George McGinnes

Lore & Background

In the mid-1970s, the Pacers were a team that played basketball the way the city played everything: hard, physical, and without apology. McGinnis was the embodiment of that ethos. Standing at 6-foot-8 with a stocky, powerful frame, he did not rely on quickness or range. He relied on leverage, timing, and an almost stubborn willingness to absorb contact. Opposing centers and forwards learned quickly that a McGinnis screen was not something you shrugged off; it was something you felt in your shoulders for the rest of the quarter. His role in the 1977 playoffs was critical, though the Pacers were eliminated in the first round by the Denver Nuggets. The Nuggets had size and scoring, but the Pacers had a forward who could anchor the paint, crash the boards, and make every shot in the restricted area a negotiation. That team's identity—tough, disciplined, collective—was built on players like McGinnis, and the fact that a franchise from Indianapolis could push a top seed to the brink was a shock to the NBA establishment. What made McGinnis endure in Pacers lore is not a single stat line but a feeling. Fans who were teenagers in '77 and '81 remember the sound of his body hitting a defender, the way he would set a screen and simply stay there, arms locked, daring the opponent to move him. He was the player who made the team feel like a unit rather than a roster. In a franchise that would later be defined by stars, McGinnis represents the era when the Pacers were defined by something harder to quantify: character.

Reader's Guide

#23. Six seasons in the black-and-gold, and every single one of them mattered. Here's the moment that still gets told at Pacers watch parties: 1977, Finals, Portland. The Blazers have the size, the scoring, the pedigree. And there's McGinnes, setting a screen on a 6-foot-11 center, and the center pushes. McGinnes doesn't push back. He just... stays. Arms locked. Weight planted. The ref whistles nothing. The center gives up. That one screen, that one refusal to yield an inch, is the whole team in a single frame. You don't need a highlight reel. You need that image. Signature moments and marks: four consecutive All-Star selections (1977 through 1980), two NBA Finals appearances (1977 vs. Boston), and a career defined by rebounding, interior defense, and the kind of physical play that made opponents' coaches adjust their game plans around him. When a Pacers fan says the name McGinnes, the sentence that follows is always the same: "That's who we used to be."

Did You Know?

• He earned three NBA All-Star selections in 1976, 1977, and 1979, a run that showcased his dominance in the post-ABA merger era.
• McGinnis was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, a recognition that the league's broader history, not just Indianapolis, considers him a defining forward of his era.