Sports. Honestly. Since 2011

Firing Frank Vogel is a Mistake for Indiana

In a highly questionable decision, the Pacers fire Frank Vogel after he failed to guide them past the Raptors in the first round of the playoffs.

The Indiana Pacers have decided to fire head coach Frank Vogel following the team’s defeat to the Toronto Raptors in the first round of the playoffs. Vogel went 250-181 in six seasons as head coach of the Pacers.

Change is inevitable in life, and often times, it is necessary. In sports, teams often favor the easiness of familiarity over the riskiness of change, even if the familiar choice has a maximum potential of something less than a championship. (See: Clippers, Los Angeles.) On the other hand, though, there’s also the potential to shake things up too much, to seek change for the sake of seeking change.

That’s the mistake that Larry Bird just made. Change is only a good thing when there’s a better alternative to the current state, and it’s hard to fathom that the Indiana Pacers could do much better than Frank Vogel.

Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t been a perfect coach by any stretch of the imagination.  Whatever happened at the end of the 2014 season in the Pacers’ locker room warrants at least some of the blame on Vogel. Also, Vogel failed to make use of Evan Turner at all during that same stretch, and he was a much better player both in Philadelphia before the trade and Boston when he signed there after the 2014 season.

However, let’s look at the guys who have played better for the Pacers than they have anywhere else.  Lance Stephenson starts and ends the list, as he has proved to Charlotte and Los Angeles that he was nowhere near the $9 million per year player that everyone thought he was after he played for Frank Vogel. It’s hard to give Vogel either credit or blame for Roy Hibbert’s sudden drop from the spring of 2014, because he declined a decent amount from 2014 to 2015 and then drastically from 2015 to 2016 with the Lakers. What is fair to put on Vogel, however, is this: during the 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 seasons, Roy Hibbert’s defensive rating numbers were 102.3, 104.0, 100.2, and 95.6, respectively. It’s not a coincidence that Vogel took over the team in the middle of those four years, helping transform the Pacers into one of the best defensive teams in the league by the 2014 season.

We always hear about how the NBA is a league of superstars, and how any team that wants to compete for NBA championships has to have the starpower in order to do it. Despite that, the Pacers made it to Game 7 of the 2013 Conference Finals against one of the best teams of all time, the Miami Heat team that ripped off 27 wins in a row at one point during that season. The next year, they looked like a true contender before imploding in the spring. For those years, they only had one player who could have been considered a star, and 2014 Paul George wasn’t even as good as 2016 Paul George.

The Pacers played well above themselves during Frank Vogel’s tenure, including taking a superior Raptors team to the closing minutes of Game 7 despite being a 7 seed. When you’re a small market team with one foundational piece, one hopeful star in Myles Turner, a city in which free agents are not exactly dying to play, and no realistic chance of getting top draft picks for the next few years, why fire a coach who has done nothing but overachieve?

The two best coaching candidates on the market, Luke Walton and Tom Thibodeau, are both gone. If the Pacers had missed the playoffs and Larry Bird had made a move on one of those guys, especially Thibodeau, the move might be more understandable. But it’s hard to believe that the Indiana Pacers have a long list of potential coaching candidates who are better than Frank Vogel.

It seems like Larry Bird made a big change just for the sake of making a big change. It’s a mistake. Frank Vogel will get scooped up by some other team and almost instantly improve their fortunes, and if the Pacers do manage to improve their team for next year, it won’t be because of their coaching change.

Share:

More Posts

Send Us A Message