Insider: Trade of Hibbert was required for Bird's new vision of Pacers

After a tumultuous start to the offseason, when he was called out by Pacers President Larry Bird and cast aside for a younger, more athletic draft pick, Roy Hibbert is now on his way out of Indiana.

The Pacers spent Saturday finalizing a trade to send Hibbert to the Los Angeles Lakers. A league source confirmed to The Indianapolis Star that the deal will be completed on or after July 9, the end of the NBA moratorium. According to USA Today's Jeff Zillgit, the Lakers will absorb the remaining $15.5 million of Hibbert's contract. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Pacers will get at least one future second-round pick and potentially cash.

If all goes through, the deal marks an abrupt end to Hibbert's seven-year career with the only team he has known.

However, it should come as no surprise because Indiana has tried to move away from Hibbert for several years. Hibbert made the All-Star team in 2011-12 while having the best season of his career — averages of 12.8 points per game on 49.7 percent shooting, 8.8 rebounds and 2.0 blocks, all career highs — and was a key figure in the team taking the Miami Heat to seven games in the Eastern Conference finals in 2013, but his role then slowly eroded to the background. First, when Paul George ascended as a two-way perimeter star, then as small ball produced success for opponents around the league.

The true center in the NBA seems to be going the way of the dinosaur, and one of the last big men standing — the goofy and moody 7-2 Hibbert, who once supplied the defensive identity of the Pacers — no longer carried the status that his Big Dawg nickname suggested.

In 2008, Indiana selected Hibbert, working out a deal with his agent to make sure he would be available at the 17th slot. Ironically, this last NBA draft night, Hibbert made his last big stand as a Pacer.

On June 25, Hibbert reportedly filed papers to exercise the option of his contract for the 2015-16 season. The move came after months of silence from Hibbert and his representatives. Hibbert had missed an annual celebrity softball game in town, remained relatively dormant on Twitter (one of his favorite mediums of expression) and moved out to Los Angeles for the summer to, among other things, learn jiu-jitsu.

However, Hibbert didn't have to say much. The Pacers already had spoken loud and clear: There was no longer a home for Hibbert in Indiana.

Last season, Hibbert played the most games of any of the remaining players from the Pacers' once-heralded core. In those 76 games, Hibbert did not bear the burden for the lost season. However, he also didn't provide the promise that better days could come. Hibbert became an afterthought near the end, only playing 23 minutes a night during the final 12 regular-season games. Overall, Hibbert averaged only 10.6 points, 7.1 rebounds and 1.6 blocks — numbers actually on par with his 2013-14 All-Star season but still uninspiring to his bosses.

In the days following the end of the season, Bird assumed Hibbert would pick up his option. But, if he so chose to return, Bird fired not-so-subtle warning shots about Hibbert's shrinking role.

"We're probably going to play another style," said Bird, who promised a faster, smaller lineup. "And I can't guarantee him anything. He's going to have to earn it."

Much had clearly changed from the summer of 2012 when the Pacers matched Hibbert's four-year, $58 million max contract from the Portland Trail Blazers. Then, Indiana had evolved with its "smash-mouth" basketball identity and Hibbert bullied from the backstop as one of the best rim-protecting defenders in the league. Hibbert perfected his intimidation by jumping straight up to defend shots, a move so respected by Toronto coach Dwane Casey, that he told his young center to emulate "The Hibbert."

Behind Hibbert and a core of Paul George, David West, Lance Stephenson and George Hill, the Pacers played the role of plucky underdogs all the way to back-to-back Eastern Conference finals. However, even after Hibbert dominated the Heat in the 2013 conference finals (22.1 points and 10.4 rebounds), he felt in the follow-up 2013-14 season that the Pacers' offensive focus turned to the perimeter.

"My role changed a little bit and I needed to just accept that," Hibbert said in an interview last season, "even though it wasn't said verbally in practice or anything like that."

Before the start of the last season, Hibbert said he was aware that his name occasionally appeared in trade rumors. By this offseason, those rumors grew to substantive reports fueled by the Pacers' desire to move on with a new image.

While Hibbert has spent the summer working out in Los Angeles, the Pacers drafted a more offensively talented center in 19-year-old Myles Turner to form a faster, more agile frontcourt, and signed diminutive free agent guard Monta Ellis to rev up the backcourt. With these moves, here lies the smash-mouth identity (2011-2015). Along on this funeral march, the five-man starting core once considered good enough to pound and bruise their way to the franchise's first NBA title; now all that remain are Hill and George.

It took less than three months for Bird's vision of the new Pacers to take shape, one without Roy Hibbert.

Call Star reporter Candace Buckner at (317) 444-6121. Follow her on Twitter: @CandaceDBuckner.