Pacers mascot breaks backboard on halftime dunk, forces prep game to new gym
With the Indiana Pacers on a West Coast swing, team officials thought it would be a good idea to get team mascot Boomer out on the road for some good old-fashioned halftime exercise. The furry yellow and blue creature made a stop at New Palestine (Ind.) High on Friday night, where he planned to complete his usual halftime dunkathon, in which he takes off on a trampoline and throws down an acrobatic slam.
He did ... and he made sure that the game would have to be completed at a new gym in the process. As first reported by the Greenfield Reporter and WISH-TV (and brought to Prep Rally's attention by Larry Brown Sports), Boomer's first dunk at halftime of the boys basketball game between New Palestine and Triton (Ind.) Central High completely shattered the backboard. Boomer brought down the rim, the backboard and, appropriately, the house in the process.
While the dunk may have further cemented Boomer's place in the high school fans' hearts, the sudden lack of a second workable basket caused some significant problems for New Palestine officials. Unlike NBA arenas, where a spare backboard is pretty much always around just in case a rim gets ripped off, high school facilities aren't usually prepared for that kind of an issue.
[Related: School nixes Cougars mascot to avoid offending middle-aged women]
Yet, in New Palestine's case, there was a solution: According to the Reporter, the second half of the game was moved down to the school's auxiliary gym, which couldn't hold as many fans but did have the requisite working backboards to play a game.
It turns out that the fans may have not missed too much in the second half of New Palestine's 70-45 win, a game which the Dragons salted away with a dominant, 38-9 run from the start of the second period to the six-minute mark of the third quarter.
Besides, they got to see the most explosive part of the game at halftime, even if Boomer's entire performance only lasted 90 seconds.
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