Doyel: Pacers' mess is of Larry Bird's own making
INDIANAPOLIS – We could focus on the 3-pointer Paul George missed in the final seconds of Game 4 Sunday against Cleveland, or on the 15 other shots he missed in the game. We could focus on the coaching of Nate McMillan, the adjustments he didn’t make as LeBron James pick-and-rolled his team into oblivion, the answers he didn’t have throughout the season. But all of that feels like misdirection, a sleight-of-hand that would have us looking one way without noticing how badly the other hand has been screwing up.
The other hand being: Indiana Pacers President Larry Bird.
For most of his career, it's true, everything he touched turned to gold. Indiana State and the 1979 NCAA title game. Boston Celtics and those three NBA titles. Hall of Fame in 2006. NBA Coach of the Year in 1998. NBA Executive of the Year in 2012.
But nothing gold can stay. Robert Frost wrote that. So I’m writing this: The problems with the Indiana Pacers, deep and varied as they may be, begin with Larry Bird.
They've been mediocre for three years now, and here it gets really scary. Superstar Paul George has made his intentions known, wanting to play where he has a chance to win an NBA title that would define his career. He can be a free agent in one year and his hometown Los Angeles Lakers are rebuilding as we speak, which means Bird is on the clock to show George the Pacers are serious about getting better, fast.
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But Bird has been on the clock for months, and at the trade deadline in February, he wasn’t serious at all. He made no moves to improve a 29-28 team that had lost six consecutive games.
In Bird’s defense, he had no real assets to trade.
No, you’re right, that’s not a defense. That’s an indictment. Three years after taking apart the 2014 Eastern Conference finalists, Bird has constructed a team with a bleak present, an ominous future, and little to use as trade bait to fix it fast.
Three months ago, point guard Jeff Teague was a valuable commodity, a player outperforming an expiring contract. Today he's a free agent about to triple his salary, perhaps here. Power forward Thaddeus Young is a nice player, but one whose contract ($43 million over the next three years) and decline in production (11 ppg and 6.1 this season, down from 15.1 ppg and 9.0 rpg in 2015-16 with Brooklyn) give him little trade value. Center Myles Turner is an untouchable young engine. Everyone else is an interchangeable part.
Now, to be clear: Dismantling that 2014 team was the right call. David West was aging, Roy Hibbert was pouting and Lance Stephenson was leaving in free agency. Bird had put together something special, but with the NBA evolving into a smaller, more offensively efficient game, he needed to take it apart.
It was a disaster from the start.
Bird misjudged Paul George’s reaction to the team’s strategy of building a smaller, faster team around his move from small forward to power forward. George, coming off a gruesome broken leg suffered in August 2014, wanted no part of it. Bird had made that decision without even consulting with George, then doubled down by saying: “He don’t make the decisions around here.”
Bird played in the 1980s when a star was an employee, not a brand. Whether he was right about the basketball side of it — and he might have been right; imagine a lineup of Turner at center, George at power forward and three other 3-point shooters on the wing — Bird was dead wrong about the business side. He misjudged the authority of today’s NBA superstar, who wields more power than anyone in the organization. Paul George was the only thing standing between the Pacers and irrelevance. He knew it. He was never going to play power forward.
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Bird built an entire team — forging for this franchise a brand new path — around a miscalculation.
But this is how good Frank Vogel was as coach: He won anyway. Won 45 games in 2015-16 with a Mr. Potato Head roster built to play small but going big and pushing the second-seeded Toronto Raptors to Game 7.
After the season, Bird made a series of moves that clearly, in hindsight, weakened the Pacers. He cut loose Vogel, which made no sense at the time, and made two major acquisitions. Trading George Hill in a three-way deal that brought Teague as the point guard? Trading the 20th overall pick in the 2016 draft for Young? Looked good at the time. Pacers fans loved it. The media approved. Me, I’m saying.
You and me, we were wrong. But we’re not paid to be right. Bird is. And he wasn’t. The revamped franchise — new coach, new point guard, new power forward, new center (Turner sliding over from forward), old shooting guard (Monta Ellis, Bird’s $44 million albatross from the summer of 2015) — dropped from 45 wins last season to 42, and from three playoff wins to zero.
Credit where credit is due, Bird did sift through the bottom of the lottery to uncover George (10th overall in 2010) and Turner (11th in 2015). And he did well to bring back Stephenson a few weeks ago. That spark invigorated what had been a terrible bench, a bench of Bird's making.
Bird isn't getting fired by Pacers owner Herb Simon, and that’s not what I’m suggesting should happen. He’s not in over his head. Bird has built a championship contender once. In theory, he could do it again.
But now we know the truth: He's not Midas, not a magician. And some handcuffs can't be removed in time.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or atfacebook.com/gregg.doyel.