eastern Conference centers for next month's All-Star Game in Orlando, Fla.The voting totals and Ellison's statistics (20.4 points and 11.9 rebounds per game)

NBA commissioner David Stern came down hard on Indiana Pacers forward Ron Artest and eight other players involved in Friday night's ugly basketbrawl in suburban Detroit. Hard and fast. The melee that erupted at the end of the Pacers-Detroit Pistons game left nine people injured and the image of the NBA so badly bruised that only the most severe disciplinary action - swiftly imposed - would have sent the right message to anyone who might be tempted to take a beef into the stands again.

Indiana Pacers coach Isiah Thomas doesn't have to look far to recall the 1988-89 and 1989-90 seasons, when he helped lead the Detroit Pistons to two NBA titles. He need only look across his own locker room to see a group of young, hungry, previously heartbroken players banded together to get their first title. "You can draw some similarities," Thomas said last week during the Pacers' visit to Washington. "On that Pistons team, we were all young, and everybody was trying to carve out some turf in the league.

PURCHASE, N.Y. -- For four years, Pat Riley has preached total commitment and devotion to the team concept and to his vision of how a National Basketball Association title can be won.On Monday, Riley said it was time for his New York Knicks to give as they've never given before, because the alternative is a quick exit from the playoffs."

In his six seasons in Indiana, trash-talking forward Chuck Person was fingered as the principal reason the Pacers were labeled classic underachievers, never advancing past the first round of the NBA playoffs.But now Person is playing with the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the Pacers, who have lost eight of their past 11 games, still are pointing fingers, only this time they've discovered a bigger scapegoat: 7-foot-4 center Rik Smits.Everyone has been waiting for the Netherlands native to blossom into a superstar since he averaged 15.5 points and 2.0 blocks his second year as a pro. But the agile giant, who is a fine shooter, hasn't fulfilled the expectations of his teammates, making him a target for criticism.

LANDOVER -- There were just under five minutes left in a tie game between the Washington Bullets and the Indiana Pacers, and with Reggie Miller having a ho-hum game, several fans seated near the home bench were all over the Pacers guard.Whether the talk woke up Miller, nobody knows. But he put together an assortment of jumpers in the final minutes, scoring Indiana's last 11 points -- and mouthing off all along the way -- to lead the Pacers to a 99-93 win.Miller would finish the game with 35 points, and provided commentary to the courtside fans after each of his key baskets.