On the road. Trailing 96-94 with 12.1 seconds left in overtime. The weary end of a back-to-back, a sprint of four games in five nights. Five of their best players injured.
Frank Vogel, coach of the Indiana Pacers, did not need a computer for this algorithm.
“I told them we were going for the win,” he said.
Vogel knew what his team needed to hear. He had done with his own career what they were trying to do with theirs. No one ever envisioned Vogel as an NBA head coach: He had been a student manager at the University of Kentucky, a video coordinator, an advance scout, an assistant for several NBA teams. For his entire adult life Vogel had been driven by the same stubborn belief that was mirrored in the eyes of the players staring back at him. They believed they could be stars. This was their chance.
The final play last Wednesday was designed for Chris Copeland, last on the team in minutes played per game during the 2013-14 season. Copeland inbounded and ran a curl to the 3-point line, but Donald Sloan, essentially the fourth-string point guard, could not deliver the ball to him. Instead, Sloan spun into the lane and kicked out to the one teammate who was open, 24 feet away from the basket: Roy Hibbert, the 7-foot-2 center. He had made six 3-pointers in seven NBA seasons.
“I cringed,” Vogel said the next morning. And then he laughed. “And then I hoped it went in.
“What a great story, what a great night, if that goes in.”
Video – Pacers give the ball to Roy Hibbert outside the arc to win the game, but he comes up short.
Consider Vogel’s view from the sideline in Washington. You lead the Pacers to successive Eastern Conference finals. The dream of controlling your own team in the NBA has come true, even as you realize that so much is beyond your control: free agency, injuries, and now this awkward 3-point shot by Hibbert, the last of Indiana’s healthy starters.
The ball caromed short to Copeland, who had circled in where Hibbert was supposed to be. Copeland knew what to do with the ball, but he didn’t know how. Moments later he was hunched over, hands on his knees, thinking about the hurried fallaway shot he had left on the front rim, wishing for another chance.
Changes bring about new certainty
The five injured Pacers that night were All-Star forwards Paul George and David West, point guard George Hill, combo guard Rodney Stuckey and backup point guard CJ Watson. Their replacements, 1-4 on the season to that point, were fighting for the identity of their team as if it were April or May. For the unlikely starters of Indiana’s provisional rotation, the upcoming game against the Celtics loomed like Game 6 of a playoff series.
The first warning sign that this season might be different emerged last July, when shooting guard Lance Stephenson rejected an offer of $44 million over five years to re-sign with the Pacers. If he could have known that George, the Pacers’ leading scorer, was doomed to be sidelined for this season, Stephenson would have returned to Indiana, Vogel believes.
“I think he probably — and we probably — would have approached it differently,” Vogel said over breakfast in Boston the morning after the loss to the Wizards. “The money would have to have been right, and we would’ve had to figure that out. But he would have had much more incentive to stay.”
Stephenson had to find out whether he could command more money with LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony off the free-agent market. The Pacers could not afford to wait . So they replaced their best playmaker by pursuing C.J. Miles and Stuckey, a reliable pair of shooting guards entering their prime years.
“There is reason to believe that we can be just as good with those two guys as we were with Lance, no question,” said Vogel. “You know what you’re getting. Solid isn’t a bad thing. These two guys are solid.”
Vogel was explaining why — despite the compound tibia-fibia fracture that George suffered while scrimmaging with USA Basketball in August — he believed then and now in the ultimate promise of this season. “We’re thinking we have George Hill, David West, Roy Hibbert. To me that’s enough,” Vogel said. “Roy and George were underutilized because of the explosion of Paul George and Lance Stephenson.”
Vogel’s backup plan was to play through the old-school frontcourt of Hibbert and West, an option once Stephenson left. “He had the ball in his hands a lot,” Vogel said of Stephenson. “A lot of times there was less ball movement than we would want to have, that we would hope to have. And that’s not a knock on Lance: Some guys dominate the ball to be effective. [Rajon] Rondo does it, Chris Paul does it, LeBron [James] does it. But I think in some ways it’s tough to keep Roy Hibbert and George Hill in a good rhythm.”
Adding to Vogel’s confidence was the summer regimen of Hill, who rededicated himself after a disappointing postseason. “I’ve never seen a guy really work that hard,” Vogel said. “Yoga in the morning, weights, boxing, shooting — it was like a 9-to-5 job, every day. He looked like a different player.”
Video – George Hill gets injured during the third quarter.
Hill is not going to be available until December after suffering a bruised left knee in the second-to-last preseason game at Minnesota. West (right ankle), Stuckey (left foot) and Watson (right foot) already had been sidelined when Hill went down. The morning after the Pacers were clobbered 107-89 by the Timberwolves in the preseason, Vogel wrote one word on the whiteboard. “Culture,” he recalled. “I said we’ve got to understand it doesn’t matter who’s in uniform, we’re going to play the game a certain way. This is who we’re going to be. This is the standard that you all understood we are going to have.”
Since that Oct. 22 meeting, the Pacers had been competitive into the fourth quarter of every game, even though they ranked second to Oklahoma City in games missed to injury. Both the Pacers and Thunder had entered the summer as title contenders who had built their programs the right way. They had invested shrewdly in the long term. They had raised their young players to put the team first, and it was proof of the amoral randomness of injuries that the likes of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook and George and West and Hill had been struck down.
“My expectations were to have a chance to win it all again — a real chance, especially when LeBron left [Miami],” Vogel said. “When you reach a certain level with a core group, you have extraordinary confidence, almost certainty, that you can reach that level again. That you can get back to the conference finals. The Pistons, when they went to the conference finals six straight years — I really envisioned that for us if we were able to keep everybody together and not have injuries. I thought we would be able to do that, and if you’re there year after year, one of those years you punch through. That’s what I was envisioning.”
Vogel is 41, still young for his position, and he neither looked nor sounded like a victim after the Washington loss as he sat at breakfast in a white T-shirt. Just the opposite: He refused to let go of that vision. He continues to reinvent it, rework it, as if giving himself the same kind of lifelong pep talk that earned him this job when no one else believed.
“What’s removed is the certainty of knowing that a certain group can get to a certain level,” Vogel said . “Now, can this group get there? Maybe. It’s unlikely, losing the star power of Paul George. But there is no certainty with this group at all. There’s none. There’s no certainty that says we’re going to stink, and there is no certainty that says we’re going to be one of the best in the league. Teams that go through injuries reform every year and surprise people every year. There are surprise teams every year. So why can’t we be one of them?”
New faces eager to help Pacers thrive
“We had dinner last night,” C.J. Miles said.
Vogel took Miles out in Boston, just the two of them. They were talking and laughing and telling stories for nearly an hour about everything except the troubles that Miles was having in his opening weeks with the Pacers. He was shooting 25.4 percent in five games. He had missed all but five of his 29 3-pointers.
“He said, ‘It’s understandable,” Miles recalled. “He said people go through this. ‘And everything you’re going through,’ he said, ‘I saw Roy going through it last year’ — that [Hibbert] went through the same thing after he signed his [four-year, $58 million] deal.’
“And Roy’s come to me and said, ‘I can see it, I was there, I know what you’re going through.’ He said: ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ And I said, ‘Man, nothing you’re not already doing. I appreciate it.'”
The more understanding his new coaches and teammates are, the more Miles feels the burden of his slump. He is accustomed to demanding environments. His first NBA coach was Jerry Sloan, whose Utah Jazz drafted Miles as an 18 year old from Skyline High School in Dallas. Over his last two seasons in Cleveland, where he played for Byron Scott and Mike Brown, Miles shot an impressive 38.8 percent from the 3-point line.
“To my parents, my friends, my family, I’m saying this is not about me. It’s a slump. I’m going to get out of it. I’ve been here 10 years and this is something I know I’m going to get out of,” said Miles, 27. “But I look at the 14 guys around me and I want to help them. I want to help them win games.
“My biggest thing is, I want to look to the guy next to me and have him look back at me and have him know that I’m going to be where I’m supposed to be and I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing and what I’m capable of doing to help him. That’s what bothers me when I’m going through a slump. It’s not about personal accolades. It’s about winning games.”
The Pacers’ game that night provided a crucial opportunity to end the losing streak. The Celtics are healthy, mostly, and are only beginning to establish the winning identity and character that has defined Indiana. No one understood better than Miles that one timely three from him could put his team over the top.
“It’s, like, I have to do this,” said Miles, sitting on his team’s bench after the morning shootaround in Boston. “I have to. It’s like you have the weight of the building on your shoulders a little bit. You start looking at the game a different way. You have a game where you take five shots and you missed the first four, and instead of saying, ‘I just made that last one,’ you say ‘I should have made the first four.’ So instead of being happy you made one, you become angry. You look at this injury bug we’re having, guys are going down, and you say: It has to happen right now. For me, it has to happen. Because we’re shorthanded. And that’s a little bit of a burden right now.”
Six hours later, in the hallway outside his locker room, Vogel revealed that Miles was experiencing migraine headaches that would keep him out of the game against the Celtics.
‘A whole different world’
They lost 101-98 in Boston. In the far corner of the visitors dressing room in Boston, Copeland and Sloan sat at lockers next to one another. More than 15 minutes had passed and Copeland was still in uniform, elbows propped on his knees, head cradled in his hands.
“I’m making mistakes that I shouldn’t be making,” he said. “I’m learning, but it’s just not good enough. I’ve got to get better.”
The Pacers have been trying to fill in at small forward with 6-foot-7, 220-pound Solomon Hill, their first-round pick of 2013, as well as the 6-foot-8 Copeland, who is normally a stretch 4. Copeland spent the preseason in three-man drills contrived to teach him to fight through screens and stay with small forwards defensively.
“It’s a whole different world,” Copeland said after the game. “But I’ve got the capabilities. I’ve shown that I can do it in spurts. I’ve just got to be able to do enough of it to help us win the game.”
The 1-5 start after the Boston loss was the Pacers’ worst since 1993. Copeland takes the losses hard. “I can’t speak for everybody, but I know most of us are,” he said. “We’re winners in here, no matter what our record looks like. I don’t know how to handle this right now. That’s frustrating. Very frustrating.”
Eventually Copeland got up to take a shower. When he returned to his locker, he could overhear Sloan giving an entirely different kind of interview.
“I wouldn’t say it’s frustrating,” said Sloan, a 26-year-old point guard from Texas A&M who had brief stays with eight teams in the NBA, D-League and China before joining the Pacers last season. “We want to win. But it’s a different year for us. We have a lot of guys out right now. The face of the team is out, possibly the whole year. I would say this is encouraging. We’re losing a lot of these games by two to four points. You’ve got to see the bright side in them.”
Sloan scored 31 points in the overtime loss at Washington. He generated 15 points with four assists and no turnovers against the Celtics.
“There’s a lot of guys out there for us right now, including me, that didn’t get that opportunity last year,” Sloan said. “So take the opportunity to show Coach that you got some more guys over here if needed. I think guys are doing a great job of that. A lot of people don’t understand the 15th, 14th, 13th guy on every roster is capable of doing good things if given the opportunity. Give me a legitimate opportunity on any given night and I can show you why I deserve to be playing.”
The reactions represented two ends of the spectrum, and both were right and true. The Pacers were going to need all sources of inspiration. This was an opportunity for them to prove themselves, and at the same time to hold themselves accountable. They needed to be what they were trying to become, and they needed to be that now.
“When you go from eight minutes a game to 32 a game, it’s a whole different world,” said Pacers president Larry Bird. “Everybody reacts different. The pressure is on them now. The reason they’re not playing as much is not because they’re not good players. It’s because they’re not as consistent. Some guys take full advantage of the opportunity; some revert to their old ways, and that’s the reason why they come off the bench. It always boils down to being consistently good night in and night out.”
This particular Pacers’ loss was decided by an errant midrange jump shot from Celtics guard Avery Bradley. The long offensive rebound went to Jeff Green, whose ensuing free throws gave Boston a three-point advantage with 6.1 seconds remaining. “We as a team need to be dedicated to getting that one rebound that Jeff Green got,” Hibbert said at the end of the night. Hibbert is an example of a self-made player: A No. 17 pick who had transformed his body and his game to become a two-time All-Star. He takes no solace from the moral victories that his less-established teammates are earning.
“It’s good for them, but I’m seven years [into his NBA career] and I’ve got to win now,” Hibbert said. “I can’t be going through a rebuild process.”
Indy’s ideals bigger than wins, losses
The next night, in a rematch with the Wizards in Indianapolis, Hibbert banged knees with Hill, which forced the Pacers to play the final three quarters of a 97-90 loss without their top seven players. The Pacers dropped to 1-6.
And then, when their losing streak was looking as if it may never end, it did.
On Monday night in Indianapolis, Hibbert returned to score 29 points. A.J. Price, signed to a 10-day contract after the Pacers were granted an injury exemption, provided 22 points off the bench, including 10 in the fourth quarter of their 97-86 win over the fatigued Utah Jazz, who had survived a one-point win themselves the previous night at Detroit.
“I’m playing for my life,” explained Price.
As a team, the Pacers are fighting to hold onto a sense of themselves that began with Bird building the team, that was practiced daily by Vogel, that was embraced by all of their best players. They were losing games, certainly. But they were holding onto the larger ideal of who they had been and who they want to be.
“We are not a tanking team,” said Bird. “We are the type of team that sets a good culture. We expect players to meet expectations.”
West is expected back within another week, maybe. Miles will be healthy eventually. Stuckey, who had been a candidate to lead his new team in minutes, will be playing a crucial role soon enough. By December Hill and Watson will be reclaiming their roles as the Nos. 1 and 2 point guards, and they will be surrounded by more options — by Hill, who is emerging as a productive scorer and prodigious leader, by Lavoy Allen and his double-double capability off the bench, by Copeland and Sloan and the more familiar cast of contenders.
“Life deals you a certain hand?” said Vogel with a shrug. “You’ve got to play the hand.”
The win Monday over the Jazz was their first since opening night. The way the Pacers look at it, it was just the beginning of something better.
Ian Thomsen has covered the NBA since 2000. You can e-mail him here or follow him on Twitter.
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