D’Antoni, Shaw, Hornacek? Who Will Larry Bird Hire to Replace Frank Vogel?

Larry Bird no longer wants Frank Vogel coaching the Indiana Pacers, but he has yet to announce a new hire or reveal any candidates. Who will the Indiana Pacers hire?

Larry Bird fired Frank Vogel. Now what? The NBA is littered with NBA coaching candidates, but there are at least four key questions surrounding the search for a new man to lead the team.

• Who can lead a team to better results than Frank Vogel likely would have in the next few seasons?

• Who does Larry Bird want?

• Who wants to come coach the Indiana Pacers?

• Will the Pacers pay top dollar to hire whoever Bird targets?

While each of these will be important to the search, let’s start from the bottom and work our way up in reverse order.

Will the Pacers pay top dollar to hire whoever Bird targets?

Larry Bird said in his press conference that money wouldn’t be an issue. More accurately, he said, “We will do what’s necessary to get the right guy,” as reported by Scott Agness of Vigilant Sports.

I suppose that doesn’t necessarily mean team owner Herb Simon is willing to open the war chest — “the right guy was willing to work for $20 hour, it turns out” — but that is certainly what Bird was implying. But if we take Larry at face value (which … ahem), the search will not hit a brick wall due to the high financial demands of a coach.

Who wants to come coach the Indiana Pacers?

Indiana isn’t a marquee destination, but the whole world just witnessed how good Paul George still is despite suffering a heinous leg injury. The promise of the 20-year-old Myles Turner, on top of some good veterans and up to $32 million in cap space, should be enough to attract the eye of many high-caliber coaches.

The Pacers are not sitting on a Timberwolves-level, “can’t miss” future, but it would be hard to have a bad team over the next two seasons just with the talent currently on the roster alone. And the potential is very high if Myles Turner can reach a near-All-Star level.

It seems selling a coach on coming to Indiana won’t be a problem for Larry, who in his words is just another Hoosier who treats people good. Whatever you say, Mr. Bird.

Who does Larry Bird want?

While common wisdom would suggest you don’t fire someone as successful as Frank Vogel without a plan in place, I’m not convinced Larry Bird had a specific plan.

This dismissal seems less like, “I want this guy” and more like “I know longer want that guy.”

So my guess is that Larry Bird has not spent the last few days securing the services of a coach in principle. He is now looking hard and trying to nail down the right person.

Marc Stein of ESPN reported that recent Vogel assistant Nate McMillan and former Vogel assistant Brian Shaw are both on the short list.

Nate McMillan

Nate McMillan has been a head coach in the NBA for 12 seasons, going 478-452 (0.514). His teams went to the playoffs in five of those 12 years, but he only made it out of the first round once, with a 52-win Sonics team in 2004-05, and went 14-20 (0.412) overall in the postseason.

My general feel is that he has fallen out of favor as a head-coaching candidate around the league. He has been away from a lead coaching role for three seasons now after getting fired midseason in 2011-12 as his Blazers team struggled to get above .500.

It was a rough deal. He lost Brandon Roy to retirement and never got to use Greg Oden during his tenure in Portland. Thems the breaks though, and he has now settled into what seems to be a career assistant trajectory.

McMillan also served under current Pacers GM Kevin Pritchard in Portland. So there is a connection there.

But, still, my guess is that Bird would give Nate a courtesy interview since he’s a natural candidate, being with the Pacers now, while not really considering him seriously.

Brian Shaw

Brian Shaw, on the other hand, is definitely a Bird guy. Back when Vogel was just an interim coach, in the summer of 2011 after having taken over for Jim O’Brien midseason, Bird was undecided about bringing him back. (It’s likely that the concerns he had then were never fully alleviated, but that’s more a discussion for here.)

Before he could feel comfortable hiring Frank, he needed to know there were some people with stronger voices — guys who had either played or had the gravitas to command the respect of players. Brian Shaw was convinced to join the team, Vogel was hired, and the two made a great pair for several seasons.

Paul George was an outspoken supporter of what Shaw did for the team, and it’s well known that Shaw was The Lance Whisperer. While Bird, and to a lesser extent Vogel, also mentored Stephenson during his rise, Shaw was the one who was in his ear everyday, coaching him into a professional who went from bench warmer to near All-Star in three years. Shaw was a rising star, though, and the assistant gig wasn’t going to last. He left and ended up in Denver to run the Nuggets.

He has had mixed, but overall discouraging, results. Year one fared decently, with Shaw guiding them to a 36-46 record that looked like something he would build on.

He didn’t.

This year, he went 20-39 and got fired in March. He is now unemployed, and although the luster he had as a rising assistant has been tarnished to a degree, he is still a guy that certainly commands Bird’s respect. The Legend saw his good work in Indiana and has known him since they played together for nearly three seasons in Boston in the early 1990s.

I would not be surprised to see Brian Shaw hired, although I doubt he would be a first choice. My guess is that if Shaw becomes the coach — but it isn’t announced  in the next day or two — he was the fallback option who Bird knew he could get if nothing better came along.

Jeff Hornacek

Jeff Hornacek is a candidate for the Pacers job, according to Ken Berger of CBS Sports. The former Phoenix Suns coach, who like Shaw was fired this year, recently seemed like an up-and-comer who would hold his job for years. He turned around the Suns in one year, as Berger notes, taking a lowly Suns squad from 29th in offensive rating to 8th in his first year at the helm in 2013-14.

They were 48-34 and looked to be headed upward. The following season, 2014-15 was a backslide, however. They went 39-43 in his second campaign, and then the wheels feel off this year. Hornacek could simply not get wins and was let go after Phoenix fell to 14-35.

Really, the team may have been even worse than that record suggested, and although plenty of that is due to the injury to Eric Bledsoe, the Suns were simply playing horrific basketball. Still, he has shown some offensive chops and he played in Bird’s era.

If Bird believes that Dan Burke, a long-time Pacers defensive assistant who is expected to stay on the bench even as Vogel departs, can lead the defense, then the president may see Hornacek as the person who can finally get this team scoring.

Jim Boylen

Jim Boylen is another former Pacers assistant and someone Ken Berger says is in the running for the vacancy. He is a 51-year-old career assistant who worked for the Bulls under Fred Hoibert last season and first cut his teeth in the NBA in 1992.

He has won three titles, two with the Hakeem Olajuwon Rockets and one in 2014 with San Antonio, the team he left Vogel’s Pacers to join. He also did serve as head coach of the Utah Utes of the NCAA before coming back to the NBA (to join Indiana) after a four-year stint in the college ranks.

Perhaps Bird knows something the rest of us don’t, but Boylen hasn’t come up often in head coaching chatter around the league, so I would put this as a low, but not out-of-the-question, possibility.

Kevin McHale

Kevin McHale, who caused some stir in Pacers fan world this morning by announcing he was out of the running for the Kings job, will not be coaching in Indiana.

Larry Bird was asked about this directly during his press conference and said that it was not happening. Bird cited “our relationship” and said that he wouldn’t ever ask McHale to work underneath him. Going back to their days of winning titles in Boston, the two have had long and seemingly cordial, if highly competitive and a bit snippy, relationship.

For that reason, it never really seemed like something Bird would be interested in. And he confirmed that today.

Other Candidates

UPDATE: Candace Buckner of the Indianapolis Star has heard a few other names mentioned, and the list reads something like a rundown of every currently unemployed coach.

So it looks like we can add Randy Wittman (assessment: HARD nooooope) Mark Jackson, (a baloney sandwich for dinner), and Mike Woodson (aiming for mediocrity) to the list. She also is giving some official-ness to the Mike D’Antoni idea (which is explored below a bit more).

Who can lead a team to better results than Frank Vogel likely would have in the next few seasons?

None of the candidates mentioned above inspire grand hope that title lies just over the horizon. In more realistic terms, none even conjure the notion that this team will be in better hands in the short term.

There are of course others out there.

Jeff Van Gundy and Mike D’Antoni are the two big ones. Each have had tenures of great success. Van Gundy took the Knicks to the NBA Finals in the late 1990s. He is obviously a great basketball mind, and followed up his New York days by showing some high-level work at times in Houston with Yao and McGrady. But he has been in the booth rather than on the sidelines for a long time now.

As for D’Antoni, he, yanno, revolutionized the concepts of small ball in the mid-2000s before they took over the league. His concepts are what helped Steve Nash win back-to-back MVPs and go from All-Star to Hall of Famer.

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D’Antoni had, let’s say, less success during his tenures in New York and Los Angeles than he did in Phoenix, however. In fairness both of those situations were landfill infernos. The Knicks are the Knicks, and he had the misfortune of being in Laker land when Kobe and Dwight were busy hating each other.

Naturally, the best man for the job would be Rasheed Wallace. If Bird hires Sheed, this team will win six or seven titles in the next three seasons.

More than the big names, however, Bird may want to look to the rising assistants. As we saw when Shaw went to Denver, this is far from a fool-proof strategy.

But it has been working of late, with Steve Clifford and Mike Budenholzer being major success stories. Previously, Vogel himself, Erik Spoelstra, and Tom Thibodeau led a class of non-players who made the whole league start re-considering geeks over guys with on-court experience. And the Lakers just bet on Luke Walton, a hybrid of those two molds, becoming the next rookie head coach to make the leap.

ESPN writer Kevin Arnovitz does a yearly column looking at some of the best candidate, and here are his six picks from April:

• Nate Tibbetts, Portland Trail Blazers assistant coach
• Jarron Collins, Golden State Warriors assistant coach
• Nick Nurse, Toronto Raptors assistant coach
• Chris Finch, Houston Rockets assistant coach
• Stephen Silas, Charlotte Hornets assistant coach
• Sean Sweeney, Milwaukee Bucks assistant coach

Of those listed, I would personally be most interested in Chris Finch (a fast-paced offense proponent in Houston) and Stephen Silas (son of NBA legend Paul Silas and coveted member of Clifford’s staff who helped resurrect the career of Jeremy Lin).

Any of these would have the added benefit of probably being cheaper to hire than others mention — or the huge sums it would likely take to lure D’Antoni or Van Gundy to Indiana. While Bird says that’s not an issue, money is always money.

We will see.

It’s probably just as likely that none of the people listed on the same day Vogel got fired will actually end up on the bench. But it is a new day, and now Pacers Nation needs to get beyond the Vogel era and into the great unknown.

The next coach may be hired tomorrow or not until June, but we now know somebody other than Frank Vogel will be holding the clipboard for the next 82 games.