Gregg Doyel

gregg.doyel@indystar.com

Through it all, you thought Indiana Pacers President Larry Bird would somehow salvage the situation. Right? Getting rid of coach Frank Vogel looked wrong, felt wrong, seemed wrong, probably was wrong. But he’s Larry Bird, and he knows more basketball than we do. He probably has in mind a brilliant hire.

Or Nate McMillan.

No offense intended to McMillan, who spent the past three seasons as Vogel’s associate head coach and is finalizing negotiations to replace him. Maybe someday McMillan’s the guy who leads the Pacers to an NBA title.

But today he’s a pending hire that screams one word:

Huh?

Time will tell how this turns out, but when Bird got rid of Vogel, you had to think he’d try to replace him with someone, I don’t know, promising. Maybe a rising star of an assistant coach, like the Hawks in 2013 with Mike Budenholzer. Or a college coach we didn’t see coming, like the Celtics in 2013 with Brad Stevens. Or an NBA veteran now doing TV, like the Warriors in 2014 with Steve Kerr.

What happens when an assistant coach moves over 1 seat?

But a retread? And more to the point, this retread?

Brian Shaw is a retread who has a great relationship with Paul George. Mike D’Antoni is a retread known for coaching the kind of offense Bird has hoped to see here. David Blatt and even Mark Jackson are retreads who haven’t coached long enough in the NBA to have an established ceiling.

Nate McMillan has coached 10 full seasons in the NBA, and parts of two others. Almost 12 years as an NBA head coach? That’s not a sample size. That’s a full resume.

Only three current NBA head coaches have logged more than McMillan’s 930 games: Gregg Popovich (1,574), Doc Rivers (1,306) and Rick Carlisle (1,132).

So what would the Pacers get for all that experience?

Frank Vogel Lite.

Again, no disrespect to McMillan. I’m not predicting failure for the guy. How well a coach does depends in large part on his team’s talent and its health. McMillan caught some bad breaks in Portland with injuries to Greg Oden and Brandon Roy, but in Seattle he had high-scoring Rashard Lewis and either Gary Payton or Ray Allen, each a future Hall of Famer in his prime.

In 4½ seasons in Seattle, McMillan went 212-183 — and then left for arch-rival Portland.

In 6½ seasons in Portland he went 266-269. Then was fired.

What I’m saying is, if the Pacers are going to replace Frank Vogel, can’t they replace him with someone who isn’t statistically and demonstrably his inferior?

Here are the numbers. If you’re a Pacers fan, you will find them upsetting.

Vogel’s career winning percentage in the regular season: .580. McMillan's is .514.

Vogel’s career winning percentage in the playoffs is .508 (31-30). McMillan's is .412 (14-20).

Vogel’s teams won seven of 12 playoff series. McMillan’s teams won one of five playoff series.

The point here isn’t to wax forlornly for Frank Vogel. The point here is to wonder why Larry Bird would even consider replacing a proven NBA winner with a proven NBA mediocrity. And not just a mediocrity, but a mediocrity whose track record is coaching the same style of deliberate, defensive-minded ball preferred by Vogel.

Minus the great defense.

Doyel: Frank Vogel falls victim to Larry Bird's warped thinking

McMillan’s teams in Seattle and Portland were often efficient but never prolific offensively, never averaging even 99 points per game. (The presumably offensively challenged coach Bird just got rid of averaged 102.2 ppg this past season.) They were often below average defensively. In four of his 10 full seasons with the Sonics and Blazers, McMillan’s teams ranked between 25th and 28th in the league in defensive efficiency. Only once did his team crack the top 10, in 2009, when Portland was 10th.

In five full seasons under Vogel, the Pacers never finished worse than ninth in defensive efficiency — and led the league two times. And that was with Roy Hibbert as the centerpiece. Have you seen what became of Hibbert when he left here? He’s a punch line in Los Angeles. Was a force of nature here. Maybe coaching helped that.

But again, let’s not pine for Vogel. He’s gone, not coming back, so on. But Bird is close to hiring a coach who doesn’t play fast, doesn’t coach great defense, doesn’t have a track record of winning much more than he loses in the regular season — or of winning much at all in the playoffs.

Bird gets his new voice, though. McMillan definitely would sound different than Vogel, seeing how McMillan is from North Carolina and Vogel’s from New Jersey. McMillan’s voice also is deeper than Vogel’s.

Hey, this apparently matters to Bird. Matters more than coaching results obviously. On the day he announced Vogel was being discarded, Bird acknowledged Vogel was “the best” and “a great man, great leader,” but that Bird wanted “a new voice.”

Four other NBA teams are still seeking a new coach, two of them with vacancies that have lasted several months, but not Bird. He found for the Pacers a new voice just nine days after cutting off Frank Vogel at the, um, vocal cords.

With the whole country in which to conduct his search, Bird picked the guy down the hall. Thorough, this process was not. Here’s what it was:

Thoroughly baffling.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.