The two games will be what preseason games tend to be, meaningful opportunities to learn about the roster and prepare for the regular season. But the flight to those games might be the most valuable aspect of the Pacers’ trip to Mumbai, India next week.
The team and assorted franchise personnel leave Tuesday, Oct. 1 on a 16-hour jaunt to a country that never has hosted an NBA game, preseason or otherwise. The Pacers will play Sacramento on Oct. 4 and 5 beginning at 9:30 a.m., EST, following a few days of rest, practice, and youth clinics.
“We feel like we’re pioneers,” Pacers President of Basketball Operations Kevin Pritchard said in a conference call on Thursday. “There’s some excitement from the players that they want to be prepared to put on a good show. We have the honor and the ability to spread this beautiful game James Naismith invented.”
The Pacers and Kings have been granted an extension of a few days for training camp to negate the travel time and jet lag that will interrupt their training camps. Pritchard, however, hopes to take advantage of their sequestered environment to and from India. A video and reading material will be distributed to the players, and they will have an opportunity to address their teammates so everyone can become better acquainted.
“I’m really excited about the flight,” Pritchard said. “We’re going to try to make it productive.
“If you have a deeper understanding of who’s sitting in your locker room to your left and to your right, you have a better opportunity to meet the challenges during the season.”
Doug McDermott, the Pacers player made available in the conference call, has not played overseas during his NBA career but did travel to Lithuania and Latvia while with Creighton and to Russia with a World University Games team.
“We’ve had a chance to be around each other the last few weeks (in workouts at St. Vincent Center), but on a 16- or 17-hour flight you can learn a lot about guys and get to know each other,” he said.
McDermott said the pre-training camp workouts have been productive.
“Our coaching staff is really pushing us,” he said. “There’s a lot of talented guys, and they’re young. The oldest guy on the team now is (30-year-old Justin Holiday). It’s kind of crazy being one of the vets. But I’m really impressed with the young guys and how much they’ve been in the gym this summer.”
The trip to India and the games there will provide the Pacers a variety of experiences, but the primary purpose will be to better introduce the NBA’s product to one of the few highly populated countries in which basketball is not well-established. It’s a long-term investment that could reap rewards for the league and its teams years from now.
“We have an opportunity to open up the eyes of the Indian people to this brilliant and wonderful game that we love in the United States,” Pritchard said. “If in 10 years you see kids at an outdoor basketball court wearing a Pacers or Kings jersey, then we’ve done our job.”
