A Long Series of Thoughts About Nate McMillan Coaching the Pacers

Was Nate McMIllan a good hire by the Indiana Pacers? It’s a lot more complicated than that. There are so many things to consider.

The Indiana Pacers got rid of Frank Vogel and hired Nate McMillan. According to Adrian Wojnarowski, McMillan got a three-year deal, and he will obviously be involved in the draft, trade, and free agent decisions left to be made this summer before he really starts working with the players and molding this roster of players into his team.

Rather than any one cohesive opinion on the whole matter, I have a lot of random, unconnected, or semi-connected thoughts about Nate McMillan taking over.

These are those.

• This was my first reaction to the news:

• Though this is pure speculation, I don’t believe hiring Nate McMillan was Bird’s plan all along. He may have considered it an option when he canned Vogel, but this feels like something that was an “if nothing else comes up” move. Like going to the nearby Italian restaurant that is never life-changing but reliably not disappointing on date night. It sounds like a move Bird decided on recently (and was perhaps talked into) more than something he has been really wanting to make happen for weeks or months. (And I do believe he has been planning to move on from Vogel for weeks or months.)

• Nate McMillan seems to have gotten a reputation as a defensive coach. This is odd. His best teams were the 2004-05 Seattle Supersonics and the 2008-09 Portland Trailblazers, both of which were electric offensively. None of his teams have ever been particularly good on the defensive end, however. And many have been downright awful.

• In McMillan’s 10 full seasons as an NBA head coach, here are how a few of his squads ranked in defensive rating: 17th, 17th, 27th, 27th, 28th, 26th, 17th, 13th, 15th, 14th, per Basketball-Reference.

• For a frame of reference, here is how his a few of his defenses in Portland compared to Jim O’Brien’s defenses in Indiana:

2008 Blazers: 17th
2008 Pacers: 15th

2009 Blazers: 13th
2009 Pacers:19th

2010 Blazers: 15th
2010 Pacers: 14th

• It’s likely the reason that people think his teams played good defense is because they played slowly. Remember: Much of his coaching occurred before the general public understood what pace is. (Not that they really do now either but … yanno … that’s a different conversation usually involving my head and a hammer.)

• Here are how McMillan’s squads ranked in pace: 24th, 27th, 15th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 29th, 30th, 30th, and 30th.

• Nate McMillan’s teams have been sloooooooooow.

• No really.

• Since 2001, there have been 95 coaches to coach an NBA team for at least one full season. (Partial seasons are not considered here.) Nate ranks 92nd in terms of pace. The only teams that have played slower have been Kevin O’Neill’s Raptors, Michael Curry’s Pistons, and Mike Fratello’s Grizzlies.

• This isn’t a bad thing.

• Playing slow has yielded phenomenal results for Nate’s teams on many occasions. As mentioned, the 2004-05 Sonics and 2008-09 Blazers were both elite, ranking 2nd and 1st, respectively, in offensive rating.

• Here are how McMillan’s squads ranked in offensive rating: 5th, 19th, 3rd, 2nd, 30th, 20th, 14th, 1st, 7th, and 10th.

• I’m not sure if Nate is the only coach who has overseen both the best and worst offense in the NBA in different seasons, but I certainly don’t know of any others.

• Because of the slow pace, his teams did not score a large number of points per game, on balance, and thus that’s probably why he has never gotten a lot of notoriety for running potent offenses.

• Here are how McMillan’s squads ranked in points per game: 6th, 23rd, 6th, 11th, 30th, 29th, 28th, 14th, 21st, and 24th.

• So the best categorization for Nate would be an offensive coach whose teams have played slowly and defended poorly.

• For convenience, here is a full chart showing where Nate McMillan’s teams have ranked in all these key categories.

(Note: if these numbers don’t match exactly to others mentioned in this article, it’s because these are from NBA.com while most others come from Basketball-Reference. The differences are small, and related to an arcane calculation different. Don’t worry about it.)

• When he coached in Seattle, McMillan’s Sonics team were part of the new wave of 3-point-shooting pioneers in the mid-2000s. His best team there, the 2004-05 Sonics incarnation, went 52-30 in the regular season and smoked the last vestige of the CWebb-Peja Kings in round one. (Webber didn’t play). They then bowed out in the second round to the eventual champion Spurs in a second-round series that was at one point tied at 2-2. Rashard Lewis didn’t play in Games 4, 5, or 6. The Spurs won Game 6 by just 2 points.

• This team was very fun to watch and I loved it.

• Rashard Lewis was a bit of a unicorn back then, with a size, quickness, versatility, and shooting ability that hadn’t been seen much in the history of the game. McMillan didn’t play him that the 4 spot all the time — that transition would happen in Orlando under Stan Van Gundy — but there is no doubt that SVG saw the potential Lewis had as a literal game-changer while watching him play in Nate’s potent, 3-chucking offense. Other than Rashard himself and the Magic’s GM, obviously, McMillan should be considered the person most credited for Lewis getting his six-year, $118 million contract in the summer of 2007.

• In addition to ‘Shard, that Sonics team featured Ray Allen. They beat opponents by taking and making the second-highest number of 3s in the league, behind only the Seven Seconds or Less Suns. At 22.2 attempts per game, it doesn’t match modern output. (This year’s Pacers averaged 23.0 per game and only ranked 20th in the league. Also: Consider the 666 makes Seattle had that season to the 402 Steph made himself this season.) But 22.2 triples a night was a ton back then. This fueled the league’s second-best offense (again behind Phoenix) at 112.2 points per 100 possessions — more than 6 per 100 better than league average, per Basketball-Reference.

• The previous year, in 2003-04, Nate’s Sonics team made the second-most 3s ever in a season, with their 723 coming up short of only the 735 of the 1994-95 Mavericks (which played in the short-line era).

• McMillan’s 2008-09 Trail Blazers team, which featured Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge, had the best offense in the NBA that season. They won 54 games and tied for the fifth best record in the league.

• That team got embarrassed in Game 1 at home of their first playoff series and then dropped two in Houston to fall down 3-1. They ended up losing in six games and only scored more than 90 points in one game. Portland scored 83 or fewer points in three of their four loses. Houston’s highest scorer in the series was Luis Scola, while Yao Ming, Metta World Peace, Aaron Brooks, and Von Wafer all averaged double-digits in the series.

• They regressed a bit the following season, winning 50 games while having the 7th best offense. They again lost in the first round, dropping four of six games to the Suns. The Blazers scored 90 or fewer points in all four losses and shot 43.0% in the series.

• Nate got fired midseason in Portland a few years later. This came just a few months after Brandon Roy was forced to retire at 27 years old due to faulty knees. The previous year, Roy played only 23 games. The year before that, Roy was on the All-NBA team.

• Greg Oden was drafted first overall by the Trail Blazers in 2008. He would only play in 82 games over two years under McMillan (and really never play again other than 23 games with the Heat four seasons later).

• It’s hard to believe any coach could have survived such bad luck, but there is no debating the quality his Blazers teams showed while going 104-66 (.612) in 2008-09 and 2009-10 (during the regular season anyway).

• Myles Turner has been discussed as having the potential to develop into a guy like LaMarcus Aldridge, who spent his first seasons in the NBA under Nate McMillan. Nate has said he sees a big-time similarity and believes Turner will become an All-Star.

• Kevin Pritchard, the Pacers current GM, was McMillan’s boss for four seasons in Portland. You have to think this had a ton to do with Bird hiring McMillan. Larry mentioned in a press conference that Pritchard laid out Nate’s “pros and some of the cons and the positives outweighed the negatives by a wide margin.”

• This makes you wonder.

• Kevin Pritchard doesn’t seem to be someone who would spend as much time as an underling as he has in this franchise. I’ve always had a sense that Pritchard was sticking around with some belief that he would take over the reins someday when Larry Bird inevitably decides he’s done with this. There was talk around the league that, during his tenure in Portland, Pritch had rubbed some folks the wrong way, and that factor was keeping him from getting the top jobs he wanted. So perhaps him staying in Indiana is an opportunity issue more than a “Waiting It Out As Next In Line” thing. That said, if Bird is nearing the end of his desire to remain in this job, it would make some sense for him to let the guy who will take over soon have an outsized say in who the next coach would be.

• Bird did say this about Pritch’s involvement in the hiring: “We had many discussions about [McMillan], but when it comes down to the final say, obviously I have the final say in what we’re going to do. “

• Bird doesn’t seem to care much about always saying things that reflect reality in press conferences anymore.

• Here is something Scott Agness of Vigilant Sports tweeted during the press conference when Bird fired Vogel: “Bird says he won’t get the opinion of players on this hire. ‘I think it’s important to get somebody they respect. That’s key.'”

• Here is something Scott Agness of Vigilant Sports tweeted during the press conference when Bird introduced McMillan: “Bird said he spoke with two players about the decision to hire McMillan.”

• (Update: Of note: Bird did say he might talk to players towards end of the process. He has made plenty of odd comments of late though.)

• Who knows how much influence Pritchard actually had in this process?

• To the degree that this was a Kevin Pritchard hire, it would be Pritch’s first-ever coach hire. (Nate was already in place when Kevin got to Portland.) That is interesting for two reasons: (1) He by nature doesn’t have any experience picking a coach, and (2) he thinks so much of McMillan that he opted to go with something familiar than something unknown.

• Though the reaction of Pacers fans seems to be somewhere between “WTF???” and “Meh,” this was a very safe and reasonable hire if you think the team under Frank Vogel this season was on the rise. He is probably likely to outperform some other options who fans would have liked better given that he has a track record for producing some of the NBA’s best offenses.

• People love the idea of swinging for the fences, and that is what hiring an unknown is generally equated to. Conrad Brunner got people excited about the possibility of Ettore Messina, for example, and I saw plenty of people in my Twitter mentions hoping that Bird was going to go with another assistant on the rise, like Stephen Silas, rather than another dreaded “re-tread.” The logic seems to be: If you’re going to fire someone as capable as Vogel, it better be for the next Erik Spoelstra or Steve Clifford — not for Mike Woodson.

• There was a lack or home-run candidates on the market. Mike D’Antoni, who has failed famously at his last two stops, and Jeff Van Gundy, who doesn’t seem to be leaving the booth, were the closest things available to real “gets.”

• Nate McMillan was likely a lot cheaper than the high-profile options on the market. While announcing his decision to get rid of Vogel, Bird said “we will do what’s necessary to get the right guy” in terms of spending. The right guy turned out to be the cheap guy. (Probably. We don’t know the exact numbers.) Vogel’s next salary, not to mention D’Antoni and Van Gundy’s, seems sure to be higher than Nate’s salary in Indiana.

• Other than “retread” dread, another reason that nobody can get excited by a McMillan hire is because he is a head coach who has spent too much time lately as an assistant.

• Fair or not, there seems to be a general disrespect for former head coaches who are forced to got back to an assistant role. By doing so, they voluntarily take a demotion, seemingly because they were no longer wanted for a real gig. And this is something that championship coaches would never have to do — nor accept doing. Once you ascend to the rank of NBA Head Coach, you should never backslide. And if you do, it means you probably don’t deserve to be running a team. (I’m putting forth a strawman belief here, not necessarily a personal opinion.)

• The track record on this is actually staggering.

• Since 1986, every coach to win a title has never been an assistant again after ascending to the level of head coach. And using K.C. Jones from 1986 as the stopping mark is even a technicality since Jones spent just one season as an assistant in Seattle in 1994-95 before retiring. Paul Westhead, who led the 1979-80 Lakers to a ring and closed his career being an assistant in various locations over six seasons, was the last one before Jones. Other than that, no other coach to win a ring has ever put on an assistant hat again after taking hold of his own clip board. Here is the full list of those names: Pat Riley, Chuck Daly, Phil Jackson, Rudy Tomjonavich, Gregg Popovich, Larry Brown, Doc Rivers, Rick Carlisle, Erik Spoelstra, and Steve Kerr.

• Thus, McMillan carries not only the dreaded “retread” label but is also now known as someone who has agreed to be an assistant. Getting fired is being told by a former boss that you can’t hack it. Taking an assistant coaching gig is admitting that fact yourself.

• True Head Coaches don’t do that. Jeff Van Gundy would rather hang out in a booth. His brother Stan, Rick Adelman, George Karl, and Larry Brown just take years off. Even Mark Jackson has taken this tack. They are head coaches or unemployed — never assistants. And Nate McMillan has conceded that he is a coach — not specifically a *head* coach.

• Of course, this isn’t necessarily meaningful. Guys like the Van Gundys and Larry Brown could be simply seen as having too big of an ego while McMillan simply loves coaching the sport more than caring about his exact role on the team. He would rather bide his time by learning more and staying close to the game than holding out for one of 30 jobs.

• Again, I’m not criticizing McMillan for taking an assistant role. I’m merely noting that his status among fans, and the eagerness other teams have to hire him around the league, has likely been affected negatively by him serving under another coach after spending a decade as a head coach.

• There is evidence that head coaches turned assistants who then go back to head coaching can do wonderful.

• Terry Stotts never impressed in his stints with Atlanta or Golden State and spent three years in Dallas under Rick Carlisle. He then returned to the helm with Portland and went 149-97 (.606) over the last three seasons in addition to finishing second in Coach of the Year voting this season. After flaming out in Minnesota, Dwane Casey also sat on Rick Carlisle’s bench for three years in Dallas before taking over in Toronto. He has gone 210-184 (.533) since then including a fantastic 153-93 (.622) over the past three seasons. Alvin Gentry just returned to the bench in New Orleans, and although his first year back was an injury-plagued torture march, he is certain to do better next year as he coaches Anthony Davis. There may be others I should be noting here. I couldn’t think of them off the top of my head though.

• With Paul George and Myles Turner, McMillan has a bit of a Blazers facsimile In Indiana.

• Really, PG is not much like Brandon Roy. PG is an all-time great defender but will never be the playmaker or floor general that Roy was. Both score a ton of points though.

• Myles is unlikely to ever be as good as Aldridge is. That’s not to say that Turner won’t be good. It’s just that LaMarcus is a five-time All-Star who just had back-to-back games of 38 and 41 points in the second round of the playoffs. Few human do that.

• There is plenty of reason to think the Pacers will do wonderfully over the next few years. McMillan has two great pieces, along with other talented (if not currently seen as great) players. The Pacers have cap space and should add significant talent this summer. Larry Bird tends to draft well. And there there is a defensive foundation in place that both McMillan and his players understand very well.

• If he can maintain some semblance of the defense that Vogel established and improve on the offense — as he is almost certain to do — then this team can definitely get a lot better very quickly.

• That said, coaches do have styles.

• Vogel was a defensive guru and thinking that McMillan can just tell his guys to “keep doing that” is discrediting what Vogel did. He turned this current group of ragtag defenders into the third-best defense in the NBA. So especially if Nate tries to transition Myles into a 5 (as he said he wants to do in his introductory press conference) and the team loses its elite rim protector in Ian Mahinmi (as it would seem they are going to do rather than paying him $10 million a year to back up Myles), the defensive backslide could easily negate any gains made in terms of scoring.

• Bird has harped on playing faster over the past year. When letting Vogel go, he did talk more in terms of improving the offense than scoring more points, but smaller and faster has been his mantra for over a year now.

• This was seemingly the biggest (Xs and Os) rift between Bird and Vogel. So it stands to reason that McMillan will try to not just improve the offense but speed it up.

• There are legitimate questions as to whether he can do this. Again, coaches have styles. And Nate is a coach who has only ever led a slow team while rarely having any success on the defensive end.

• To the degree Nate has had success in the NBA, he has done it playing very slowly. Whether he can — or will — adapt his style and still oversee a good offense is the biggest question of the upcoming Pacers season.

• Nate McMillan is definitely not an exciting hire. He probably wasn’t a “good” hire if you consider the entire process and what Bird has been saying publicly for the past 12 months. He most certainly is not a “get” in the sense that there were a lot of other teams beating down his door for the past few years.

• But a lot of that doesn’t really matter anymore and is a discussion that has more to do with how one thinks the Pacers are currently being run than it does with Nate McMillan, basketball coach.

• Nate McMillan might do well. He could do very, very well. He almost certainly won’t do awfully.