There's a wide array of local stories today on the Pacers with the draft lottery last night and continued reports on a pending deal with the Capital Improvement Board (CIB) to take over some operating costs of the Fieldhouse. Speaking of the Fieldhouse, one former downtown business owner is citing the Fieldhouse as the basis for a disaster relief claim for his failed business.
This is a basketball-centric site, so let's start with the Pacers and the 10th pick in the draft. Last night's draft lottery solidified the draft order, so now it's time for Larry Bird to begin weighing his options. Bruno wades through several of those options, while Bird continues to indicated he'd be happy to move the pick.
"We're open to doing anything with that pick. We know there's some athletic bigs out there and we need one. We could look at point guards – there's not a lot of point guards in the draft, but we think we're going have some options with that 10th pick whether it's in the draft or dealing with some other teams."
After the jump, more links on the lottery, local news and the Eastern Conference finals where Vince Carter made Nick Anderson a trending topic on Twitter after wanting no part of two free throws late in the Magic loss to the Celtics last night.
Pacers get no luck, remain at No. 10
Mike Wells offers his take on the draft lottery.
Celtics bully Magic into corner in East finals
Woj recaps the Magic crumbling at crunch time, leaving the Celtics up 2-0 in the Eastern Conference finals.
Experts say a Pacers move unlikely
Francesca Jaroz reports on the many issues that would muck up a move by the Pacers. All solid points, however, as we witnessed in Seattle, it just takes one wealthy person motivated to buy a team and all of those hurdles can quickly shrink. While the deal seems imminent, I keep hearing about people wanting the city/CIB to be tougher on the Pacers and not capitulate to their every demand. Obviously, they've just started following this story. This has been going on since early April 2009 when the Pacers were, according to their agreement with the city, able to open up negotiations on the operations of the Fieldhouse. It's not like the Pacers asked and the city handed them a check.
Businessman Files For Disaster Relief, Citing Pacers
This seems like an embarrassing cash grab for a failed business, but you have to like the effort. Comparing Hurricane Katrina relief to the Fieldhouse bringing TOO MANY people downtown. Unfortunately, those people didn't want to go to the Hollywood Bar and Filmworks.
What Does a Draft Pick Get You? Part I: Stat Ratings and Number Crunching
Tim Donahue analyzes past draft picks to try to determine some reasonable expectations for this year's draft picks.