The Indiana Pacers season was destined to fail, but everyone hoped the team would overcome its shortcomings. How much of the blame falls on Larry Bird?
The Indiana Pacers season was doomed to fail. Or at least they shouldn’t have been expected to be a top four team in the East and Larry Bird deserves a good deal of the blame.
Hold on, this isn’t a postmortem hot take. Just stay with me here.
Hindsight is 20/20. It is very easy to wait until all is said and done to make a grand pronouncement of what was wrong. That’s one reason I like Stan Van Gundy’s “Write the story while the ball is in the air.” motto. If you can’t make your point before the situation terminates itself, there rarely is value in that assessment.
But here is the thing: We pointed out a lot of these issues before the season even started. From the moment Larry Bird fired Frank Vogel, we started to see that the Indiana Pacers might be in trouble.