Bird throws hands up, walks away from Pacers
2012 exec of year leaves George situation for someone else to resolve
This feels like a retreat, like a surrender. It feels like the great Larry Bird has admitted defeat.
Bird won’t be the one who returns the Indiana Pacers to the top of the NBA Eastern Conference. He won’t, because he can’t. He tried and he failed, and now he’s leaving.
You want some imagery? Here’s your imagery. In his last public act as team president — the morning after the Pacers were swept from the 2017 playoffs by the Cleveland Cavaliers — Bird was seen slowly and uncomfortably driving an Indy car down Broadway. After a few blocks in the heart of Manhattan, in all that traffic, he unfolded himself from the car and declared it “fun” but admitted, “It’s a little rough ride, you know, no suspension in it or anything.”
The last few years have been hard on Bird, who has seen most of his biggest decisions fail and learned the hard way — publicly, embarrassingly— he didn’t have the ultimate say over the future of his own franchise. It was Bird’s idea before the 2014- 15 season to move Paul George to power forward, to jump on the wave of the NBA future by going smaller, faster, more perimeter- based. Bird had it all figured out. Myles Turner would be his center. George would be his power forward. George’s reply? No. Bird’s reply? “He don’t make the decisions around here.” George’s retort? Yes, I do. Two years later, Bird is gone, one of the NBA’s last cowboys riding off into the sunset.
Bird is an NBA icon with a wonderful if mixed résumé, winning executive of the year in 2012 as he was building the Pacers teams that reached the Eastern Conference Finals in 2013 and ’ 14. It has been a bit of a rough ride since then for a franchise Bird was unable — and not because of George; that’s on Bird — to return to
prominence even as the Eastern Conference remains mostly mediocre.
Bird is a cowboy, as I was saying, a throwback who was at his best in another era — the era that literally ended in 2014, when the Pacers reached the conference finals and the San Antonio Spurs won the NBA title. Bird built that team around size, toughness and a plodding rim protector. The 2014 Pacers were a team straight out of the 1990s.
Meanwhile, the Golden State Warriors were helping reinvent the wheel. They had a breakthrough 51- win season in 2014, won the NBA title in ’ 15 and won a record 73 games in ’ 16. They are the leading candidates to win another title this spring. This had been happening for a while, teams getting smaller and quicker, but small- ball hadn’t gone mainstream until Golden State — a former laughingstock — re- created itself and then the NBA by building an attack not around a dominant big man but around a lot of perimeter shooters.
Bird saw the wave and tried to adjust. And failed. He misread George’s reaction to the position change and then misread his own ability to enforce his vision on his star player. Bird played when he played, when the general manager called the shots and the coach called the plays and star players — even a player as great as Bird— did what they were told.
Bird also was leaning on his experience as a player — three decades earlier — when he decided after the 2016 season to part ways with coach Frank Vogel. Technically, Bird didn’t fire Vogel. But he fired him. Vogel wanted to come back. Bird said no. Why? Because when Bird was a player, Boston Celtics owner Red Auerbach believed teams needed “a new voice” — meaning, a new coach — every three or four years. The NBA had free agency in those days, but player movement wasn’t nearly as chaotic as it is now.
None of it worked. Not the switch to small- ball, not the switch of coaches, not even the offseason acquisitions of Jeff Teague and Thaddeus Young. Multiple sources close to Bird say he is turning over the franchise to GM Kevin Pritchard because Bird doesn’t have the patience, the will, to fight the battle that looms ahead, a battle in which the first salvos will be fired by someone else.
The George decision, I mean. For more than a year Bird has been of the belief that George is likely to leave the franchise as a free agent after the 201718 season. The Pacers listened to offers for George before the 2017 trade deadline but did nothing. The next year will be painful, with the drumbeat to trade George — to get something for him before he leaves as a free agent — getting louder. The Pacers’ future rests on what George wants to do. He does, as it turns out, make the decisions around here.
Bird has seen enough. He’d rather stuff himself into an Indy car and drive slowly off into the distance, leaving behind a shadow that will get smaller, smaller, smaller …
Doyel is a sports columnist for The Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network.