The In-Season Tournament is here to stay

The NBA’s In-Season Tournament may not sway casuals, not with a Bengals/Jaguars tilt to mind, not with the MLB’s hot stove stewier than ever, but it certainly swayed the locals. Watch the clips from Sacramento or Milwaukee or L.A. or take my word on what happened in Indianapolis — tickets flew toward the faces of those best used to sticking that face in a phone.

Monday’s crowd at the Pacers’ arena was the youngest I’ve been around at a Pacer arena since Smashing Pumpkins paired with Garbage at Market Square Arena in 1996. A few full families but chiefly twentysomething groups and dates all over the place. I’ve been to Pacer “college nights” where they basically give away tickets to anyone with a student ID, yet there weren’t as many teeming twentysomethings as on Monday.

New game, new weirdness, tickets which only became available a week before — no corporate season pass hand-me-downs. The bowl was full of earnest youth, talking themselves into full-time fandom after plucking seats off an app.

It’s an odd feeling, fans flapping free towels, encouraging enrichment of players already making tens or hundreds of thousands per game, but this is America, and Indianapolis is somewhere in the middle of it.

The IST games don’t secure a playoff seed or first-round pick but they pounded fists just the same, knowing the stakes. This is a professional version of drawing fans onto the floor to shoot half-court shots for a half-million bucks. Now we just ask the Bucks to do it.

THE PACERS