Gregg Doyel

gregg.doyel@indystar.com

INDIANAPOLIS – This feels like a retreat, like a surrender. It feels like the great Larry Bird has admitted defeat.

Bird won’t be the one who returns the Indiana Pacers to the top of the Eastern Conference. He won’t, because he can’t. He tried and he failed, and now he’s leaving.

You want some imagery? Here’s your imagery. In his last public act as team president — the morning after the Pacers were swept from the 2017 NBA playoffs by Cleveland — Larry Bird was seen slowly and uncomfortably driving an Indy car down Broadway. After a few blocks in the heart of Manhattan, in all that traffic, he unfolded himself from the car and declared it “fun” but admitted: “It’s a little rough ride, you know, no suspension in it or anything.”

The last few years have been hard on Bird, who has seen most of his biggest decisions fail and then learned the hard way — publicly, embarrassingly — that he didn’t have the ultimate say over the future of his own franchise. It was Bird’s idea before the 2014-15 season to move George to power forward, to jump onto the wave of the NBA future by going smaller, faster, more perimeter-based. Bird had it all figured out. Myles Turner would be his center. George would be his power forward.

George said: No.

Bird said: “He don’t make the decisions around here.”

George said: Yes, I do.

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Two years later Bird is gone, one of the NBA’s last cowboys riding off into the sunset. Or maybe just to Orlando. The Magic reportedly tried to hire him five years ago, and already the Magic have been linked to Bird again by the same person who broke the news Friday of his resignation, Adrian Wojnarowski of The Vertical. It is interesting to note that Bird rarely traveled with the Pacers in the regular season, but he made an exception this season when the Pacers played in … Orlando.

Bird is an NBA icon with a wonderful if mixed resume, winning Executive of the Year in 2012 as he was building the Pacers teams that reached consecutive Eastern Conference finals in 2013 and ’14. It has been a little rough ride since then, you know, no suspension for a Pacers franchise that Bird was unable — and not because of Paul George; that’s on Larry Bird — to return to prominence even as the Eastern Conference remains mostly mediocre.

Bird is a cowboy, as I was saying, a throwback who was at his best in another era — the era that literally ended in 2014 when the Pacers reached the conference finals and the San Antonio Spurs won the NBA title. Bird built that team around size, toughness and a plodding rim protector. The 2014 Pacers were a team straight out of the 1990s.

Meanwhile, Golden State was helping reinvent the wheel.

The Warriors had a breakthrough 51-win season in 2014, won the NBA title in 2015 and won a record 73 games in 2016. They are the leading candidate this season to win another title. This had been happening for a while, teams getting smaller, quicker, but small-ball hadn’t gone mainstream until Golden State — the former laughingstock — recreated itself and then the NBA by building an attack not around the dominant big man, but around a whole lot of perimeter shooters.

Bird saw the wave and tried to adjust. And failed. He misread Paul George’s reaction to the position change, and then misread his own ability to enforce his vision on his star player. Bird played when he played, when the general manager called the shots and the coach called the plays and star players — even a player as great as Larry Bird — did what they were told.

Bird also was leaning on his own experience as a player — three decades earlier — when he decided after the 2016 season to part ways with coach Frank Vogel. Technically, Bird didn’t fire Vogel.

But he fired him.

Vogel wanted to come back. Bird said no. And why? Because when Bird was a player, Boston Celtics owner Red Auerbach believed teams needed “a new voice” — meaning, a new coach — every three or four years. The NBA had free agency in those days but player movement wasn’t nearly as chaotic as it is now. Rosters were similar over the years. Maybe a coach’s voice did grow old. But that was then.

This is now: Bird moved on from Vogel because he wanted a new voice, when in reality Vogel’s voice would have been “new” to most of this team. Entering the 2016-17 season, only Paul George and Lavoy Allen had been here longer than two years.

None of it worked. Not the switch to small-ball, not the switch of coaches, not even the offseason acquisitions of Jeff Teague and Thaddeus Young. Multiple sources close to Bird say he is turning over the franchise to General Manager Kevin Pritchard because Bird doesn’t have the patience, the will, to fight the battle that looms ahead, a battle where the first salvos will be fired by someone else.

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The Paul George decision, I mean. For more than a year, Bird has been of the belief that George is likely to leave the franchise as a free agent after the 2017-18 season, and he wasn’t encouraged by George’s public declaration in February: “I always want to play on a winning team,” George told ESPN Radio. “It's frustrating just playing the game for stats or for numbers or to showcase yourself. Man, I want a chance to play for ... a championship.”

The Pacers listened to offers for George before the 2017 trade deadline but did nothing. The next year will be painful, the drumbeat to trade George — to get something for him before he leaves as a free agent (potentially to the Los Angeles Lakers) — getting louder. The Pacers’ future rests on whatever Paul George wants to do. He does, as it turns out, make the decisions around here.

Larry Bird has seen enough. He’d rather stuff himself into an Indy car and drive slowly off into the distance, leaving behind a shadow that will get smaller, smaller, smaller …

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