Nate Taylor

IndyStar

Game 5: Pacers at Raptors, 6 p.m. Tuesday, TNT

Inside a buzzing arena, Chris Carr left his seat in pursuit of a noise closer to silence. He entered the Indiana Pacers’ locker room inside the Air Canada Centre last week with less than six minutes left in Game 1 of the team’s first-round playoff series against the Toronto Raptors. Carr was in the room alone.

He muted the TV to not let the broadcasters distract or influence him. He opened his Spalding NBA leather notepad portfolio. With a pen, Carr, the Pacers’ performance psychologist, took notes on his white legal pad. He wanted to study the team’s body language, actions and performance at the most critical time.

Carr watches the team unlike anyone else in the Pacers’ organization.

“I look for things like, do players stay relaxed or do they get tight?” Carr said two weeks ago as the Pacers began preparations for the postseason. “I can see that. Do they communicate? Do their heads drop? Do they maintain a brisk pace? Do they maintain a state of alertness?”

Throughout this season, and his five years in the organization, Carr has been with the Pacers at every pivotal moment. He is responsible for ensuring the players have the correct mental approach — before they perform, during the game and when they are presented with an obstacle, both performance-based or in their personal life.

Carr tracks behavior the same way coach Frank Vogel oversees a player’s statistical performance. Carr explains to the Pacers that composure is just as important as points, that resilience is as revealing as fighting for a rebound, that engagement and encouragement between teammates will lead to more assists and better overall defense.

In the series opener, Carr spent much of his time sitting in the crowd among a rabid Raptors fan base to experience the intensity the Pacers faced, the same atmosphere that is expected to welcome them Tuesday in Game 5. When Carr went into the locker room, the Pacers held a one-point lead.

From that moment on, Carr was encouraged by the amount of focus he tracked that led to the Pacers playing at their near optimum level to win. Paul George shot the ball with confidence. Monta Ellis ran the offense with composure. Myles Turner was assertive. Solomon Hill concentrated to make free throws. The Pacers’ bench was engaged.

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Carr has assessed the Pacers throughout the series, which is tied at two games apiece.

He watches Vogel’s pregame speech and instructions during halftime so that he can see whether the players execute it correctly. He speaks with players individually in confidential sessions. He will watch a player’s behavior, take notes and, when the moment presents itself, share positive reinforcement or help find a solution.

In a league in which scouting is critical, medical science is essential and advanced statistics are valued, the Pacers hope to gain a competitive edge with Carr. About half of the teams in the NBA have a sports psychologist. The Raptors do not.

“Dr. Carr is really a great asset,” Hill said April 10. "This is so much more of a mental game. He adds a different dynamic to our team.”

***

The first important meeting Carr had for this season occurred in August 2014.

George, the Pacers’ brightest star, arrived in Indianapolis on crutches with a titanium rod in his right leg, which was itself encased in a cast from the knee down. Less than two weeks before, George had sustained a compound fracture during a USA Men’s Basketball intrasquad scrimmage. Carr’s task, with a franchise’s future in the balance, was to present George with a mental plan to support his rehab.

Carr, 55, explained to George the loss he would suffer in missing most of the season, the grief he would experience watching others play and the anger that he could expect to feel. Then, Carr brought up visualization.

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At his core, George is a dreamer, a player who aspires to greatness. He explained that he spent a lot of time with Carr last season to envision himself back in top form — to lead the Pacers once again, to return to the All-Star Game, to re-establish himself as a star in the playoffs.

To help accomplish his goals, George went through what Carr called mental rehearsals through imagery scripts. Carr instructed George by having him watch video clips of himself on the court before the injury. George saw himself shooting, defending and grabbing rebounds. Then Carr asked him to close his eyes and visualize himself on the court performing those acts.

Instead of physical repetitions, George’s first ones were psychological:

Feel the ball, imagine yourself curling off the screen, dribble hard to the elbow, set your feet, release the shot high and in rhythm.

George said those mental exercises were the foundation of his remarkable return. He played a career-high 81 games in the regular season and set career highs in points per game (23.1) and made 3-pointers (210).

***



Before Carr was a sports psychologist, he was an athlete.

An offensive guard from Muncie, Carr was a two-year starter at Wabash College during his football playing career from 1978 through 1981. He studied psychology. After his playing career, Carr became a graduate assistant football coach at Ball State in 1983 and began working on his master’s degree in counseling psychology.

“Thinking that, at one point, my career path was to be a high school or college football coach,” he said. “I thought I’d be a guidance counselor.”

A friend encouraged Carr to look into sports psychology. Sports medicine was evolving and athletic training was becoming a booming business. But what about a psychological approach?

Carr’s first experience was as a research assistant in sports psychology at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs. He did an internship at Ohio State and was hired in 1992 by Washington State as a psychologist in the athletic department. In his 24-year career, Carr has worked with Ohio State’s football team, the USA’s Olympic alpine and diving teams, and the Kansas City Royals, among others.

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His introduction into the NBA was in 2009, when he joined the Oklahoma City Thunder. When the Pacers and the Indiana Fever became an option in 2011, Carr wanted the job so he could do the majority of his work in his home state. Along with the Pacers, Carr also works with Purdue, Butler and the USA gymnastics’ team.

With the Pacers, Vogel has Carr address the team about four times during the season. The first is in training camp when he gives each player a mental training manual that he wrote and developed throughout his career. The packet discusses goal setting, suggested pregame mental routines, stress management, dealing with adversity, and, of course, free-throw preparation.

“The mental game is really no different, it’s just a little bit more difficult because you have to do it yourself,” Carr said of the athletes he advises. “You have to be self-motivated to incorporate those mental training skills.”

Hill, who was out of Vogel’s rotation until March, said he used Carr’s materials to help improve his performance. Now a contributor off the bench, Hill uses the MP3 of music and guided imagery that Carr gave the team to help him relax before games.

“He reminded me that this game is not just about being in the gym for hours and hours working on your craft,” Hill said. “If you don’t believe in it, it’s not going to happen for you. I had to start changing how I think.”

Carr reviews his notes on a 10-day basis to see patterns or deviations. Some games he writes down every point and others he just writes down moments or runs.

“Who initiated the run?” he explained. “Was there a play on the defensive end? How did we respond? What’s our behavioral responses on timeouts?”

Carr stresses that he does not have all the answers. The players, he said, play the games and win or lose. But what he does have is observations and notes from his meetings with players that inform him on possible solutions. With a fluid season of winning and losing streaks, Carr focuses on the stable factors to help the Pacers develop mentally.

“A lot of times you tell him the answer, and you don’t even know it because you’re finally talking about it,” C.J. Miles said April 10. “A lot of the problem is when you’re going through change, you hold so much in and you bottle so much up and you try to fix everything with one move. And then you sit down and talk and you realize, I just told him what I should be doing. I had a couple conversations like that.”

***

Myles Turner, the Pacers’ 20-year-old rookie phenom, represents a shift in the NBA culture.

Turner met with Carr when he was introduced to the Pacers before last year’s draft. When the Pacers selected him with the 11th overall pick, Turner was eager to work with Carr. He had never been exposed to a sports psychologist.

When the season began, Turner talked with Carr in a planned meeting each week.

“I thought it was a big step forward for the program, just because any little advantage you can gain in this game I feel like that’s going to take you a long way,” Turner said of Carr on April 12.

Miles began his career similar to Turner. At 18, Miles entered the NBA from high school and was drafted by the Utah Jazz. To help ease his transition, the Jazz provided a sports psychologist for Miles to use. But Miles seldom did.

“I think the reason I didn’t talk to him as much as I probably should have was because of that, being young,” Miles said. “What am I going to tell this dude? I don’t want to talk to him. I’m not crazy. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just not playing. I probably wish I would have taken more advantage of it looking at it now after using Dr. Carr the last couple years.”

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Carr's help was especially important after Turner sustained a chip fracture in his left thumb in November.

Carr suggested Turner journal during his rehab to enhance his mental awareness and identify his limitations. Through that exercise, Turner said he developed a pregame routine and began visualizing his success once he became healthy.

“It came to a point where I wrote almost every day,” Turner said of his recovery from surgery on his thumb. “I was bored with nothing to do. I had to sit back and analyze everything.”

When he returned, Turner’s play improved. He was named Eastern Conference rookie of the month for February after he averaged 13.4 points and 6.6 rebounds during that stretch.

Turner has performed well in the playoffs. His energy and ability to protect the rim helped the Pacers win Saturday’s game to tie their series.

“If a player utilizes me and I help them, then that’s awesome,” Carr said. He added of Turner: “He’s special.”

***

At some point in this series, the Pacers will either have a chance to advance to the second round — which would be an upset over the Raptors — or will be facing elimination. Carr will watch that game from multiple areas in the arena. He will sit among the fans to see how the Pacers perform in the heightened environment. He will watch from the tunnel the players enter through. And in the final six minutes, he will exit through that same tunnel.

Carr will be in the Pacers’ locker room, alone, watching.

Call IndyStar reporter Nate Taylor at (317) 444-6484. Follow him on Twitter: @ByNateTaylor.

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