Chris Defendis joins Noblesville’s G League team as president of business operations
By RICHIE HALL
Take a look at the resume of Chris Defendis, and you’ll see he has worked for some well-known brands: AT&T, HBO, Warner Bros., the WWE have all been stops on his career journey.
“I have a history of working at best-in-class brands,” said Defendis. That bodes well for the Noblesville Boom, which hired the Westfield resident to become the team’s president of business operations on April 27.
“It’s fantastic,” said Defendis, 48. He noted that on his first day at the job, the team had a town hall downtown, “so I was able to meet the entire PSE&E [Pacers Sports & Entertainment] family. Some players from the [Indiana] Fever joined to do a little Q&A. Everyone’s been very accommodating, helping me to do a soft landing as I enter the organization.”
The Boom is the NBA G League affiliate of the Indiana Pacers, a team that has been a staple in Indianapolis for over half a century. The Pacers have showcased basketball at a high level throughout that time, from the ABA championship days of the 1970s, the attention-getting playoff runs of the 1990s, to the 2025 NBA Finals, where the Pacers were one Game 7 away from winning a championship.
The success is great, but it also means tickets are hard to come by. Defendis said it’s sometimes “very difficult, given the demand to attend a Pacers game,” for young people to get close to the action.
“The Arena is a beautiful, modern arena without a bad seat in the house,” said Defendis. “We want to extend the opportunities to the organizations and really work with those organizations to have opportunities to attend Boom games and experience that level of basketball up close, but also transition them to become Pacers fans over the course of their life.”
Defendis said his priority is to extend the awareness of the Boom into Noblesville’s neighboring communities. That includes Kokomo, the north side of Indianapolis – “anywhere within 15 to 20 to 45 minutes away,” he said.
“I think this is a great, family-friendly and affordable alternative,” said Defendis. “It’s high-quality basketball in a state that takes basketball very seriously.”
Defendis graduated from the University of Dayton in 2000, noting that he was the 14th member of his family to do so – “it’s definitely a family legacy,” he said. After working for AT&T for a year, he spent 21 years at HBO, working his way up from account executive to hold various positions at the network and its parent companies.
Defendis worked at the WWE in 2023, then the next year joined Xtreme One Entertainment, where he helped relaunch the company and its flagship property, Xtreme Fighting Championships. The mandate was to make the organization “the premier global development platform for next-generation MMA athletes,” Defendis said on his LinkedIn page.
“What we were trying to do was give opportunities to those athletes to fulfill their dreams and make it to the UFC,” said Defendis. He wants to continue that with his work at the Boom, giving opportunities to those athletes to achieve their dreams while making the experience “phenomenal for those players by filling the stands with fans and making sure the community knows and cares about them.”
Defendis knows about how to care for athletes. His son is a baseball player on the Westfield High School baseball team, while his daughter cheers for the Shamrocks. Defendis previously served on the board of Westfield Youth Sports and was a youth baseball coach for several years.
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