If your memory’s not shot by operating in the mangled zone of NBA Standard Time, then cast it back to last March. Here, we had no notion of an LED basketball court, Damian Lillard’s Dame Time was still technically PST, and the Indiana Pacers were hanging in. After a tough losing stretch leading up to 2023’s All-Star, the Pacers returned post-break on fresh legs to macerate a couple low-hanging matchups and nab close wins against the Mavericks and Bucks. Mid-March, things started to slide.
Indiana had been volleying a Play-In berth back and forth with Chicago for most of the month, and by April, the Bulls pulled ahead. There weren’t enough games left for the Pacers to catch up. It was around that time that Myles Turner, about to close out his eighth season with the team, took a scan of the locker room. He was hoping for some candid and encouraging words from the team’s leader, that de facto position most often granted to those who’ve been there the longest.
“I was kind of looking around for someone to speak up and thought, ‘Oh wait, that’s you. You gotta say something,’” Turner recalls, sitting down with Dime in Indianapolis over All-Star Weekend.
Turner’s played in Indiana his NBA whole career thus far, and has learned that tenuousness can run parallel with tenure — his name’s come up in trade talks most every season, multiple times a season, for years. In order to keep working and improving, as an athlete and within a team, there has to be a degree of tuning out that kind of speculation.
“Being here for so long, days start to run together,” Turner says, noting the “aha” moment he felt looking around the locker room had more to do with time, and recognizing his place in it. He didn’t want a pep talk that would undercut or invalidate the season of growth the Pacers just had, nor was he looking to hear that next season would serve as a completely clean slate. He mostly wanted to confirm that the team would, in his words, “continue to keep rolling.”
He embraced the role, then and there, “with open arms.”
“I’ve always been a natural leader, maybe somewhat of a reluctant leader at that. I always kinda knew what to say but never really vocalized it. I think over the years I got a lot better at that, and as I matured, just into my role in the league, it’s gotten better,” Turner says. “It definitely took some grooming, and it took me a second to get comfortable enough to voice my opinions.”
The Pacers took what Turner said to heart and kept rolling, irrefutably accelerating. Predicted at the start of the season to finish ninth with a 38-44 record, Indiana currently sits 33-26 and sixth in the Eastern Conference. Much has been made of their all gas, no breaks strategy, and how far they can get in the postseason without improved defense.
Momentum’s been a theme for Turner and his team all season. The Pacers may have come into the year quietly, with Rick Carlisle looking to further calibrate things around Tyrese Haliburton. But any cover the team was hoping to keep for their designs on a playoff run was blown in the inaugural In-Season Tournament. Indiana was electric, taking full advantage of the mini-platform the games gave them to showcase their speed and ingenuity to a wider national audience, and as a prelude to operating as a team wearing a target. The all-seeing eye of the league was on them.
“The In-Season Tournament was obviously something that was big for us, big for our franchise. I think we got a lot of attention, a lot of hype around us and whatnot, and it’s funny man, you always talk about trying to be the hunters,” Turner chuckles. “It’s kind of like you eluded, in Lord of the Rings, we’re the hunted now.”
Though the roster went through some big changes prior to the trade deadline — losing both Bruce Brown and excellent shooter and energy man, Buddy Hield; gaining length and defensive prowess by adding Pascal Siakam — Turner says the team is comfortable shouldering the attention, calling the next few weeks a “sprint more than a marathon” to get to the postseason. So, the perfect comfort zone for a team that likes to go very fast.
As significant as the Pacers’ competitive acceleration has been for Turner this season — he’s on track to catch, if not top, his career-best shooting last season — he’s experienced another meaningful leap as the team’s longest tenured player.
“Being here as long as I have, it’s such a rarity,” Turner says, when asked how he’s stepped into the role as ambassador for the city, not just the Pacers. “You start to remember faces. You start to remember different people, you start to see kids grow up in the community. Like, I had a kid show me a picture of [us], he was maybe nine years old — he’s in college now. Stuff like that is crazy to me.”
Over All-Star weekend, Turner had more engagements, at a glance, than NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. True to playing form, he was “ripping and running” around Indianapolis despite it being a break for most of his teammates and colleagues around the league. He viewed the exposure as good for the city, a way to define it as more than just an obscure point on the map, he also finds it energizing to be in the wider mix. Noting that even faces he sees regularly, or from one year to the next at league events like All-Star, still change.
“Honestly, everything’s about mindset right? Everything’s about perception,” Turner says.
Turner’s ability to broaden his scope, zoom out from the present to something bigger, is a unique trait. Rarer still in the hyper-present focus of an NBA season. It’s what makes him such a versatile athlete and frankly gruelling matchup, as skilled seeing the sequence at hand as he is predicting the next possible five. In life, it’s been a perspective that keeps him curious. A tactile example is in the Legos Turner loves so much — you need a lot of scope to put together a 7,500 piece Millennium Falcon — an emotional one is in his own foundation, W.A.R.M. (Work As Role Models).
“W.A.R.M. basically started when I was younger, about fifth or sixth grade, I saw some kids — it was like 30 degrees outside in Texas and they had no shirts on — just walking around the city,” Turner recalls. “My mom had extra supplies in the back of her car we handed out to them, and from that moment I told myself if I was ever fortunate enough, or had a platform to help, that I would give back in any way I can to that community.”
The foundation evolved when Turner entered the league and now encompasses structured programs like basketball camps, educational scholarships, and bigger resource drives to reach more people in need. Turner spent Thursday morning of All-Star weekend at Wheeler Mission, an Indianapolis network of shelters for people experiencing homelessness, handing out packs with essential items like hand warmers, toothbrushes, and toothpaste as part of a community activation that invited anyone who wanted to help and had time to spend the morning alongside him.
Leading up to the weekend, Turner and students at a local elementary school wrote encouraging letters the students then tied into blankets that were delivered to local shelters, for a not-for-profit called Blankets of Hope. Turner also led a 3-point contest held at Starry’s activation in the NBA’s Crossover convention space, helping participants hit a target of 100 shots in an hour. At the end of February, Starry donated $33,000 to Indiana’s Gleaners Foodbank — an organization, Turner adds, that gave out a hundred million meals the previous year. “That’s about a third of the food insecure community here,” he notes.
All-Star weekends can be invigorating events for the cities that host. They can also be isolating. In Indianapolis, there was a palpable sense of excitement from the people and businesses concentrated downtown, but that was still only one side of the city. Beyond the price of events, plenty of people find taking time off work prohibitive. What Turner was doing, in a small but impactful way, was bring the weekend out into the wider community, so more people could feel like they were a part of it.
It’s an unfortunate parallel that during Sunday’s All-Star Game, Charles Barkley and Draymond Green had a brief back-and-forth on the broadcast commenting on the unhoused population of San Francisco — next year’s All-Star host city. Barkley asked whether it was better to be cold, a reference to the weather in Indianapolis, or around “a bunch of homeless crooks” in San Francisco. Whether a backhanded compliment or clumsy insult it didn’t matter, it missed the staggering reality. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recorded a 12 percent increase in people experiencing homelessness, up to 653,104 people nationwide and the largest number measured in the 18-year history of the survey. Every major city in the U.S., and most in the world, are experiencing the same increase, the same precariousness and difficulty in making ends meet.
Much like Turner did at the end of last season in the Pacers locker room, looking around to take stock of who might be the most impactful leader, it wouldn’t hurt the NBA to similarly scrutinize itself. The NBA has made significant changes to the weekend’s programming over the years to involve and assist local communities, like introducing the NBA Cares All-Star Day of Service in 2008 — this year’s edition saw 6,000 volunteers pack one million meals at Lucas Oil Stadium. However, there is a discrepancy between one-off events and a shift in overall mindset for who and what can be negatively impacted when a contingent of close to 10,000 visitors descends on a city. Along with prerequisites like enough 5-star hotel rooms to host athletes and celebrities, consideration for already marginalized groups who stand to be further displaced seems an obvious step in positive optics, as it does a necessary adjustment to the facts of contemporary life. There are enduring ways to help those most vulnerable, starting with how and why they’re discussed on a broadcast at all. The NBA would benefit by looking to its own people, those who’ve already made the quiet and enduring commitment to doing that essential work, for examples.
