After having to dump Paul George to Oklahoma City for pennies on the dollar, Kevin Pritchard has spent the past month making one solid move after another. Here’s what we’ve learned about the Indiana Pacers’ new team president: He’s competitive, he’s ambitious, and he’s good at his job.

Which is too bad.

Because the Pacers didn’t need Pritchard to have a good July. They didn’t need him to be ambitious. They needed him to be cynical. They needed him to be logical. You know what they needed? They needed Kevin Pritchard to be dreadful.

And he wasn’t. He wasn’t cynical, logical or remotely close to dreadful. He tried to make the Pacers as good as they can be for the 2017-18 season, and he succeeded. The Pacers have a team president who’s good at the art of the deal. This offseason showed it.

No, the Paul George deal didn’t show that, but it was never going to show that. Pritchard had no leverage once George’s agent leaked it that PG wanted to leave, and preferably to the Los Angeles Lakers. Pritchard was never going to get an even exchange for George, though he did acquire a young player who will be a very good starter (Victor Oladipo, 25) and an even younger player (Domantas Sabonis, 21) who could become one eventually.

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Did Pritchard pull the trigger too quickly, taking the deal with Oklahoma City on the eve of free agency rather than waiting to see what would happen as dominoes started falling around the league? I think so but can’t prove it. We don’t know what other teams were offering before Pritchard said yes to OKC – I’m not believing every “offer” that has been “reported” – and we’ll never know what teams might have offered later in the offseason.

So here’s what I’m saying: On the biggest deal Kevin Pritchard made this summer, perhaps the biggest deal he will ever make as president of the Pacers given the timing and the stakes, he gets a great big … shrug of the shoulders. Because who knows?

As for the rest of the moves he made, he gets a nodding head. Yes to Darren Collison. Yes to Cory Joseph. Yes to Bojan Bogdanovic. Yes to his three picks in the 2017 NBA draft. Yes to all that future salary-cap space he created, which will give Pritchard a chance to acquire talent – nothing earth shattering, but nice nonetheless – via trade from teams so desperate to dump salary, they’ll just about give certain highly paid players away.

Can Kevin Pritchard handle the big-boy chair bequeathed to him by Larry Bird? Yeah, he can. Maybe better than Bird had been handling it in recent years, given the way Bird threw money at the shooting guard formerly known as Monta Ellis and misread the Paul George situation and drafted unremarkably since 2011, other than Myles Turner.

Pritchard does have some Larry Bird in him, though, the part that says: No backward steps to move forward. Bird never wanted to be in the draft lottery, never wanted to fall out of the playoffs, and Pritchard is of the same belief.

Which is, as I’ve said, too bad.

NBA basketball is a team game requiring supreme individual talent, and if you can’t convince those players to sign as free agents – and history has shown that the Pacers cannot – it’s incredibly hard to find that talent without one of the top two or three picks in the draft. It’s incredibly hard, but not impossible. Larry Bird drafted George 10th in 2010.

But George is gone, leaving the Pacers in NBA purgatory: They are a team without a superstar. Hell, they have no All-Stars, not a single player who has reached a single NBA All-Star Game at any point in his career. Crazy, right? Almost impossible to do, seems like, but the Pacers have done it.

A team with no All-Stars cannot win big. It can’t win small. Probably shouldn’t be able to win at all. Which brings us back to the 2017-18 Indiana Pacers, and Kevin Pritchard’s roster remake. He did great, which means he screwed it up. With no leverage in trades and no realistic chance of winning to sell free agents, Pritchard still managed to put together a starting lineup that can compete with lots of teams.

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Point guard: Darren Collison (acquired by Pritchard as a free agent), backed by Cory Joseph (acquired by Pritchard in a sign-and-trade).

Shooting guard: Victor Oladipo (trade), backed by Lance Stephenson.

Small forward: Bojan Bogdanovic (free agent), backed by Glenn Robinson III.

Power forward: Thaddeus Young, backed by Domantas Sabonis (trade) and T.J. Leaf (acquired by Pritchard in the draft).

Center: Myles Turner, backed by Al Jefferson, Sabonis and Ike Anigbogu (acquired by Pritchard in the draft).

That team won’t win the league, conference or division, and it might not reach the playoffs. Probably won’t make the playoffs, actually. But if everyone stays healthy and the defense is merely “below average” and not “laughable,” the Pacers are going to win just enough to have – at best – a pick late in the 2018 NBA draft lottery. Hard to find a franchise-altering talent there.

Kevin Pritchard’s first offseason in charge? He was good.

A little too good.

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