Frank Vogel Is the NBA’s 8th Best Coach

Frank Vogel was a media darling at this point last year. He had just finished a three-year run of taking his team from the first round of the playoffs to the second round to the Eastern Conference Finals — where the Pacers took King James and the Miami Heat to seven games before bowing out.

This is literally the year-to-year progression teams dream of, and Vogel did it all without one marquee free agent signing or a top draft choice. He did it through ol’ fashioned team building and by constructing one of the best defenses we’ve seen in the modern NBA.

Then it all fell apart.

You’re reading this site, so I shouldn’t have to explain all the horrible basketball the Pacers played after February hit, when they tailspun from a team with the best record in basketball to one that nearly lost in the first round to a sub-.500 Atlanta Hawks team.

Matt Moore of CBS’ Eye on Basketball isn’t letting the recent past affect his overall assessment of the coach, however. He slotted Frank Vogel at eighth in his recent ranking of all 30 head coaches.

"Why is he so high, here? Because he has a track record and measure of success that goes beyond a bad four-month stretch. You can’t look at the Pacers’ roster and think that it was all talent; for the most part that talent was developed into star power by Vogel and his staff. Vogel was a huge part of their success, building the best defense in the league and finding ways to create offense with limited skills.Vogel also benefits here from lowered expectations. Paul George is gone for the season after that horrific leg injury. With Lance Stephenson in Charlotte, the Pacers will start the year as a question mark for the playoffs. If they make it, he’ll have exceeded expectations and done way more than you would think possible. If they don’t and are terrible… you can’t blame him, the team was missing its best player.Vogel is both safe from criticism and able to easily defy expectations. After that, though, it could get dicey."

It is months after last season ended and less than a week until training camp begins, and we still don’t have a real explanation of why the team fell apart so catastrophically last season.

You have to blame Vogel for some of it. His too-cheery demeanor and constant positivity probably let his players get too complacent with mediocrity, then straight-up bad basketball. By the time the playoffs hit, he was the captain of a downtrodden group that no longer even knew how it had dominated all comers just three short months earlier.

During the Hawks series, too, Frank Vogel was a mess. His stubborn insistence on playing the way the team had been successful in the past nearly cost him the series — and, reportedly, almost his job. The Pacers had enough talent to just play smaller personnel and beat the Hawks’ cadre of middling basketball players. But Vogel just kept trotting out the same rotations and refused to make the major adjustments that most people watching knew would work.

So, yes, Vogel deserves criticism.

But it was more the players. They were playing well and then stopped. Either they started hating each other or they stopped listening to Vogel’s instructions. And that’s on them. That’s not being a professional or doing their job. Each member of the starting lineup — except for Lance Stephenson — fell off statistically. Everybody played badly for long stretches during The Struggle.

On talent alone, the Pacers starting five should have been able to beat most of the team’s they lost to in February, March, and April.

When you’re in charge of a group of professionals who cease to be professionals, you are going to get called out for your role in the problems. But the larger question and the harsher judgments should be reserved for the people who stopped doing their jobs.