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One year ago today the Indiana Pacers changed the face of their franchise. After 3 and ½ seasons they relieved Jim O’Brien of his head coaching duties.
This is a fact and is without dispute, what will follow will be filled with non scientific opinions and probably some rants and raves as well.
I will tell you this right now, avoid this post at all cost if you are a supporter of Jim O’Brien or if you don’t like anyone to be criticized when they are out of a job. BTW I am sympathetic to that point and will try my best to not go too far overboard.
Honestly I’ve been struggling with this post all day. At one time I was just going to actually start the thread and then do nothing but post the record of Frank Vogel since he has taken over. Then I was going to write up a balanced and non opinionated piece to where I just tried to analyze this as non emotionally as I could, but I was giving myself heart burn in trying this. Then I even went so far as to go over to Xtranormal.com to do another cartoon of the fans discussing the team one year later, but then after writing up a script and everything that you now have to pay to publish the cartoons. That sucked because I thought is was actually pretty funny (ok probably only I would have thought it was funny and some probably would have been offended).
So instead this is what I am left with. I am just going to write a piece from my heart and go from there right or wrong, popular or unpopular.
By the time he left I hated Jim O’Brien. I mean I have never ever hated a coach as much as I hated him and I’ve lived through Dick Versace and George Irvine twice. Now when I say hate I don’t mean I hated him as a person, obviously I never knew the man so I have no opinion of him away from the court. But what he did on the court caused me to absolutely loath the way he coached the team.
I’m going to admit this now, I’ve probably said it before but I’ll reiterate it again here, by the middle to end of December over the past three seasons he was here I had given up on the season. By the middle of January over the last two seasons I had lost interest for the most part in the season. I am a life long Pacers fan and have sit in the fieldhouse and M.S.A. before that and watched games where we lost by 20+ points and have set through seasons where we were lucky to win 25 wins but I sat there and watched every game I could. Not when he was coaching. Frankly speaking there were times those last two seasons that if it was really cold out we just wouldn’t go to the games and there was a time that we drove to Indianapolis, ate dinner and just decided that we didn’t want to waste our time with the game and just went home.
It wasn’t the losing, I never like to lose but there are times as a fan when you just know you aren’t going to win but you stick it out anyway. No, it was never that for me. It was the style of play and the players he chose to allow to make mistake after mistake while punishing others for the first offense on the floor. It was never admitting that something wasn’t working and trying something else. It was never understanding that some of the young players actually did deserve to be on the floor. I can understand and even appreciate his unwillingness to tank on purpose (I argue that his coaching style is tanking) but at some point in time when you are out of it (which once again was usually middle of December) then you do need to give some of your younger talent some time on the floor.
But I’m jumping to far ahead; I didn’t start out disliking him as a coach. In fact when we hired him I was very surprised. I honestly thought we were looking at the assistant coach of the Bulls at the time so when they said Jim O’Brien I was more than a little surprised.
But again I didn’t start out disliking him, in fact his first press conference went quite well and in fact for the most part early on he was saying all of the right things.
When he was hired this team was just starting to flush the toilet of the sewage of players that had so taken our clubs sterling reputation and just crapped all over it.
So Jim had no easy task to begin with. The fan base hated our team and hated our players. But a lot of that had to do with Donnie Walsh using lawyer speak when dealing with our off court issues and Rick Carlisle using cliché after cliché in press conferences but never showing that he was disciplining the players.
We had prominent players who would spend the majority of the games arguing with the referee’s over almost every call and an offense that was both boring and predictable. Not to mention it had become public knowledge that Carlisle was not making certain players practice with the club while still maintaining their starting position.
So along comes Jim and he immediately put the rule into place that only he could complain to the officials. He said that he would come to the teams defense when he felt that they were being abused by the referee’s but there would no longer be the constant talking to officials that had so previously crippled the public reputation of the club.
To Jim's credit (see I will give him credit where credit is due) he pretty much kept his word. While the griping did not 100% subside it did drop dramatically and on occasion when he felt the need he did work the officials and obtained the technical fouls to prove it.
Second he talked about playing strong defense. Of course every coach say’s the same thing but he seemed so adamant about it when he started that for the most part people believed him.
But almost as importantly he talked about opening up the offense. He said Jermaine O’Neal will still get his shots and will still score but we are not going to play the half court slog ball that took 23 of the 24 seconds off of the shot clock every time.
This sounded appealing at the time as well. You have to understand that while the offense we employed during the Carlisle years was affective it often was a strain on the eyes to watch and did not allow for many players to be involved.
I of course new of O’Brien from his time with Boston and did remember that I hated playing their team because I felt like we never lost to a better team but to a gimmick. I never really paid attention to him in Philly so I never had an opinion about him there. I just felt like the Boston teams were just an anomaly and surely that was not how he coached on a regular basis.
It took me about 2 min. into the first pre-season game to start to suspect that maybe this was his normal coaching.
But again I was not at first discouraged. I knew the talent on the club was not the greatest so I did not have high expectations for that first year.
The first few games started out great. In fact we won the first three games that Jim ever coached here. So it looked like maybe things were going to be better after all. The offense certainly moved faster and while we saw a lot of three’s go up we didn’t believe that over the course of the season that this would continue. Then we went on a horrid losing streak. But again, while I was seeing things that I didn’t like, I understood that we had a mix and match team that was still playing with some of the leftovers from the previous seasons while trying to integrate new players. But the off court stuff was slowing down (A lot of this has to do with Bird taking over and taking a no nonsense approach to this and not making excuses in the press for this behavior).
So like I said it wasn’t the losing.
By the end of the first month we were at .500% ball. Now a lot of people were not happy about that because previously we were winning at a much higher %. But like I said I understood the players and in fact was impressed that he got the team to play .500%. But more and more I was seeing things that were beginning to bother me on the floor. The defense did not seem to be that great and honestly I was already starting to see that he had players who did what he wanted on the offensive end but appeared to have zero ability to defend but would be able to play big min. because he liked what they did on offense. At first this didn’t bother me as much as it would come to because I just figured that like any coach he had his favorites and they must be doing what he wanted.
For awhile we kept playing at .500% then in January we went on an extended losing streak. Again, I didn’t like it but was living with it. But by this time the lack of offensive discipline was starting to grate on me and the over abundance of the three point shot was really bothering me. But again I hadn’t gone over the edge.
Then it happened.
January 9, 2008 the Indiana Pacers played the Phoenix Suns in Phoenix. This was at the back end of another three game losing streak and for the most part the team played a brilliant game. In fact they took the Suns (who at the time were very good) to overtime.
This was when I went from a person who was not thrilled but accepting of the coaching job he was doing to a raving lunatic who cursed so much that night that I am certain I was making up new words.
I won’t bore you with all of the details but for the last three min. of the overtime period we saw the single most selfish basketball play we have ever seen and it was done by none other than our point guard Jamaal Tinsley. Now you may wonder why I became so upset with Jim when Jamaal was the one on the floor. Well simply put while Jamaal proceeded to shoot shot after shot after shot during that time frame (I don’t remember exactly but I believe in that three min. period he put up 13 shots) not once passing to anyone else. Again why was I mad at Jim when this was Jamaal’s doing?
Well at one point in time after missing like 5 or so shots and the team now behind by 4 or 5 Jim calls a time out. I’m thinking ok great that will be the end of that. Jim will now either pull Jamaal out of the game or at the very least will draw up an offense that will more affectively be able to score. I was at first stunned when Jamaal re-entered the game but then I thought ok Jim is just going to go a different way.
Then it happened, Jamaal just kept shooting without even so much as looking at anyone else. I’m going ape **** at home. If I could have flown out to Phoenix that night I would have strangled Jamaal and I was absolutely certain that Jim had to be livid on the sidelines. Then the camera panned over to him, nothing. Not one single word from him, no calling out plays from the bench, no red face from cursing Jamaal for his play. In fact as the game went on and we went further behind Jim just stood there like a rock. I no longer was mad at Jamaal I was now livid with O’Brien.
The reason I was so mad was because the team was short players that night. They had been on a prolonged losing streak but had battled valiantly to tie up the game and take one of the better teams to overtime to have it absolutely destroyed by the crappiest basketball I have ever seen in my life and I will probably die never seeing anything this bad ever again (at least I hope).
So as expected we lose. The in the post game Jim just says that Jamaal was taking good shots and that they just weren’t dropping but he was more concerned with the defense. Now remember this is Jamaal Tinsley we are talking about here. He is a superior ball handler (second to none) and he is a great passer and runner of an offense. However he was never a scorer, now he could score when needed but that was never his game. He was a point guard who likes to point as we used to say and certainly Jamaal never was one to fire up three pointers unless he had to. That game he shot the ball 26 times, I would have to look it up but I am sure that this is still a career high attempts for him.
I thought that Jim’s actions, or better yet lack of actions, not only cost the team the game but cost the fans at home a much needed win and was disrespectful of the other players that night who fought so hard to keep that game at hand.
Honestly my opinion of O’Brien changed that night. It changed so much that while every season after that I would always come in trying to give him the benefit of the doubt I was always fighting an up hill battle because of what happened that night.
Then one week later the Golden State Warriors came to town and Jamaal was listed as inactive for the game. Jim when asked said that Jamaal was a sick but then he wasn’t expecting what happened next. Stephen Jackson, God love him, obviously did not get the memo about Jamaal being sick and let the cat out of the bag that Jamaal was actually suspended from the team.
Jim when confronted with this still tried to outright lie and say no he wasn’t suspended. Then it came out that yes he was suspended and then during this same time the cat was let out of the bag that Jermaine O’Neal was not practicing with the team and in fact had not practiced at all with the team.
Why is this a big deal? Simple, early on Jim made the very public proclamation that if you don’t practice you don’t play. So he wasn’t following through on this threat.
Then I began to wonder if all of his talk was just that, talk. Were things really any different other than our lack of interior defense and a wildly undisciplined offense?
Ok, I’ll stop going over this piece by piece because this could be 36 pages long if I did this.
I’ll just jump ahead and say that I tried; honest to God I tried every single year to believe that he could turn this around. But every single year the same result occurred. We would have a putrid regular season and then once we were out of the playoffs we would make some end of the season run that not only raised the win total but dropped our drafting position. In fact I will say that the 2009-10 Pacers should have had and did have a 20 some win record until the middle of March we went on a 5 and 4 game winning streak after we had already been eliminated from the playoffs. So I always believed that his record here was inflated because he would start winning games after we were out of the playoffs and other teams were either resting or frankly tanking.
The fact that he was given a one year extension was just unbelievable to me. He should have been fired after his second season and at the very least mid way through the third, not given an extension. But no, for whatever reason (stubborn pride IMO) Bird decided that a coach that was now being booed by the home crowds every single game should be extended. In fact the booing was so bad that the Pacers had to alter the opening so that both Jim and the opponents coach would be introduced together so that way the boo’s appeared to be for the opponents coach. But asking any and every member of PS&E they would freely admit that this was done because O’Brien was being booed every single game.
In fact the section right behind the Pacers bench on a few occasions would get a rousing chant of O’Brien sucks going. I set 4 seats behind Larry Bird and 5 seats behind Herb Simon and if I heard this every night I know they heard it.
While I hated each and every single thing about Jim O’Brien’s offense the one thing I obviously hated the most was his insistence on the use of a stretch four and at no point in time was his dependence on this and his idiocy exposed over this more than that last year here. Look I hated the way he played Troy Murphy; I loathed the way he allowed Troy to not defend but would still reward him with giant extended minutes because he did offensively what he wanted. But I understand that Troy was unique in that he could hit the trailing three with amazing consistency and while I was never ever impressed with his rebounding he did produce numbers.
But when he would not play both Tyler and Josh at the same time because he had to make sure that James Posey could play that was sinking to an all new low and believe me we were pretty low by that point. The day that Blake Griffin scored 47 points do you know that Josh McRoberts was inactive because Jim did actually start Tyler that game but because he had to make sure his boy Posey was available to spread the floor Josh was left inactive. Now I’m not saying Josh would have made a difference but don’t you think that if you are playing a young athletic stud of a power forward that you would want to counter with all of the big body’s you could? Not if you’re Jim O’Brien.
In fact here is an interesting point for you. The day Jim was fired the player who had played the most min. for us that season besides Granger who he kept moving over was James Posey. Not Tyler, not Josh but an old slow out of shape small forward was getting the most min. on the floor. Was it because of his stellar defense? Well back in the day James was a good defender. He was a good wing defender and he was about 40 pounds lighter. No it was because he did the one thing that Jim wanted above all things. He shot the three point shot.
As I’ve said before I’m not an idiot. I know that Jim never intended for us to just jack up three point shots for the sake of jacking up three point shots. It was intended to open the floor and allow driving lanes for our guards and small forwards.
However here is the problem. Our guards were not great at penetration and he refused to use our center as a consistent low post offense. Oh and one other problem, every other coach in the NBA was not an idiot. They did not automatically run their big men out of the lanes to chase our power forwards for three.
Now in all fairness to Jim I will say to him the same thing I would say to Van Gundy (who is almost as bad) and to D’Antoni who is just as bad. When you are hitting at a high % it can work. That is how we did manage to beat both the Lakers and Boston in Indiana when both were playing at a very high level. When the three point shot is dropping you can win.
But as has been said time and time again, live by the three die by the three.
The thing that bothered me the most about Jim O’Brien, well beyond his need, want and desire of a stretch four. Was the fact that at the end of the day he is a brilliant coach.
Yes that’s right I said he is a brilliant coach and he knows every single way to coach that you can imagine. If Larry would have said Jim I want you to run a dual power post offensive game he could have easily done it. He wouldn’t have had the players that could do it but he would have known how. He even tried for a few games to change up his system. But at the end of the day whenever the first sign of trouble would come along he would revert to the system that he absolutely believed in.
If you ever listened to Jim speak and explain his system you would walk away shaking your head in agreement going “well that makes a lot of sense”. That is one of the reasons why every year I would give him a chance, because to listen to him speak he sounded like he knew what he was doing and at the basics of his speeches he would be making sense.
Then you would realize that this meant seeing James Posey on the floor or before that Troy Murphy playing center while Roy Hibbert would be benched.
I swear I’ll wrap this up here in a second but one last complaint that I had was that not only did he not value shot selection the way he should have but the offense that he designed never drew fouls. Our teams were routinely outshot from the free throw line and often times by a large number. It was like he just did not understand that a two point shot plus a foul shot was a three point play just like his beloved three point shot.
Jim played %’s and if you look at his biggest defenders on here you will see that these are guys who generally believe in advanced statistics like Jim does. Now there were others who just support the coach no matter what but for the most part these are guys who look at charts and graphs and do math calculations just like Jim and determine that his style of play is the only way that he could have been playing. Even when you tell them that Frank Vogel took over the exact same team and ended the season with a winning record and a playoff berth they tried to argue something they called strength of schedule. Of course having them try and explain then how Frank’s teams were able to be the Bucks or the Hawks who Jim’s teams could never beat seemed to stump them. Then having them explain how we beat the Bulls in OT to give the Bulls their only central division loss of the season also left them with a blank. Basketball is not a math game. Yes statistics matter, the final score is a statistic so obviously it matters. But they have to be taken in context and not just regurgitated the way that Jim and his defenders would do. Jim honestly would justify playing James Posey vs. Amare based on the shooting %. Never mind that fact that Amare scored three straight plays on him to help N.Y. win the game. But hey James did spread the floor on offense so it had to work, right?
I’m ending now and I am hoping to use this as my last piece I ever write about Jim O’Brien. I won’t guarantee that I will never talk about him again but I will try from here forward to put him in the past, where he belongs.
As to coaching? I’ll just say this. When Jim was fired our team was 17-27 and was floundering. Frank Vogel took over the team and with not one single trade took the same group of players to a 20-18 record and a very strong playoff performance against the Central division champions and E.C. best record Chicago Bulls.
This season with some significant changes to our roster he has the Pacers playing at such a high level that anything less than a top 5 seed in the East will be considered a disappointment at this point in time.
However while I admit that the roster did have major changes, the single most significant change to our team occurred one year ago today and the record speaks for itself.
P.S. Notice I did not even talk about how his players felt about him.
P.P.S. Please use the space below to share your thoughts about O'Brien. Like or dislike is fine, I've said my peace about him. I won't swear not to respond but I'll do my best.
This is a fact and is without dispute, what will follow will be filled with non scientific opinions and probably some rants and raves as well.
I will tell you this right now, avoid this post at all cost if you are a supporter of Jim O’Brien or if you don’t like anyone to be criticized when they are out of a job. BTW I am sympathetic to that point and will try my best to not go too far overboard.
Honestly I’ve been struggling with this post all day. At one time I was just going to actually start the thread and then do nothing but post the record of Frank Vogel since he has taken over. Then I was going to write up a balanced and non opinionated piece to where I just tried to analyze this as non emotionally as I could, but I was giving myself heart burn in trying this. Then I even went so far as to go over to Xtranormal.com to do another cartoon of the fans discussing the team one year later, but then after writing up a script and everything that you now have to pay to publish the cartoons. That sucked because I thought is was actually pretty funny (ok probably only I would have thought it was funny and some probably would have been offended).
So instead this is what I am left with. I am just going to write a piece from my heart and go from there right or wrong, popular or unpopular.
By the time he left I hated Jim O’Brien. I mean I have never ever hated a coach as much as I hated him and I’ve lived through Dick Versace and George Irvine twice. Now when I say hate I don’t mean I hated him as a person, obviously I never knew the man so I have no opinion of him away from the court. But what he did on the court caused me to absolutely loath the way he coached the team.
I’m going to admit this now, I’ve probably said it before but I’ll reiterate it again here, by the middle to end of December over the past three seasons he was here I had given up on the season. By the middle of January over the last two seasons I had lost interest for the most part in the season. I am a life long Pacers fan and have sit in the fieldhouse and M.S.A. before that and watched games where we lost by 20+ points and have set through seasons where we were lucky to win 25 wins but I sat there and watched every game I could. Not when he was coaching. Frankly speaking there were times those last two seasons that if it was really cold out we just wouldn’t go to the games and there was a time that we drove to Indianapolis, ate dinner and just decided that we didn’t want to waste our time with the game and just went home.
It wasn’t the losing, I never like to lose but there are times as a fan when you just know you aren’t going to win but you stick it out anyway. No, it was never that for me. It was the style of play and the players he chose to allow to make mistake after mistake while punishing others for the first offense on the floor. It was never admitting that something wasn’t working and trying something else. It was never understanding that some of the young players actually did deserve to be on the floor. I can understand and even appreciate his unwillingness to tank on purpose (I argue that his coaching style is tanking) but at some point in time when you are out of it (which once again was usually middle of December) then you do need to give some of your younger talent some time on the floor.
But I’m jumping to far ahead; I didn’t start out disliking him as a coach. In fact when we hired him I was very surprised. I honestly thought we were looking at the assistant coach of the Bulls at the time so when they said Jim O’Brien I was more than a little surprised.
But again I didn’t start out disliking him, in fact his first press conference went quite well and in fact for the most part early on he was saying all of the right things.
When he was hired this team was just starting to flush the toilet of the sewage of players that had so taken our clubs sterling reputation and just crapped all over it.
So Jim had no easy task to begin with. The fan base hated our team and hated our players. But a lot of that had to do with Donnie Walsh using lawyer speak when dealing with our off court issues and Rick Carlisle using cliché after cliché in press conferences but never showing that he was disciplining the players.
We had prominent players who would spend the majority of the games arguing with the referee’s over almost every call and an offense that was both boring and predictable. Not to mention it had become public knowledge that Carlisle was not making certain players practice with the club while still maintaining their starting position.
So along comes Jim and he immediately put the rule into place that only he could complain to the officials. He said that he would come to the teams defense when he felt that they were being abused by the referee’s but there would no longer be the constant talking to officials that had so previously crippled the public reputation of the club.
To Jim's credit (see I will give him credit where credit is due) he pretty much kept his word. While the griping did not 100% subside it did drop dramatically and on occasion when he felt the need he did work the officials and obtained the technical fouls to prove it.
Second he talked about playing strong defense. Of course every coach say’s the same thing but he seemed so adamant about it when he started that for the most part people believed him.
But almost as importantly he talked about opening up the offense. He said Jermaine O’Neal will still get his shots and will still score but we are not going to play the half court slog ball that took 23 of the 24 seconds off of the shot clock every time.
This sounded appealing at the time as well. You have to understand that while the offense we employed during the Carlisle years was affective it often was a strain on the eyes to watch and did not allow for many players to be involved.
I of course new of O’Brien from his time with Boston and did remember that I hated playing their team because I felt like we never lost to a better team but to a gimmick. I never really paid attention to him in Philly so I never had an opinion about him there. I just felt like the Boston teams were just an anomaly and surely that was not how he coached on a regular basis.
It took me about 2 min. into the first pre-season game to start to suspect that maybe this was his normal coaching.
But again I was not at first discouraged. I knew the talent on the club was not the greatest so I did not have high expectations for that first year.
The first few games started out great. In fact we won the first three games that Jim ever coached here. So it looked like maybe things were going to be better after all. The offense certainly moved faster and while we saw a lot of three’s go up we didn’t believe that over the course of the season that this would continue. Then we went on a horrid losing streak. But again, while I was seeing things that I didn’t like, I understood that we had a mix and match team that was still playing with some of the leftovers from the previous seasons while trying to integrate new players. But the off court stuff was slowing down (A lot of this has to do with Bird taking over and taking a no nonsense approach to this and not making excuses in the press for this behavior).
So like I said it wasn’t the losing.
By the end of the first month we were at .500% ball. Now a lot of people were not happy about that because previously we were winning at a much higher %. But like I said I understood the players and in fact was impressed that he got the team to play .500%. But more and more I was seeing things that were beginning to bother me on the floor. The defense did not seem to be that great and honestly I was already starting to see that he had players who did what he wanted on the offensive end but appeared to have zero ability to defend but would be able to play big min. because he liked what they did on offense. At first this didn’t bother me as much as it would come to because I just figured that like any coach he had his favorites and they must be doing what he wanted.
For awhile we kept playing at .500% then in January we went on an extended losing streak. Again, I didn’t like it but was living with it. But by this time the lack of offensive discipline was starting to grate on me and the over abundance of the three point shot was really bothering me. But again I hadn’t gone over the edge.
Then it happened.
January 9, 2008 the Indiana Pacers played the Phoenix Suns in Phoenix. This was at the back end of another three game losing streak and for the most part the team played a brilliant game. In fact they took the Suns (who at the time were very good) to overtime.
This was when I went from a person who was not thrilled but accepting of the coaching job he was doing to a raving lunatic who cursed so much that night that I am certain I was making up new words.
I won’t bore you with all of the details but for the last three min. of the overtime period we saw the single most selfish basketball play we have ever seen and it was done by none other than our point guard Jamaal Tinsley. Now you may wonder why I became so upset with Jim when Jamaal was the one on the floor. Well simply put while Jamaal proceeded to shoot shot after shot after shot during that time frame (I don’t remember exactly but I believe in that three min. period he put up 13 shots) not once passing to anyone else. Again why was I mad at Jim when this was Jamaal’s doing?
Well at one point in time after missing like 5 or so shots and the team now behind by 4 or 5 Jim calls a time out. I’m thinking ok great that will be the end of that. Jim will now either pull Jamaal out of the game or at the very least will draw up an offense that will more affectively be able to score. I was at first stunned when Jamaal re-entered the game but then I thought ok Jim is just going to go a different way.
Then it happened, Jamaal just kept shooting without even so much as looking at anyone else. I’m going ape **** at home. If I could have flown out to Phoenix that night I would have strangled Jamaal and I was absolutely certain that Jim had to be livid on the sidelines. Then the camera panned over to him, nothing. Not one single word from him, no calling out plays from the bench, no red face from cursing Jamaal for his play. In fact as the game went on and we went further behind Jim just stood there like a rock. I no longer was mad at Jamaal I was now livid with O’Brien.
The reason I was so mad was because the team was short players that night. They had been on a prolonged losing streak but had battled valiantly to tie up the game and take one of the better teams to overtime to have it absolutely destroyed by the crappiest basketball I have ever seen in my life and I will probably die never seeing anything this bad ever again (at least I hope).
So as expected we lose. The in the post game Jim just says that Jamaal was taking good shots and that they just weren’t dropping but he was more concerned with the defense. Now remember this is Jamaal Tinsley we are talking about here. He is a superior ball handler (second to none) and he is a great passer and runner of an offense. However he was never a scorer, now he could score when needed but that was never his game. He was a point guard who likes to point as we used to say and certainly Jamaal never was one to fire up three pointers unless he had to. That game he shot the ball 26 times, I would have to look it up but I am sure that this is still a career high attempts for him.
I thought that Jim’s actions, or better yet lack of actions, not only cost the team the game but cost the fans at home a much needed win and was disrespectful of the other players that night who fought so hard to keep that game at hand.
Honestly my opinion of O’Brien changed that night. It changed so much that while every season after that I would always come in trying to give him the benefit of the doubt I was always fighting an up hill battle because of what happened that night.
Then one week later the Golden State Warriors came to town and Jamaal was listed as inactive for the game. Jim when asked said that Jamaal was a sick but then he wasn’t expecting what happened next. Stephen Jackson, God love him, obviously did not get the memo about Jamaal being sick and let the cat out of the bag that Jamaal was actually suspended from the team.
Jim when confronted with this still tried to outright lie and say no he wasn’t suspended. Then it came out that yes he was suspended and then during this same time the cat was let out of the bag that Jermaine O’Neal was not practicing with the team and in fact had not practiced at all with the team.
Why is this a big deal? Simple, early on Jim made the very public proclamation that if you don’t practice you don’t play. So he wasn’t following through on this threat.
Then I began to wonder if all of his talk was just that, talk. Were things really any different other than our lack of interior defense and a wildly undisciplined offense?
Ok, I’ll stop going over this piece by piece because this could be 36 pages long if I did this.
I’ll just jump ahead and say that I tried; honest to God I tried every single year to believe that he could turn this around. But every single year the same result occurred. We would have a putrid regular season and then once we were out of the playoffs we would make some end of the season run that not only raised the win total but dropped our drafting position. In fact I will say that the 2009-10 Pacers should have had and did have a 20 some win record until the middle of March we went on a 5 and 4 game winning streak after we had already been eliminated from the playoffs. So I always believed that his record here was inflated because he would start winning games after we were out of the playoffs and other teams were either resting or frankly tanking.
The fact that he was given a one year extension was just unbelievable to me. He should have been fired after his second season and at the very least mid way through the third, not given an extension. But no, for whatever reason (stubborn pride IMO) Bird decided that a coach that was now being booed by the home crowds every single game should be extended. In fact the booing was so bad that the Pacers had to alter the opening so that both Jim and the opponents coach would be introduced together so that way the boo’s appeared to be for the opponents coach. But asking any and every member of PS&E they would freely admit that this was done because O’Brien was being booed every single game.
In fact the section right behind the Pacers bench on a few occasions would get a rousing chant of O’Brien sucks going. I set 4 seats behind Larry Bird and 5 seats behind Herb Simon and if I heard this every night I know they heard it.
While I hated each and every single thing about Jim O’Brien’s offense the one thing I obviously hated the most was his insistence on the use of a stretch four and at no point in time was his dependence on this and his idiocy exposed over this more than that last year here. Look I hated the way he played Troy Murphy; I loathed the way he allowed Troy to not defend but would still reward him with giant extended minutes because he did offensively what he wanted. But I understand that Troy was unique in that he could hit the trailing three with amazing consistency and while I was never ever impressed with his rebounding he did produce numbers.
But when he would not play both Tyler and Josh at the same time because he had to make sure that James Posey could play that was sinking to an all new low and believe me we were pretty low by that point. The day that Blake Griffin scored 47 points do you know that Josh McRoberts was inactive because Jim did actually start Tyler that game but because he had to make sure his boy Posey was available to spread the floor Josh was left inactive. Now I’m not saying Josh would have made a difference but don’t you think that if you are playing a young athletic stud of a power forward that you would want to counter with all of the big body’s you could? Not if you’re Jim O’Brien.
In fact here is an interesting point for you. The day Jim was fired the player who had played the most min. for us that season besides Granger who he kept moving over was James Posey. Not Tyler, not Josh but an old slow out of shape small forward was getting the most min. on the floor. Was it because of his stellar defense? Well back in the day James was a good defender. He was a good wing defender and he was about 40 pounds lighter. No it was because he did the one thing that Jim wanted above all things. He shot the three point shot.
As I’ve said before I’m not an idiot. I know that Jim never intended for us to just jack up three point shots for the sake of jacking up three point shots. It was intended to open the floor and allow driving lanes for our guards and small forwards.
However here is the problem. Our guards were not great at penetration and he refused to use our center as a consistent low post offense. Oh and one other problem, every other coach in the NBA was not an idiot. They did not automatically run their big men out of the lanes to chase our power forwards for three.
Now in all fairness to Jim I will say to him the same thing I would say to Van Gundy (who is almost as bad) and to D’Antoni who is just as bad. When you are hitting at a high % it can work. That is how we did manage to beat both the Lakers and Boston in Indiana when both were playing at a very high level. When the three point shot is dropping you can win.
But as has been said time and time again, live by the three die by the three.
The thing that bothered me the most about Jim O’Brien, well beyond his need, want and desire of a stretch four. Was the fact that at the end of the day he is a brilliant coach.
Yes that’s right I said he is a brilliant coach and he knows every single way to coach that you can imagine. If Larry would have said Jim I want you to run a dual power post offensive game he could have easily done it. He wouldn’t have had the players that could do it but he would have known how. He even tried for a few games to change up his system. But at the end of the day whenever the first sign of trouble would come along he would revert to the system that he absolutely believed in.
If you ever listened to Jim speak and explain his system you would walk away shaking your head in agreement going “well that makes a lot of sense”. That is one of the reasons why every year I would give him a chance, because to listen to him speak he sounded like he knew what he was doing and at the basics of his speeches he would be making sense.
Then you would realize that this meant seeing James Posey on the floor or before that Troy Murphy playing center while Roy Hibbert would be benched.
I swear I’ll wrap this up here in a second but one last complaint that I had was that not only did he not value shot selection the way he should have but the offense that he designed never drew fouls. Our teams were routinely outshot from the free throw line and often times by a large number. It was like he just did not understand that a two point shot plus a foul shot was a three point play just like his beloved three point shot.
Jim played %’s and if you look at his biggest defenders on here you will see that these are guys who generally believe in advanced statistics like Jim does. Now there were others who just support the coach no matter what but for the most part these are guys who look at charts and graphs and do math calculations just like Jim and determine that his style of play is the only way that he could have been playing. Even when you tell them that Frank Vogel took over the exact same team and ended the season with a winning record and a playoff berth they tried to argue something they called strength of schedule. Of course having them try and explain then how Frank’s teams were able to be the Bucks or the Hawks who Jim’s teams could never beat seemed to stump them. Then having them explain how we beat the Bulls in OT to give the Bulls their only central division loss of the season also left them with a blank. Basketball is not a math game. Yes statistics matter, the final score is a statistic so obviously it matters. But they have to be taken in context and not just regurgitated the way that Jim and his defenders would do. Jim honestly would justify playing James Posey vs. Amare based on the shooting %. Never mind that fact that Amare scored three straight plays on him to help N.Y. win the game. But hey James did spread the floor on offense so it had to work, right?
I’m ending now and I am hoping to use this as my last piece I ever write about Jim O’Brien. I won’t guarantee that I will never talk about him again but I will try from here forward to put him in the past, where he belongs.
As to coaching? I’ll just say this. When Jim was fired our team was 17-27 and was floundering. Frank Vogel took over the team and with not one single trade took the same group of players to a 20-18 record and a very strong playoff performance against the Central division champions and E.C. best record Chicago Bulls.
This season with some significant changes to our roster he has the Pacers playing at such a high level that anything less than a top 5 seed in the East will be considered a disappointment at this point in time.
However while I admit that the roster did have major changes, the single most significant change to our team occurred one year ago today and the record speaks for itself.
P.S. Notice I did not even talk about how his players felt about him.
P.P.S. Please use the space below to share your thoughts about O'Brien. Like or dislike is fine, I've said my peace about him. I won't swear not to respond but I'll do my best.
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