INDIANAPOLIS – The future is bright for the Indiana Pacers. They’re on the verge of a second-straight playoff berth in the post-Paul George era. They boast legitimate NBA Coach of the Year, Defensive Player of the Year and Sixth Man of the Year candidates in Nate McMillan, Myles Turner and Domantas Sabonis, respectively. And the latter two are part of a blossoming young core led by a bona fide star in Victor Oladipo, without whom the Pacers have still managed to maintain a top-five seed in the Eastern Conference.

While the Larry O’Brien Trophy might not be in this franchise’s immediate future, the Pacers are a team on the rise.

Perhaps it is appropriate then, to look back on the last time the Indiana Pacers looked to be a franchise on the rise.

It wasn't so long ago.

The 2013-14 Pacers — built on a familiar foundation of elite defense, inimitable chemistry and veteran leadership — appeared poised to shock the world. Seemingly out of nowhere, the tight-knit Pacers had become chief rivals and worthy adversaries of the greatest player of his generation, LeBron James, and a modern-day NBA dynasty in the Miami Heat.

"Midwestern Grit vs, South Beach swag" looked like a rivalry that could shape the Eastern Conference for years to come.

Instead of fulfilling that promise, however, the Pacers collapsed in on themselves beneath the weight of those expectations.

The fall was nearly as swift as the rise.

The following is the story about how a team touted as king-slayers crumpled before ever getting near the crown they so coveted. This is the story — a cautionary tale perhaps — of the last great Pacers team.

“The death knell”

Seconds after picking up the phone, David West’s heart sank to his stomach.

It’s over, he thought. That’s it. It was only February, but he knew there would be no redemption for the Pacers. No NBA Finals. No victory parade through downtown Indianapolis.

The Pacers had just traded Danny Granger to Philadelphia, a move that would eventually color Paul George's acrimonious exit from Indiana, and, West believes, led directly to the swift downfall of the 2013-14 Pacers.

“That was the death-knell," he told IndyStar last year. “When we did that for Danny, I just sort of in my gut, I knew we weren't going to be able to get by the Heat. Even though it was in February, I knew we’d be able to get through the first two rounds, but without Danny, without OJ (Orlando Johnson was waived as part of the Granger trade), without Roy (Hibbert) being mentally confident, I knew we weren’t going to have enough to get by them.”

Whether West truly understood the team makeup better than anyone else or cursed the Pacers with a self-fulfilling prophecy, he was right. After winning Game 1 of their second-straight Eastern Conference finals against the Heat, the Pacers fell a game sooner than the season before, with an embarrassing 117-92 sendoff in Game 6.

From there, the once rock-solid group began to fracture. Their sparkplug, Lance Stephenson, chased a fortune to Charlotte. George shattered his leg while playing for Team USA. And, depending on whom you ask, Hibbert was either irreparably broken or had become an instant relic in an evolving NBA.

This smash-mouth Pacers era were over. They’d reach the postseason one more time in the Paul George era, but even he didn’t survive the coming collapse. Not long after Stephenson left, West and Hibbert followed. Eventually, coach Frank Vogel was fired and George Hill and Paul George were traded. Three years after a second-straight East finals appearance, and every player from that team was gone.

What could have, and possibly should have, been the beginning of a Pacers dynasty ended before it ever realized its full potential.

“That team had some of the best chemistry I've ever been around," Vogel told IndyStar. "Honestly, if we’d come back the next year having been able to keep Lance and Paul not getting hurt — with LeBron (James) leaving Miami — I thought that would have been our year. We could have at least reached the (NBA) Finals.”

‘The funnest team I’ve ever played on’

Heartbreak only brought them closer together. A year after being bounced by the Heat in the East semifinals, the Pacers pushed the defending champions to the brink: Game 7 of the 2012-13 East Finals.

A second-half collapse and a lopsided final score (99-76) painted a picture that the Pacers couldn’t handle the spotlight. West knew better.

“It wasn’t that tough,” West said of dealing with the Game 7 defeat. “I mean, it was hard. I feel like we should have gotten through. It was more that we knew we could compete against (the best). If we stayed together again, we could get right back there again.

“I don’t know if our confidence was higher (in 2013-14), but we had continuity and confidence … in what we were. We were solidified and felt comfortable with the identity we had created throughout that run.”

Most of 2012-13 team hung around Indianapolis until mid-June and returned to Indianapolis by late August. They didn’t want a break, West said. They wanted to get back to work.

Then-team president Larry Bird was in lockstep with his players, spending the offseason aggressively trying to shore up the team’s most glaring weakness: the bench.

Bird, who declined to comment for this story, acquired C.J. Watson, Donald Sloan, Chris Copeland, Solomon Hill and Luis Scola to ensure when the Pacers met the Heat for Round 3, Vogel would have the weapons needed.

“We've got a shot the next couple years to go for it all,” Vogel told NBA.com at the time, “and we're going for it all.”

With a revamped bench and the return of a starting unit that graded out as one of the league’s best in 2012-13, the Pacers became preseason darlings. Pundits across the country were picking Indiana to dethrone King James.

“Have you looked around the web lately?” wrote then-IndyStar columnist Bob Kravitz. “The Pacers have become this year's fashionable media pick to unseat the Miami Heat. Cat Fancy magazine likes the Pacers. National Geographic likes the Pacers. Field & Stream likes the Pacers.

"... Those who aren't going chalk and picking the Heat are falling in love with the Pacers.”

The only component the Pacers were missing heading into the season was Granger. After sitting out all but five games of the 2012-13 season with a knee injury, the All-Star forward was supposed to be the final piece to the puzzle that would lift the Pacers past the Heat. Instead, the veteran's calf flared up in the preseason and put him back on the shelf. No one knew at the time when he'd return and what shape he'd been in when he did.

Just as he had done the previous season, George would have to shoulder the load left by his mentor.

“I remember (Granger) went down,” West said, “and Frank sat everybody down in Atlanta (the site of Indiana’s second-to-last preseason game) and was like, ‘Paul, you gotta do it. We don’t have time to wait. You have to come on and be a consistent threat every single night. That was sort of the beginning for him.”

Though George had earned an All-NBA Third Team nod and a max contract in the offseason, George was being called upon to take his game to new heights.

He did just that.

Coming off an All-Star season in which he had averaged 17.4 points per game, George led the Pacers to a blistering 16-1 start, as he averaged more than 24 points a night.

On the other end of the court, George, Hill, West, Stephenson and Hibbert were as suffocating as ever. They bruised and battered their foes, limiting them to 90 points or fewer 11 times during that 16-1 run.

The Pacers weren’t just winning. They were blowing teams out, with an average margin of victory of more than 11 points.

“It was like it is here,” West told IndyStar while wearing a Golden State Warriors jersey. “It’s every night. Every game, every possession, means the world. Every guy on the roster has a responsibility to be ready for when their number is called. We had that same sort of focus. And the confidence to know every night you had a chance to win.”

Their hot start was fueled by a burning desire to earn every edge they could in what they all knew was a looming rematch with the Heat. If it came down to Game 7 again, they wanted it to be on their terms — with the rowdy Bankers Life Fieldhouse faithful behind them.

That singular focus unified them, said Stephenson.

“I remember how together we were, how we communicated with each other. Someone made a mistake, we’d talk about it and get over it quick.

“I took every game — approached it like, man, we’re going to win. No one was going to stop us. When you have that type of swag, that type of confidence, that trickles down to the whole team. That was one of the funnest years. Going through it, you’re not thinking that. But looking back and being on all of the teams that I’ve been on since, it was.”

Added to the delight of their scorching-hot start, was that Granger returned to the team near the end of December. While he didn't resemble his former All-Star self (8.6 points on 36% shooting), he nonetheless provided the Pacers a major morale boost.

Despite not playing a game for nine straight months, he remained a critical cog on the team. Granger never skipped a road trip or a team bonding trip, wrote then-IndyStar Pacers Insider Candace Buckner.

“He hasn't even been left out of punchlines and conversations in the locker room — those moments that show a team's camaraderie. In short, Granger still is a part of this Pacers team. Fans may not see it, but his teammates have never excluded him, and Granger seems to feel like one of the guys.

“Granger and his teammates share a history. That cannot be forgotten as they come together again.”

The Pacers would eventually come back to Earth after their scorching start, but only just barely. They finished January 35-10, in control of the East and looking every bit like a team capable of conquering Miami’s Big Three.

But as the calendar turned to February, everything changed.

‘That hurt Roy. ... He hasn’t recovered.’

As West walked past the weight room that morning, he had to do a double take. He couldn't believe who was standing there.

“I thought it was all a rumor,” West said.

Andrew Bynum. West closes his eyes and shakes his head at the mention of his name.

“That killed Roy,” West said.

On Feb 1, the Pacers signed the enigmatic Bynum, a 7-foot center who possessed undeniable talent and had shown flashes of dominance throughout his career, in hopes that he might bolster their frontcourt depth.

Though he brought with him a history of knee problems and questionable conduct — including a suspension by the Cleveland Cavaliers earlier that season for being a “disruptive” presence said then-Yahoo! reporter Adrian Wojnarowski — he made no enemies on the Pacers, according to the players IndyStar spoke to for this story.

Still, his mere arrival was enough to fracture what had turned out to be a fragile Pacers ecosystem.

“It wasn’t Bynum’s fault,” West said. “I mean he only ended up playing, what, like two games for us. But him being there, just the focus of the team was kind of thrown off, because we already had Roy. We had Ian (Mahinmi). … It’s not that he wasn’t a fit, it just that there was really no room. I don’t know why we did it. I think maybe we got greedy. We tried to fill a cup that was already over-flowing."

Added Stephenson: “When Andrew came in, and people thinking he could potentially take Roy’s spot, Roy was thinking, ‘Man, what are they trying to do? Are they trying to get me outta here?’ It messed with everyone’s heads.”

The signing sent Hibbert, who could not be reached for comment for this story, into a tailspin — statistically.

Through Jan. 31, Hibbert had posted his customary All-Star-worthy numbers — 12.2 points, 7.8 rebounds, 2.5 blocks per game — while serving as the anchor to the NBA’s top defense.

After Bynum arrived, though, Hibbert fell off a cliff, averaging just 9.0 points, 5.2 rebounds and 1.9 blocks a night.

“It just spiraled out of control,” West said. “I remember we had more one-on-one conversations with him, more sidebars. I’ve never seen a head coach, I mean Frank is having to work him out one-on-one. Like on off days, just him and the head coach. Frank’s just trying to keep him confident.

“Look, for a lot of players, the confidence that you feel others have in you, a lot of times, gives you the confidence to have confidence in yourself. Maybe that’s a little too philosophical, but I’ve always felt like that. Being around the game my whole life, you see certain guys are wired certain ways. There’s no one specific way to reach your potential. But there are various ways for confidence to go away. And I think for Roy, it was the fact that he knew that rain, sleet or hell, we had his back. And the coaching staff had his back. Even when he made plays that he shouldn’t have or didn’t make plays he should have made, you know, whatever folks perceived about him, he knew we had his back. But the Bynum thing was sort of, ‘Oh now they’re messing with him.’ … That really hurt him. Roy, man, he hasn’t recovered.”

Neither did the Pacers. And Bynum, it turns out, was only the calm before the storm.

'I just knew if Danny wasn’t here, we probably can’t get it done.'

Fortunately for the Pacers, even without Hibbert at the peak of his powers, they were talented enough to keep winning. Despite the team’s displeasure with the addition, from the day Bynum signed until Feb. 20, Indiana went 6-3 and maintained its hold on the East’s top seed.

Meanwhile, George and Hibbert were each named to the East All-Star team — which Vogel would coach — while Stephenson (14.7 points, 7.3 rebounds and 5.1 assists) was believed by many to be the game’s biggest snub.

"We all feel for him," George said at the time. "We're all upset for him."

They were about to become more upset.

Four days after returning from the All-Star break, West received that fateful phone call.

“I’ll never forget when I got the call that Danny was being traded,” West said. “I didn’t even know who it was for. I just knew if Danny wasn’t here, we probably can’t get it done.”

The trade was for Evan Turner and backup big man LaVoy Allen. At the time, Turner was averaging a career-high 17.4 points, 6.0 rebounds and 3.7 assists with the hapless Philadelphia 76ers.

"It's just a tough deal," said Bird, who declined to comment for this story, but told Buckner in the trade's aftermath. "Danny's always been my favorite. I understand the disappointment. A lot of people say I've been trying to trade him for a year, and I haven't been doing that. I even told Danny that. I did tell him if a great opportunity arises, you can't say you'll never trade somebody."

The move was generally well-regarded around the NBA. Bleacher Report called the move a “no-brainer” for Indiana. Mark Spears of Yahoo! said the Pacers “hit the home run of the trade deadline."

Looking back, there's little doubt that in terms of on-court production, the move made sense for the Pacers. In Turner, they added a versatile scorer to their bench and an insurance policy in case Stephenson departed in free agency after the season.

However, despite the Pacers getting the better end of the bargain on paper, inside the locker room, the team was either irate, bewildered or caught somewhere in between.

“Danny was a huge part of our identity,” West said. “He was coming off an injury and working his way back, and it was just a difficult end to what I felt like could have been by far a longer stretch than it lasted. … To us, it made no sense. Us in the locker room didn’t get it, which made it hard for us to accept Evan, even though Evan is a good guy. It just made it hard for us to accept him because we were all Team Danny.”

It still makes Hill angry to look back on that trade.

“That was by far the worst,” Hill said. “Sometimes you make bad decisions, and you gotta live with them.”

George, who declined to comment for this story, never forgave the Pacers for trading his close friend and mentor, saying the Pacers threw “him to the dogs” after Granger had kept the franchise from obscurity for years.

The more immediate impact the trade had was that Turner’s addition upset and confounded Stephenson, who feared the Pacers had just traded for his replacement.

Looking back, Stephenson said, there's little doubt Turner’s arrival shook him.

“That messed with my head,” he said. “It messed with a lot of guy’s heads. Even (Evan). He’s coming in, second overall pick playing behind me, the 40th pick (both in the 2010 draft) — and it’s hard not to show it. You try to hide it, but it shows sometimes. That messed up our chemistry a little bit."

Losing Orlando Johnson wasn’t just collateral damage, either. It hurt. Though he only averaged nine minutes a night for the Pacers that year, Johnson was an invaluable role player, West said.

“You can ask anybody to a man, OJ was the guy in that locker room,” West said. “His playing time was (limited), but he brought it every single day. He talked to every single guy. He gave the locker room life. I mean he was a genuinely good dude. And he was a huge part of why we were winning. Those nights where guys didn’t have it, or didn’t feel right, he was the guy in everybody’s ear encouraging. He was huge. That lesson probably taught me how important it was having a locker-room minded guy, a glue guy.”

Following the Granger trade, the Pacers became a full-fledged soap opera. There was the widely mocked "boy-band" GQ cover photo, the salacious rumors about George that threatened to rupture the locker room further; and Hibbert's now-infamous "selfish dudes" speech following a late-March loss to the Wizards.

Amid all this drama, the Pacers were trying to convince the world — and themselves — that they were still the little Indiana engine that could beat the Heat.

It was an unconvincing performance. From the first game after the Granger trade to the end of the season, they were hardly better than a .500 team, finishing out the year 15-13.

“The Danny trade change our chemistry a little bit, but you can’t pin our tail-off all on that,” Vogel said. “That was definitely one of the things that changed in the second half of the season, but there were four or five things that changed with our group. … We just had some (internal) issues that derailed us.”

The playoffs

Fortunately for Indiana, the Heat endured some issues of their own in the second half of the season and couldn’t take advantage of the Pacers’ swoon. Indiana entered the playoffs as the East’s top seed, but the struggle to stay united was real.

The Turner-Stephenson dynamic reached a boiling point.

"Lance couldn't play the same way (with Evan there)," West said. "He couldn't focus the way he needed to focus because he always saw Evan as a replacement. In Evan, Stephenson was thinking like, 'He's someone who can do everything I can do.' We're basically the same player.'"

Stephenson says it wasn't that he didn't like Turner. He did, actually. But he felt threatened by him, and that tension between them finally erupted into the now-infamous fight ahead of Game 1 of the East quarterfinals against the Atlanta Hawks.

"It was (expletive) up man," West said. "It was literally the last five minutes of practice before the playoffs. I mean that’s why we lost Game 1. Yeah, five minutes before shootaround and Game 1 of the playoffs, and your starting 2 and backup were in a fistfight. And guess who had to break that up?"

Turner recently gave the play-by-play ESPN's Zach Lowe that it wasn't so much a fistfight West broke up as it was the two of them grabbing each other's necks after getting into a war of words while guarding one another fiercely during practice.

Whether or not punches were actually thrown is incidental. This was a team that prided itself on its togetherness and team-first mentality, and that identity was on the verge of dissipating.

Thank God for Frank Vogel, West said.

Despite the fight and despite Hibbert enduring the worst playoff series of his career — he combined for zero points and two rebounds in Games 5 and 6 — the Pacers survived the Hawks in seven games.

"We struggled in that first round with Atlanta — they were a spread-five team which was a precursor to what the league became," Vogel said. "But we found a way to get through and advance. We beat Washington (in six games) and started strong against Miami. We won Game 1."

Of course, the Pacers ended up losing in six games to Miami, but Vogel maintained pride that despite the roller-coaster season, "we crossed the finish line still together."

"I always credit Frank for getting us through that year," West said. "He's the only coach in the NBA who would have been able to handle that situation that way, under those circumstances. He was just unbelievably positive. It was incredible that he was able to get us through those first two rounds while dealing with so much volatility.

"I mean, after all of this, he still got that team to a couple games away from the NBA Finals."

The unraveling

Despite Vogel's Herculean efforts the year before, there was little he could do to prevent the disintegration of a team that had once enjoyed "some of the best chemistry he'd ever been around."

Turner was the first to go.

Though he was brought in to be the Stephenson insurance policy, he knew as soon as the season ended that he wasn't coming back.

"I think we both understood I need to go somewhere where I could play more and get my career back on track," Turner told IndyStar. "Which I did. People have gone from saying I'm a bad locker room guy to being a winner, which I've always been."

Next out the door was Stephenson, who didn't receive the financial commitment from the Pacers he thought he had earned. Without it, he decided to take his talents to Charlotte. It's a move Stephenson said he regrets. On the plus side, he learned a lot about himself and the NBA after he left.

"Sometimes, people need to go their separate ways and see what it’s like on the other side," he said. "Sometimes, you find out the grass ain’t always greener."

Losing Stephenson was a big blow, but the coup de grace came two weeks later during a Team USA scrimmage in Las Vegas.

When George went down, he took that era of Pacers with him.

"That fractured right leg ... ended an era of Pacers basketball," Buckner wrote shortly after the conclusion of a 2015-16 season in which the Pacers finished 38-44. "After George, a string of injuries shipwrecked the season. The Pacers did not have George for 76 games and, overall, players missed 219 games as the team staggered to the finish, one game out of the playoffs. Indiana entered the draft lottery, decided to wave goodbye to smash-mouth basketball."

This shift in philosophy, which was intended to better orient the Pacers with a faster-paced NBA, came at a cost. It became apparent Hibbert no longer had a place on the team.

West and Hill each understood what the Pacers wanted to do, but believed Bird was unnecessarily cruel to the Pacers big man before shipping him off to the Lakers once Hibbert picked up his option.

"They just threw him away," said West.

"That didn't sit well with me," added Hill. "It didn't sit well with D-West, how we treated him on his exit and things like that. To this day, since he left here, he hasn't been the same guy."

Though West would leave before Hibbert was actually traded, he cited the organization's unceremonious treatment of Hibbert as one of the big reasons he didn't pick up his own player option with the Pacers. Instead, he chose to chase a ring with the San Antonio Spurs.

With West out the door, of the nucleus that challenged the Heat in back-to-back East finals, only George, Hill and Vogel remained. And not for long.

In 2015-16, the Pacers clawed their way to a 45-37 record and a seventh seed only to get bounced by the Toronto Raptors in the first round of the 2015-16 playoffs.

Four days later, Vogel was informed his contract wouldn't be renewed. A month later, Hill was shipped out in a three-team deal for Jeff Teague, leaving George as the only remaining member from a roster that began the 2013-14 campaign with so much hope.

Of course, that story doesn’t have a happy ending either.

A few days after proclaiming to the world that he wanted to bring a championship to Indiana, George informed team executives he would not be re-signing with the Pacers after his contract expired. The Pacers responded by executing a deal with the Oklahoma City Thunder — trading George for Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis.

With that, the teardown of the last great Pacers team was complete.

"Those teams, I still miss those teams to this day," said Hill, who said that most of that group still talks to one another. "I wish we were still together. ... I think we would have only gotten better. Yes, we took a couple bumps and bruises with injuries and things like that, and maybe some guys not playing playoff caliber, but it was OK. One bad playoffs. We just didn't give anybody another chance. I'm not big on that. I'm more about loyalty."

West, too, hates the way things ended with that team. But he's not holding any grudges. He told IndyStar last year that while he hasn't spoken to Bird since leaving the Pacers, he knows the moves the team made that he disagreed with weren't personal.

"They probably thought what they were doing was in the best interest of the team. But hindsight is 20-20," West said. "We were just a close group. ... For a lot of those guys, I was at a different point in my career, but they grew up together. They figured out how to be pros together. We really figured out how to win together. For me, that was the first time — coming from New Orleans, a place I was really comfortable — I came to an environment where it was my responsibility to help change the culture and focus on helping the young guys grow. That was something that a big part of what we were. For it to kind of go the way it did was unfortunate."

Stephenson misses that team, too. So much so, that every once in a while, he gets back together with those guys and plays with them.

Sort of.

"I was playing (NBA) 2K the other day, and they had our team that year as the like the all-time Pacers team. I mean, I felt like that next year, if things turned out a little different, we would have definitely kicked some butt. That would have been three years of us all together. The longer you stay together, the more you learn your teammates. That next year would have been incredible."

Former IndyStar reporter Clifton Brown contributed to this story.

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Jim Ayello on Twitter and Facebook: @jimayello.