Pacers Co-Owner Melvin Simon Dies

Basketball was big in the state of Indiana before Melvin Simon and his brother Herb got involved.

They just made it bigger and better.

Melvin Simon, the older of the two brothers who own the NBA's Indiana Pacers, died Wednesday, leaving a huge hole at the top of the state's basketball fraternity. He was 82.

It was the brothers who bought the Pacers in 1983 and thwarted a probable move to Sacramento, leading the franchise to the success in the '90s that prompted construction in 1999 of Canseco Fieldhouse, one of the league's finest facilities.

Simon started what is now the country's largest shopping mall development company, using his fortune to purchase the Pacers, who were struggling both on the court and off in the early '80s.

They bought a team that had finished 20-62 the season before, attracting an average crowd of just 5,000 fans. It was a year before the NFL's Colts moved to Indianapolis from Baltimore.

They hired Donnie Walsh as general manager and built a team that by the end of the decade started a run that included at least 40 wins in 15 of 17 years. They reached the Eastern Conference final six times in 11 years, becoming one of the NBA's best-drawing teams in a basketball-crazy state. They reached the NBA Finals in 2000. They won 61 games in 2004.

The Pacers started a slide earlier this decade with a string of on- and off-the-court troubles involving various players. The most prominent incident was the ugly brawl of 2004 that started with Ron Artest and spilled into the stands in Detroit and involved various spectators.

The Simon brothers were so appalled by the actions of their team that they ordered a revamping of the roster, directing the basketball operations department to put more emphasis on character. Although Simon mostly stayed in the background, leaving his basketball people to run the operation, his presence has been felt for more than 25 years.

"He's one of the major reasons Indianapolis is a major league city in many different ways,'' said Pacers Sports and Entertainment President Jim Morris in a statement released this afternoon. "The success of the Simon family has touched the lives and benefited every single Hoosier.''