Gregg Doyel | IndyStar

Matthew Glenesk / IndyStar

Matt Kryger/IndyStar

INDIANAPOLIS – They’re coming for our NBA team. They’re calling Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon, those billionaires from other cities, wanting to pry the most valuable asset from his $2.8 billion portfolio — but Simon tells everyone the same thing, and quickly gets off the phone: The Pacers are staying in Indianapolis for the rest of his life.

And for decades after he’s gone.

“I want to leave my legacy: This team permanently in Indianapolis,” Simon told IndyStar Friday in an interview at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. “That’s my No. 1 goal.”

Simon bought the Pacers in 1983 with his older brother, Melvin — who died in 2009 at age 82. He told IndyStar the team someday will be owned by his 53-year-old son, Steve. Behind the scenes, Steve Simon has been working closely with Pacers Sports and President Rick Fuson for five years — “He knows more about the dollars and cents than I do,” Herb said of his son — and met this week with several department heads.

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“If anything happens to me, he’d be taking over,” Herb said, adding that father and son are on the same page: The Pacers are staying in Indianapolis.

Indianapolis Star file

The Pacers’ lease with Bankers Life Fieldhouse runs through the 2023-24 season, but Simon said: “We’re sitting down to try to extend the lease for the next 25 years, or 20 years, so I’ll know we’ll be here.”

Simon says Bankers Life can be made viable for another quarter-century — viable financially, and for the fan experience — with a “major redo” that would be considerably cheaper than building a new arena. The franchise has spent more than $1 million on renovation concepts, he said, and soon will “sit down with the city and other people to work it out. We’re in that process.”

Fuson, who sat in on the IndyStar interview Friday with Simon, said renovations could be done over the course of several summers, meaning the Pacers wouldn’t have to find a temporary home to accommodate the work. While the WNBA season of the Indiana Fever runs during the summer, Fuson said “there are some other gyms we could play, but we don’t know” the Fever would be displaced.

As for Herb Simon, he turns 83 on Monday and says he’s in great health, working out twice a day with private trainers here or in California, where he also spends time. His guilty pleasure appears to be the deceptively healthy dark chocolate, judging from the bowls of various sizes of candy — all chocolate, all dark — on the conference room table. He watches every game, at the arena when he’s in town, on television when he’s not, and 34 years after buying the team says he remains on “pins and needles” for all 48 minutes.

“No one comes into my room because they’re afraid to be with me,” he said, “because I’m very intensely interested in every game.”

He pledges to care similarly about his legacy, not wanting what happened to the Irsay name in Baltimore and the Bennett name in Seattle to happen to him here. They are vilified in those cities, Robert Irsay for moving the Colts to Indianapolis in 1984, Clay Bennett for moving Seattle’s NBA franchise to Oklahoma City in 2008.

“The city’s been very good to me and my family — very good,” Simon said of Indianapolis. “It’s a small city, and a lot of people would love to have a franchise and move (the Pacers) to a bigger city, but my purpose and all the plans I’ve made for the succession is to extend the lease and be here.

“My planning, all of the financial planning, is to figure out a way. It’s always a big tax problem when someone (dies), for the next generation, but we’ve worked that tax problem. We won’t have a problem with that.”

As for the problem he did have — that whole Paul George deal, where the Pacers’ best player since Reggie Miller forced a trade out of town this summer — Herb Simon spoke publicly about that for the first time Friday. He had issued a statement in September refuting speculation that he was considering suing the Los Angeles Lakers for tampering with George, but didn’t name George in the statement. Nor did he name him Friday, referring to him only as “our best player” or “our star player.”

“We were stuck with a situation where our best player didn’t want to be here,” Simon said of George. “He made it public. His agent went around telling every other team (but the Lakers): Don’t do it. We were stuck in a situation where our star player didn’t want to be here and they were making it difficult for us to get value for him, and we feel under the circumstances we did as well as we could expect.”

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Kevin Pritchard, who replaced Larry Bird as president of basketball operations, traded George to Oklahoma City for Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis. Pritchard could have tried to trade George for draft picks, which would have positioned the Pacers for a shot at the No. 1 overall pick in the 2018 NBA draft, but Simon said tanking was never an option.

“That’s not in our DNA,” he said. “We want to win every game, and we’ll let the chips fall where they may.”

However those chips fall, they’ll be falling in Indianapolis, where the longest-tenured owner in the NBA has decided to keep the Pacers. There has never been a tangible sign that the team might leave — the team has been positioning itself to host a future All-Star game since 2016, and in August the Pacers opened a $50 million practice facility across the street from Bankers Life Fieldhouse — but that hasn’t stopped the speculation. NBA maven Bill Simmons of The Ringer speculated to his enormous following in May that Bird’s resignation was linked to the eventual sale of the team.

“I think stuff’s going on with that team. I think he got out a little bit early,” Simmons said of Bird. “I think they’re probably selling it … There’s some word on the street … The owner’s old, and there’s a feeling within the league.

“I think that Bird leaving when he did made me think that the team is probably gonna be sold, they’re probably gonna blow it up, who knows what’s gonna come in.”

Well, now we know: Steve Simon, someday, is going to own the Pacers. That doesn’t mean other billionaires haven’t tried — and aren’t still trying — to get Steve’s dad to sell.

“The team becomes much more valuable if you move from a city of 2 million (like greater Indianapolis) to a city of 5 million,” Herb Simon said Friday. “But I’m not even thinking about that.”

Who, I asked the Pacers’ owner, is trying to buy the team?

“People who probably would like to move it,” he said. “But I don’t let them get far, so I don’t ask that next question.”

Thank you.