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.
Larry Bird’s Coaching Change Never Added Up
Let’s start with Vogel’s firing. Bird never justified the move with anything other than his 3-year rule that amounted to the team needing a new voice. All the other reasons he cited never added up. Vogel was asked by Bird to get more points and did from the Pacers despite a roster that clearly was in transition. You could point to him benching Myles Turner for Lavoy Allen as a instance of ‘getting after guys’. Getting what he did out of Roy Hibbert and Lance Stephenson at the time should count for something. Hibbert is now an end of the rotation player and Stephenson never looked as good as he did in Indiana.
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Maybe the time with Frank ran its course. But the offseason moves that followed shed more light on why Bird should take some of the blame.
The hiring of Nate McMillan always seemed like a rushed decision. For all of Bird’s comments on staleness and bringing in a fresh perspective, he promoted one of Vogel’s assistants. There was nothing inherently wrong with that move, but it was strange after everything Bird said.
McMillan’s past teams were slow, plodding, but offensively efficient. That sounds right for wanting the offense to improve, but the way Nate’s teams were in the past weren’t lining up with the current Pacers roster. Bird wanted faster team, but hired a coach that didn’t do either.
Here is what Jared Wade had to say at the time.
"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."
Even if it wasn’t exciting, this is really where what Bird said and what he and the front office did started to clash more often than not. Even if Nate was a good hire, they ended up giving him a roster that didn’t fit McMillan’s old style or a pace and space one.
Good Pieces Never Fit Together For the Indiana Pacers
Now we are arriving at the most damning evidence against Bird for this season’s failures.
At the end of Vogel’s tenure and the start of McMillan’s, Bird pushed the idea of a faster, more efficient team. He traded for Jeff Teague (a more traditional, distributing point guard than George Hill) and Thaddeus Young (a quick, athletic forward with some range) but after that, there isn’t a ton of speed and certainly not a lot of shooting.
Here’s the rundown on the rest.
- Monta Ellis is a slasher, not a shooter. Also not a good defender.
- Rodney Stuckey is a slasher, not a shooter. Also not a good defender.
- Aaron Brooks shoots 3-pointers well enough, but he doesn’t shoot enough of them to really earn the title of shooter. He picks his spots well, but isn’t a sniper. Not much of a defender.
- Al Jefferson is big, plodding, and offensively minded. He’ll score, but he is going to do it slowly. Also not a good defender.
- Kevin Seraphin doesn’t help in pace and space, but at least he defends.
I’m leaving Glenn Robinson III off the list for a few reasons. He was hitting that “Aren’t you getting a little old for in Summer League?” point after his third summer of it, which wasn’t a great sign. He never impressed before this season, but ended up being a solid member of the rotation.
Lance Stephenson doesn’t count since he was a last-ditch effort to get Indiana into the playoffs. I love the signing, but it only was possible because Stephenson couldn’t stick elsewhere.
I’ll give Bird some credit, but at the same time this seems more of low-risk bets paying off than a move that was part of the bigger picture.
We Were Hopeful, But Saw Trouble Brewing
We figured the starters could make it work, but there were plenty of questions with Monta Ellis and Jeff Teague sharing a backcourt. We suggested pairing Teague with almost anyone but Ellis, but it was a lesson that McMillan never fully took to heart.
The starters, once they put Monta on the bench, turned out fine. The bench was a mess that got it together at times, but never trustable.
Al Jefferson had his moments as well, but at in the end his fellow bigs — Rakeem Christmas, Kevin Seraphin, and Lavoy Allen — saw more time than him on the floor. An injury aided this, but Al’s minutes were dwindling before then.
Rodney Stuckey wasn’t healthy enough, and the revolving door at starting and backup shooting guard didn’t help Indiana’s bench either.
Of course, we all knew this was likely. I said as much before the season started.
"Weighing both the numbers and the eye-test, the bench in particular looks to be a looming disaster. There is only one ball and five players who are going to be very unfamiliar with each other when the season begins. That isn’t to say it can’t work. Players can adapt to new roles, but even if they are all willing to sacrifice, can they be as effective as a reserve unit? I don’t know, but the numbers themselves aren’t encouraging. If you forget Bird’s past mistakes when judging these moves, they were likely the best ones Indiana was capable of, especially on the fly. However, on paper, they don’t fit together."
All of this was (foolishly) wrapped in with the idea that maybe the could overachieve defensively despite the exits of George Hill, Ian Mahinmi, and Solomon Hill. Maybe Dan Burke was that defensive guru who could do anything. We wrote so many times that there were major issues to consider, but we never fully embraced the reality that they were more likely than not going to struggle, especially on defense.
Monta Ellis was the best example of this as he never settled into a role with the Pacers this season. He was expected to play defense with another undersized guard while also not eating up too many possession handling the ball. The defense didn’t work with Teague, but Ellis had value off the bench.
In the end, Ellis was a detriment to Indiana. Whether that was due to age, being put in a bad situation, or some other reason, it reared its head in the playoffs.
This is also where Nate McMillan might have coached himself out of Indiana.
McMillan Making the Same Mistake Over and Over
For the longest time it looked like McMillan was making due with the roster given to him. For Monta Ellis, at times it was the role more than anything else that was the problem.
But then we watched the same train wreck over and over.
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The end of the regular season and the four games in the playoffs were frustrating to watch for many reasons, but Monta Ellis getting so many minutes was one of the most infuriating. He wasn’t passing the eye test nor were the stats defending his play in any way.
While some of his numbers were buoyed by the other starters, his on/off numbers were worse than Lance Stephenson or Glenn Robinson. When the Cleveland Cavaliers were cruising, Ellis was usually on the court. Ellis proved a defensive liability, and wasn’t doing much offensively either.
We knew from the regular season this didn’t work, but Monta remained in the starting lineup until Game 3. Even then, he still got more minutes than his play warranted. Almost any lineup without Monta Ellis was successful, and the starters plus Lance Stephenson was particularly good.
While there were plenty of issues with the roster not fitting together, McMillan’s mistakes only exacerbated them. It was one thing when he needed to juggle lineups due to injury, but he had options once Glenn Robinson came back and didn’t use them. Not saying that is a firing offense, but it certainly deserves an explanation.
While Bird can only be held so responsible for the coaching aspects, he is still responsible for the outcome of his decisions.
Larry Bird made mistakes and many of them came to a head this season. He deserves the lion’s share of the blame for this season’s failure, especially when many of these problems appeared on the horizon before the season started.
Making mistakes is one thing, but between Bird’s wandering criticisms and failure to produce results at a critical time, it is harder to forgive him for building a flawed team. And in a season where you are trying to convince Paul George to stay, this mediocre result is a failure.
Next: The Pacers Are Facing the Multiple Realities With Paul George
What he and the Indiana Pacers do next determine what happens for the franchise for years to come, so he better get it right this time.