Knicks, Pacers share bitter playoff rivalry with new chapter set to begin

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The funny thing is, we often skip past those old battles — remember the headlines? "KNICKS VS. SLICKS"? — when we think about the best of all Knicks rivalries. There were some wonderful encounters with the Bulls, for instance, and so many of them included Michael Jordan, but that wasn't so much a rivalry as a study in head-banging.

You can get a lot of Knicks fans riled up — pun intended — when they remember the epic struggles with the Heat, which highlighted every postseason from 1997 through 2000, four successive blood feuds that were equal parts exhausting and exhilarating. But after a while, those games became a little hard on the eyes, two teams sired by the same father playing exactly the same way, an endless stream of 79-76 games.

The old-timers? Oh, it doesn't take much to get them started about the rivalry with the Bullets, which began in Baltimore and ended in Washington. Those teams met every single years in the playoffs from 1969-74, and some of those games had to be seen to be believed. But the Knicks won five of those six series.

Reggie Miller was one of the Knicks' most infamous villains in the playoffs. ASSOCIATED PRESS

But the Knicks and the Pacers?

"Let me tell you something," Larry Brown told me back in October, "I wish there could be a Knicks-Pacers playoff game tonight. I don't even need to coach the game. I just want to watch it. Can we do that?"

I'd called Brown to listen to him favorably compare this group of Knicks to the 2004 Pistons team that gave Brown the NBA championship to sit next to the NCAA title he'd won with Kansas 16 years earlier. Inevitably, the conversation drifted back to the Knicks and the Pacers playoff series that seemed to electrify the spring every year back in the day.

"Every now and then I come across one of those games on TV," Brown said. "And I'm living and dying on every possession … and I know what happened! I was there."

In truth, the Pacers are the Knicks' principal playoff foe for all time, not only because they met so often but because both teams won their share of the series. When the teams renew hostilities Monday night in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals at Madison Square Garden it'll mark the eighth time since 1993 that they've met in the playoffs.

The Pacers have won four times, including four of the past five. The Knicks have won three times. The cast changed on both sides. The coaches changed: from Pat Riley to Jeff Van Gundy to Mike Woodson for the Knicks; from Brown to Larry Bird to Frank Vogel for the Pacers.

Larry Johnson hits a 3-pointer and is fouled on the play

during Game 3 of the 1999 Eastern Conference Finals. ASSOCIATED PRESS

But the memories last, and they linger. The last time these teams met in the postseason, 11 years ago, Game 6 of the East semis at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, the Knicks were greeted by a huge sign as soon as they took the floor for final warm-up:

"The Hicks

Own the Knicks!"

When The Post first auditioned that back page in 1994, the city of Indianapolis treated it like the worst kind of civic slander. Soon the good people of Indiana embraced it. And by 2013 — and, you would assume, now — they revel in it.

Follow The Post's coverage of the Knicks in the NBA playoffs

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Vaccaro: Resilient Knicks will face one more test of wills in pressure-packed Game 7
Ex-Knicks stars distraught while watching ugly Game 6 loss to Pacers
Knicks have Game 7 Garden history on their side going into win-or-go-home Pacers matchup

"The back-and-forth between the teams was one thing," Reggie Miller, a central figure in the first six series, said in 2019. "But then you had the two buildings, the Garden and Market Square Arena, trying to out-shout and out-do each other. It was thrilling."

The heat between the Knicks and the Pacers began innocently — and unwittingly. On the morning of May 12, 1985, the only thing the teams had in common was bad basketball. They should have already been heated rivals. From 1970-73, the Knicks won two NBA titles and the Pacers won two ABA titles, but in a separated pro basketball world, they never played in a game that mattered.

Both teams arrived at the first-annual NBA lottery coming off brutal seasons: the Knicks 24-58, the Pacers even worse at 22-60. But with two spots remaining, they were the two teams left on the board for Patrick Ewing. David Stern flipped over the Pacers' logo, and when he did, Ewing became a Knick. Indiana picked Wayman Tisdale.

Roy Hibbert (R.) blocks Carmelo Anthony during the 2013 Eastern Conference semifinals. AP

Advantage, Knicks.

Then they began running into each other in the playoffs, and there always seemed to be something. John Starks head-butted Miller in Game 3 of the '93 playoffs. Miller went bonkers twice: Game 5 in '94 and Game 1 in '95, and both years the Knicks won elimination Game 6s at Market Square. Larry Johnson had his four-point play in 1999. A year later, a late Reggie 3 put the Knicks into hibernation for the better part of a quarter century.

That may be ancient history to the Knicks and Pacers who will tangle across the next few weeks. It's no such thing for the folks who will pack the Garden, and the Fieldhouse. Knicks vs. Hicks? Yeah. It's about time. We've waited long enough.

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