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Reggie Miller's late eight-point outburst in a 1995 playoff win at New York is one of his career highlights.
Patrick Ewing is able to laugh now about the day nearly a decade ago when Reggie Miller's shooting snatched a sure playoff victory away from his New York Knicks.
"He's a guy that when I played against him I wanted to smack him," Ewing said. "But I all I can do is take my hat off to him."
Ewing spoke Friday as the Indiana Pacers faced a future without their leader of 18 years, a day after Miller had his sister announce on national television that he would retire after this season.
The Miller highlight-reel performance that Ewing recalled happened on a Sunday afternoon when he turned a six-point Knicks lead into a 107-105 Pacers victory by hitting two 3-pointers and scoring eight points in 8.9 seconds to stun the Madison Square Garden crowd.
It was just one of many high-pressure shots Miller hit on his way to setting the NBA record for 3-pointers made and moving up to 14th on the league scoring list with 24,685 points going into Friday night's game against Houston.
And it all came after Pacers CEO Donnie Walsh faced a cascade of boos when he selected Miller with the 11th pick in the 1987 draft out of UCLA. Many fans wanted the Pacers to draft Steve Alford, who had just led Indiana University to the NCAA championship.
"He turned out to be a great player, and you never quite know that," Walsh said Friday. "I was pretty confident that we had done the right thing."
Miller, who turns 40 in August, called Pacers coach Rick Carlisle on Thursday to tell him of his decision, which was announced by sister Cheryl Miller, a three-time player of the year at USC and now an NBA sideline reporter for TNT.
He did not discuss his decision with teammates or reporters at practice Friday morning.
Miller's retirement after 18 seasons with the Pacers would leave him behind only John Stockton, who played 19 seasons with Utah, among NBA players who have played entirely with a single franchise.
"It is so easy to get traded or become a free agent and force a sign and trade nowadays that when you see guys like Reggie and Stockton and people like that making a steadfast commitment to a franchise, there is a special meaning there," Carlisle said.
Miller's time with the Pacers coincided with the team's transformation from one of the NBA's worst - only one win in two playoff trips during 11 NBA seasons - into one of its most consistent. Since 1990, the Pacers have made the playoffs all but one year and have reached the Eastern Conference finals six times.
He jumped into national prominence in 1994 when he scored 25 fourth-quarter points in an Eastern Conference finals victory over the host Knicks while trading words with Spike Lee as the movie director sat courtside.
He made five All-Star teams and averaged at least 18 points a game for 12 consecutive seasons through 2000-01.
Detroit Pistons coach Larry Brown, who coached Miller for four seasons in the mid-1990s, called him "the best shooter I've ever been around."
"If you needed one guy to make an outside shot, I don't know if you could find anybody better," Brown said. "He's going to be missed."
But Miller, who is averaging 11.9 points this season as the team's starting shooting guard, appears on his way to ending his career without winning an NBA championship. The Pacers' only NBA Finals appearance was in 2000, when they lost to the Lakers in six games.
The Pacers were considered a championship contender going into this season. But several injuries, including a broken hand that forced Miller to miss 16 games to open the season, and the long suspensions of three starters for the team's November brawl with Detroit Pistons fans have left the Pacers below .500 and fighting to make the playoffs.
Miller has been praised by teammates and coaches for allowing others - notably Jermaine O'Neal - to take a more prominent role.
"I think he has done a great job over the last three or four years of kind of slowly handing over the reigns of this team to Jermaine and other players in signaling that he is taking a back-seat role," said Pacers forward Austin Croshere, Miller's teammate for the past eight seasons. "He obviously is a legend in this franchise, and he will not soon be forgotten."
Source: AP
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