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Team Profile
Indiana Pacers: Five things you need to know
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Johnny Furphy's role grew as Indiana crashed from the Finals to the worst record in its history.
- Melbourne's Johnny Furphy was drafted 35th overall by Indiana in 2024.
- Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles in Game 7 of the 2025 Finals.
- Indiana fell from the Finals to a franchise-worst 19-63 the next season in 2025-26 season
Johnny Furphy has arrived but his growth has been delayed because of an ACL injury in 2025-26. But he's on the road to recovery.
The 21-year-old from Melbourne spent his rookie year learning, playing 50 games off the bench on an Indiana team that reached the 2025 NBA Finals, soaking up a title run from the best seat in the building. In his second season he took the leap: 21 starts, 18.4 minutes a game, better than double his rookie load, shooting 47 per cent from the field.
For a player jstthree years out of Australian junior basketball, that is real, fast progress. Furphy answered every question Indiana asked of him, and he did it as one of the youngest players in the league.
Australians who have played for the Indiana Pacers
Johnny Furphy is the current one, and he is thriving. Born in Melbourne on December 8, 2004, he spent a single season at Kansas before Indiana took him 35th overall in the 2024 NBA Draft, moving up a spot in a draft-night trade with San Antonio. He made the roster immediately, scored his first NBA Finals points as a 20-year-old during Indiana's 2025 run, and in his second season became a starter, more than doubling his minutes and lifting his shooting to 47 per cent. Few Australians have established themselves in the NBA this quickly.
Nathan Jawai belongs to the franchise's draft history rather than its playing history. The Bamaga-born Queenslander was selected 41st overall by the Pacers in the 2008 NBA Draft, the first Indigenous Australian drafted into the NBA, but his rights were traded to Toronto on draft night and he never played a game for Indiana.
2025-26 team snapshot
Indiana enters the new season trying to recover from one of the strangest years any recent contender has had.
Twelve months after reaching Game 7 of the NBA Finals, the Pacers finished 2025-26 at 19-63, the worst record in franchise history. They started 1-12, the worst opening ever recorded by a team that had made the previous season's Finals.
The cause was a single moment. In the first quarter of Game 7 against Oklahoma City, after making three early three-pointers, Tyrese Haliburton tore his right Achilles tendon on a non-contact drive. He missed the entire 2025-26 season. Without their offensive engine, and with injuries mounting around the roster, Indiana never recovered.
The front office responded by trading for size and stability. On February 5, 2026, the Pacers acquired centre Ivica Zubac and forward Kobe Brown from the LA Clippers, sending out Bennedict Mathurin, Isaiah Jackson and a package of picks. In the offseason they signed veteran forward Larry Nance Jr. on July 9, 2026, and re-signed Kobe Brown and Jalen Slawson to two-way deals.
The season ahead is defined by one question with no certain answer: whether Haliburton returns to what he was. A torn Achilles at 26 is not the sentence it once was, but it is not a formality either.
Why the Pacers matter
Indiana is the franchise that carries basketball itself as its identity.
This is Indiana, where the sport is closer to religion than pastime, where the state high-school tournament once drew crowds larger than professional games, and where the 1954 Milan High School title inspired the film Hoosiers. The Pacers were built on that, and they have spent 50 years being the team a basketball state deserves rather than the one a big market demands.
They have never won an NBA championship. They have been to two NBA Finals, in 2000 and 2025, and lost both. But few franchises are as woven into their own community, and fewer still have produced as much basketball history with as little silverware.
The ABA dynasty
Before the NBA, the Pacers were the best team in a different league.
Indiana was a founding member of the American Basketball Association in 1967 and became its dominant franchise, winning three ABA championships in 1970, 1972 and 1973 behind Roger Brown, Mel Daniels and George McGinnis. No ABA club won more.
When the leagues merged in 1976, the Pacers were absorbed into the NBA along with Denver, the Nets and San Antonio. They arrived as champions of a folding league and spent the next decade discovering how hard the NBA was.
Reggie Miller and the Knicks
For 18 seasons, the Indiana Pacers were Reggie Miller.
The greatest player in franchise history was a shooting guard who turned late-game marksmanship and open trash talk into an art form. His rivalry with the New York Knicks defined 1990s basketball on the east coast: eight points in 8.9 seconds to steal a 1995 playoff game at Madison Square Garden, and a running feud with courtside Knicks fan Spike Lee.
Miller took the Pacers to the 2000 NBA Finals, where they lost to Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant's Lakers in six games. He retired in 2005 as the franchise's all-time leading scorer and, for a time, the NBA's all-time leader in three-pointers.
The Haliburton era and 2025
Indiana's return to relevance was built around a trade almost nobody rated at the time.
The Pacers acquired Tyrese Haliburton from Sacramento in 2022, and he became one of the best passers and highest-value players in the league. Around him, Indiana built a fast, selfless, deep team under coach Rick Carlisle that reached the Eastern Conference Finals in 2024 and the NBA Finals in 2025.
The 2025 run was a series of escapes, highlighted by a seven-point comeback in the final 40 seconds of Game 5 against a first-round opponent. It ended in Game 7 against Oklahoma City, and in the injury that shaped the season that followed.
The greatest Pacers of all time
Reggie Miller is the franchise's greatest player and its all-time leading scorer. Mel Daniels and Roger Brown were the twin pillars of the ABA championship teams, both later inducted into the Hall of Fame. George McGinnis was the most physically dominant of that group.
Jermaine O'Neal carried the club through the 2000s, Rik Smits was Miller's long-time frontcourt partner, and Tyrese Haliburton delivered the franchise's first NBA Finals appearance in a quarter of a century.
Five Fast Facts
- The Pacers have never won an NBA championship, but won three ABA titles in 1970, 1972 and 1973.
- Indiana has reached two NBA Finals, in 2000 and 2025, losing both.
- Tyrese Haliburton tore his Achilles in Game 7 of the 2025 Finals and missed the entire next season.
- The 19-63 record of 2025-26 was the worst in franchise history, a year after reaching the Finals.
- Two Australians are tied to the franchise: Johnny Furphy, who plays for them, and Nathan Jawai, a 2008 draft-night pick who never did.
Historical Timeline
- 1967: Founded as a member of the American Basketball Association.
- 1970, 1972, 1973: Win three ABA championships.
- 1976: Absorbed into the NBA in the ABA merger.
- 1987: Draft Reggie Miller 11th overall.
- 1995: Miller scores eight points in 8.9 seconds against the Knicks.
- 2000: First NBA Finals appearance, losing to the Lakers.
- 2008: Draft Nathan Jawai 41st overall, trading his rights to Toronto.
- 2022: Acquire Tyrese Haliburton from Sacramento.
- 2024: Draft Johnny Furphy 35th overall.
- 2025: Reach the NBA Finals; Haliburton tears his Achilles in Game 7.
- 2026: Finish 19-63, the worst record in franchise history.
Looking ahead
Everything hinges on a tendon. A healthy Tyrese Haliburton makes Indiana a playoff team again; a diminished one leaves the Pacers rebuilding around Pascal Siakam and a group of young players who spent last season being thrown into the deep end.
That group includes Johnny Furphy, and his trajectory is the most encouraging thing an Australian fan can take from the Pacers right now. A season as a starter at 21, on a team that leaned on him, is exactly the education a young wing needs. When Haliburton returns and Indiana is whole again, Furphy will be more ready for it than almost anyone expected this soon.
For Australian fans, that is the story worth following: a kid from Melbourne who has gone from second-round pick to NBA starter in two seasons, and looks like he is only getting started.
