Night with the Pacers

(Blog created on Feb. 3rd)

Some great things have been happening since I last blogged. It was very satisfying to beat the Dakota Wizards on Saturday (Jan 30). As Jeff notes in his blog, we did not do very well against the Wizards last year. It will be interesting to see how the rematch goes tonight. Let’s hope Rod “Boom Tho” Benson continues to be a non-factor in this game as well. The guy was a beast last season in the D-League and is capable of putting up some big numbers. I’ll be watching the game on NBA’s Futurecast and so should you.

Some friends and I went down to the Pacers/Heat game on Friday night. The Pacers dominated D-Wade and the Heat for the majority of the game and came up with a nice win. I am very optimistic about the future of the Pacers. They have a solid team, and I think we can expect to see them back in the playoffs next year. Realistically they are not too far out of the hunt this year. It was great to see former Mad Ants staffer Lindsey Clifford at the game. She is currently working in group sales for the Indiana Pacers and doing a great job.

Lindsey hooked her favorite Mad Ants blogger up at the game! She introduced me to Pacer great “Big Smooth” Sam Perkins. He was always one of my favorites, with his huge cornrows and unique three point shot. He was a big part of the 1999-00 Pacers team that went to the NBA finals and took on the Lakers. I was also able to meet the one and only Stacy Paetz. Stacy is the court-side reporter for FSN-IN and you see her on all of the televised Pacers games. Everyone in the office knows that I have a slight crush on Stacy (by slight I mean borderline stalkerish). There was a chance for me to meet her at the Pacers/Bulls preseason game at the Coliseum but it did not end up happening (due to me being a huge wimp). So Lindsey introduced me during half-time of the Pacers game and I had a brief and somewhat awkward conversation with her. Her parting words were “Thank you for your support”, so I totally blew my chance. But I did get a nice picture with her to put up on the blog. I should have asked her when she was going to do a special on the Mad Ants for a Pacers broadcast. So Stacy, if you read this come to Fort Wayne and I’ll give you “insider access” to the Mad Ants. We can discuss all the details over dinner!

Check out the Mad Ants Office Podcast on the main page of our website. It is currently listed under “news” on the home page. This was our first podcast and hopefully it was amusing. It’s something fun we are going to do every Friday afternoon at the office.

I will be back next week with another update and hopefully be talking about how we won all three road games this week!

-Garrett