Fourty-four games into the 2010-11 season, the Indiana Pacers were moving backwards. They had won just 17 games–a .386 win percentage. This was head coach Jim O’Brien’s fourth season with the team and he had yet to lead Indiana to a .500 record. At this point, the Pacers were playing at the league’s seventh-fastest pace, attempting the league’s third-most three-pointers per game. After playing just 511 minutes as a rookie and battling through an ear infection that led to vertigo, second-year forward Tyler Hansbrough was still largely chained to the bench, having started just 10 games and averaging just 16.0 minutes per game. O’Brien favored shooting in the frontcourt and eight of his 10 most-used lineups featured Josh McRoberts, Danny Granger or James Posey at power forward.
The team felt utterly stagnant, over-matched in the talent department. With nothing expressly creative in their system on offense or defense, the appearance was of a team just pressing as hard as it could to out-run and out-shoot their opponents–Seven Seconds or Less, without Steve Nash and with a heaping helping of desperation. The result was the .386 win percentage I mentioned above.
So the Pacers did what bad teams do when the badness is too much to bear–they fired their coach. Assistant Frank Vogel was promoted to replace O’Brien. He took things in a very different direction. Indiana slowed the pace, cut their three-point attempts, began pounding the ball into Hansbrough and Hibbert on the interior, and punishing their opponents’ on the offensive glass. It was good enough to get the Pacers a 20-18 finish to the season and a playoff appearance, where they lost a quietly competitive five-game series to the top-seeded Chicago Bulls.
You can probably pick the story up here on your own. As the rest of the league zigged towards spacing and shooting, the Pacers continued doubling-down on Vogel’s original zag. The three-point shooting faded out of their frontcourt rotation and David West arrived to become part of the foundation. Indiana become increasingly isolated on an island of smashmouth, interior-focused, defensive grinding. The results were great, bordering on the fantastic. The Pacers won better than .600 percent of their games in each of Vogel’s first three full seasons, with two trips to the Eastern Conference Finals.
However, all three of those seasons ended the same way–a playoff elimination at the hands of LeBron James and the Miami Heat. Ironically, all three of those losses could also be traced to the same fundamental issues the Pacers tried to address with their commitment to size, strength and physical defense. They were stagnant, over-matched in the talent department and with nothing expressly creative in their offensive or defensive systems to turn to, they were left trying to brutishly force their way through the brick wall that was the Heat.
With an ugly, injury-riddled 2014-15 season behind them, the Pacers are again looking to change. At his end-of-season press conference, Larry Bird talked about shaking up the team’s style of play (h/t Candace Buckner, The Indianapolis Star):
“I was talking to coach earlier; we’d like to play a little faster tempo,” Bird said. “And that means we’ve got to run a little faster, maybe at times play a little smaller. We just got into it, so I don’t know what style, but we’d like to change it a little bit. … But I would like to score more points, and to do that, you’ve got to run.”
Roy Hibbert and David West are gone and it appears that Paul George may be the Pacers’ new power forward. Indiana’s first round draft pick was Myles Turner, a center whose two most notable skills are protecting the rim and hitting outside jumpers. By every indication, the Pacers are about to begin chasing the NBA’s cool kids (leaving the Memphis Grizzlies alone at the “big kids” table), going small, up-tempo, and flexible.
Time is a flat circle and so are the Indiana Pacers.
The past few seasons have, mostly, been a great stretch for Indiana. Vogel’s first three seasons were the team’s best three-year run since Bird was coaching. They have consistently been among the Eastern Conference’s elite and their playoff matchups with the Heat were ultra-competitive, rivalry-birthing, heavyweight bouts. Still, there is a nagging frustration in the thought that the whole era may turn out to be an interruption, that the Pacers are not just back to the point of needing to reshape their identity, but that they may also be trying on an identity that they were already working with.
To be clear, the O’Brien Pacers were not the Budenholzer Hawks or the Kerr Warriors. Even with their faster pace and focus on spacing, they never pushed their offensive efficiency past league average. Their defense was generally better than their offense, but it was never much to write home about either–more of a mismash of “just good enough” efforts than anything that made intentional use of speed and interchangeability the way the Warriors did this season. But I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if Vogel hadn’t been able to get the Pacers into the playoffs that first season. What if success with his “pound the ball inside” philosophy had been just a little bit slower in coming. Perhaps he would have had to search out strategic variety a little sooner. Perhaps there wouldn’t have been such a strongly perceived distinction between O’Brien’s style (bad) and Vogel’s new initiative (good). Maybe, just maybe, we could have spent the past four seasons watching the Pacers taking the best of both worlds in trying to get around the Heat, instead of trying to bulldoze through them.
The past is not just in the past for Indiana, it’s the future. The basic underpinnings of what O’Brien tried to do with the team–speed, space, shooting–are now the NBA’s style du’jour and the Pacers will apparently be picking them up and trying to do a little more with them than they did the last time around. Still facing a talent deficit against some of the other top teams in the Eastern Conference, the plan appears to be addressing the stagnation and lack of systemic creativity.
By all indications, playing George at power forward is the opening move in their plan. It’s a little concerning that they’d be asking him to play against bigger and stronger players, given that when the season starts he’ll be just over a year removed from one of the ugliest on-court injuries we’ve ever seen. But at some point you have to trust him and his leg. For his part, George appears up for the challenge, telling The Indianapolis Star’s Dana Hunsinger Benbow, “I’ll be ready for it. I’m working on making that change and being prepared to play some forward this year,” George said Thursday. “I understand what Larry (Bird) wants as far as playing the faster pace. I mean, I’m for it. That’s the way the league is going nowadays.”
Thinking about what George looks like as a power forward is mostly an exercise in imagination. According to Basketball-Reference’s position estimates, he has never played more than one percent of his minutes at power forward in any of his five seasons. There is really no sample to look at of him doing power forward-ish things. Which may be fine because what the Pacers would like him to do as a power forward may not be that different from what he does normally. This move is not an invitation for him to set up on offense with his back to the basket. He is best slashing and shooting and Indiana will (hopefully) be looking for a way to keep him doing those things, gaining an advantage by doing them against different defenders (and with more shooting around him).
To thoughtfully consider what George might look like as a power forward, Danny Granger might be the best template. The two best seasons of Granger’s career came from 2008-10, playing for O’Brien in Indiana. In both of those seasons he played about a quarter of his minutes at power forward, again according to Basketball-Reference’s position estimates. Granger’s three-point rate and free throw rate both peaked in those two seasons. He bombed away from the outside, attacked off the dribble and exploited mismatches in the low post. With the floor spread around him, he was able to be the offense’s focal point from wherever the defense appeared weakest.
One of the first things I ever wrote on the internet, five years ago now, was a piece at Indy Cornrows about how much better the Pacers were with Granger at power forward. The analysis looked back at the 2009-10 season, pointing out that Indiana was much more efficient on both offense and defense when Granger played power forward, and suggested that the team play small much more often. Advocating that strategy, five years ago, felt like a wildly unconventional take. Thinking about the same strategy now, with Paul George, feels like an long overdo no-brainer.
There are so many offensive similarities between Granger and George you can almost see the circular arc of time connecting them. There are all sorts of metaphysical connections between the Pacers today and the Pacers that Vogel inherited (can we get a Troy Murphy comeback, please!). Indiana is not reductively trying to turn back the clock to the system that O’Brien ran. Instead they seem willing to accept that the values he espoused might have some utility for them, which feels weird after so much time pushing those elements away for fear of them sapping their strength of undermining their size. They are ready to try something old and remake it as something new. Part of me hopes they haven’t waited too long for this gambit or missed an opportunity. But then I remember that time is a flat circle and so are the Indiana Pacers.
Thoughts? Vogel did work for Jim O'Brien quite awhile, even before coming to Indiana. At first, there was some surprise that the style that Frank coached was so different from the style we had been playing. Will this new style we have been hearing about be more similar to the Jim O'Brien Pacers than we realized?
