Frank Vogel Speaks More About The Struggle

A few weeks ago, Indiana Pacers coach Frank Vogel offered some insight into what it was like to coach during last season’s late swoon, something we’ve come to call The Struggle. It was a end-of-season collapse that saw the team with the record in the NBA ride some truly awful offense to a 13-13 record to close the year.

We still have no real explanations — and probably never will — but there was obviously a caustic mix of on-court trouble and personal issues.

Recently, Frank Vogel went on The Lowe Post Podcast with Zach Lowe of Grantland to have a long, candid talk about all things Indiana Pacers. Listen to the whole thing. It is both entertaining and enlightening, with one of the best diversions focusing on The Struggle.

Tom Lewis of Indy Cornrows transcribed Vogel’s characterization of what went so, so wrong.

"Yeah, well, you know it wasn’t one thing that happened. I think there was a number of things that happened, you know, and I don’t want to get into great details but, I think as a group we struggled to handle success a little bit. And it turned into some stretches where individually we weren’t at our best. I think that the trade for Evan Turner disrupted our chemistry a little bit and we just had to find our way some in that regard. C.J. Watson missed a stretch of time, where Donald Sloan came in and once he got acclimated he was pretty darn good and he was able to be himself, but when he first came in he struggled a little bit. Luis Scola had an elbow injury and was struggling to make shots for about three, four weeks, and we were hoping he was going to get through it. Roy Hibbert was struggling with his finishes around the rim.So I think it was just a matter of a perfect storm of five, six, seven things happening at the same time with off-the-court distractions and all those things that I just mentioned that just contributed to that all happening at one time. While that was happening we had our busiest and most difficult month of the season. And every team has a month where the schedule is just brutal on you and ours was March. And that happened the same time that all those other things were happening. Just one of those things, as much as everybody wants to talk about the epic collapse or whatever that they were calling us toward the end of last season, from February 1st on we were 21-15. That’s not horrible, that’s a pretty good winning percentage. Is it 33-7 or so where we were at? 16-1? Not as dominant, but no one is going to be that dominant for 82 games. To go 21-15 down the stretch to me isn’t that bad. So even at our worst we were still pretty good and still able to get to the conference finals."

Per always with Vogel, there is an almost-comical optimism. And as he shows with the “I don’t want to get into great details” comment, the problems of C.J. Watson and Luis Scola probably don’t explain it all.

But we are still searching for reasons of why it all went so bad last year, and this is the latest from someone who knows best.