"Jermaine O'Neal insists he doesn't think much about Nov.? 19, 2004, anymore. But he is well aware that the brawl here in The Palace on that date has had a lingering effect on the Pacers and many of the players involved.

"I don't really think about it anymore," O'Neal said of the fight that became ugly when fans became involved. "It took a couple of years. It's kind of an afterthought now. When you're involved in something like that, you just want to put it behind you.

"Once we had the closure with the court cases, then it became an afterthought because there was nothing else you had to deal with anymore. You deal with it for so long, then when it's time to move on you move on. It's like anything else in life. When you experience something that's not positive, the quicker you can move past it, the better it is for you."

O'Neal was initially suspended 25 games for his role in the altercation, but that was reduced to 15. But while he got over it, things were never the same for his Pacers team that had big expectations, which went out the window when Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson were docked the rest of the season and 30 games respectively.

"The biggest thing is it derailed our championship," O'Neal said before last night's loss to the Pistons. "On a personal sense, I think it gave people an opportunity to write or say what they wanted to say about it in a negative way. They didn't really necessarily know anything about the situation or anything about me personally, but they said and wrote things anyway. What bothered me is that they knew me as a basketball player, but then they talked about me as a person.

"I think people almost made it a racial conversation, which is crazy to me. People didn't want to really know everything that happened. They just wanted to say, 'OK, these guys are bad guys.'?"

As for the harsh reaction from the league, O'Neal said, "I understood it from a business point of view for the NBA. I understood the punishment from the business point of view. It's a billion dollar industry, and you have to make some people accountable for it. I knew that. I knew that when I did it."