Indiana Pacers Looking for a Way Back to Relevance
The Indiana Pacers are a team in transition, or at least fans hope that’s true.
Pacers president Larry Bird has agreed to stick around for another year or two at least, and he has $35 million worth of players who haven’t been able to achieve more than one brief trip to the playoffs since 2006 coming off the books. That should make fans smile a little bit. Bird will draft #15 later this month, and maybe they get a guy who can come off the bench and help a little bit.
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The are several reasons for optimism, and in the wake of a competitive (if a 4-1 loss can be considered competitive) first round series against the top-seeded Chicago Bulls, that’s what fans are focused on.
Good for them. How depressing would life be if seeing darkness and the void of hopelessness was the default behavior for sports fans? The beaches on the northside of Chicago would have been littered with the carcasses of formerly despondent Cubs fans for the past century.
I want Pacers fans to be happy, look ahead to a wonderful future of winning, and finally experience the joy found in Dallas today. But as is almost always the case, reality bites.
The truth is that the Pacers are who they are, and unless the Bird regime is willing to meaningfully upgrade something somewhere, the Blue and Gold are likely to remain mired in the middle of the pack dreck they have been since the retirement of Reggie Miller.
Here are four reasons for Pacers fans to go ahead and book that vacation for the beginning of May, 2012.
* There will be a lockout, and games will be lost. The NBA has told teams not to simply prepare for a delay to the start of the 2011-2012 season, but to expect it. The financials for many NBA franchises are a disaster, and the culture needs to be razed and re-built. The union for the players isn’t likely to embrace lower salaries, shorter contracts, eradicating guarantees, and giving back a lot of the gains they have earned through previous collective bargaining agreements.
* Bird is back, and while he may have been correctly slow-playing his hand over the past three years because of salary cap issues, he maybe so completely timid of getting caught in bad deals he refuses to make any that are meaningful. If it’s true that the best trades are sometimes those you don’t make, Bird has been magnificent. He might get it right, but this current roster is built for being an eight seed or in the outer reaches of the lottery.
* It looks like Frank Vogel will return as the coach of the Pacers. Vogel is a total wild card. He was an improvement over Jim O’Brien, or at least the Pacers played better under Vogel. But as the Chicago Cubs have learned after hiring their former interim guy – Mike Quade – to lead the team through a full season, sometimes not being the former coach that players hated doesn’t provide a sustainable boost. Yep, Vogel was 20-18, but Quade was 24-13. Ask Cubs GM Jim Hendry whether he regrets hiring Quade. Then again, Vogel might be the next Phil Jackson. Who knows?
* Danny Granger is the Pacers best player. As long as that is the case, the Pacers will be right where they are. They don’t have the assets to deal for a #1 option, and there aren’t any free agents out there who fit the Pacers needs. No offense to central Indiana – good enough for me to select as a place to live for several years – but players are not geographically drawn to the wonder that is Indianapolis. That means for Pacers will have to overpay for talent, and isn’t that the way the Pacers got into this mess in the first place?
The Pacers need a change in focus and culture, but minus the separation of Larry Mago from the front office, has anything else happened? The people who put the Pacers where they have been are still in the house. I’m not entirely certain which person or people are at the vortex of the Pacers malaise, but to expect a different result given the same people in the front office is the kind of delusional and disconnected leadership that continues to separate fans from the product.
