Nate McMillan Hire A Head Scratcher

The Indiana Pacers emphasized playing faster and having a new voice for the team in their dismissal of Frank Vogel, so why did they hire Nate McMillan?

The Indiana Pacers officially introduced Nate McMillan as the team’s new head coach on Monday afternoon.

Most recently, McMillan served as the Pacers associate head coach under Frank Vogel, who the Pacers announced May 5 would not return on May 5th. McMillan had previously been a head coach with the Seattle SuperSonics and Portland Trail Blazers.

The hire was a head-scratcher given what Larry Bird had said he was looking for in the team’s new head coach.

Bird made an emphasis on offensive improvement and playing uptempo.

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Instead of hiring a coach with previous experience in a run-and-gun, free-wheeling offense, the Pacers hired someone who has been on the other side of the spectrum in terms of playing style.

These points of emphasis make McMillan a confusing choice for the job when you take his previous coaching experiences into consideration. McMillan’s teams in Seattle and Portland were consistently among of the slowest-paced in the league.

In fact, McMillan ran one of the four slowest-paced offensive teams in the league over his last seven full seasons as a head coach. At no point has McMillan ever coached an offense in the upper half of the league in pace.

It’s worth pointing out that the NBA looks different from it did in 2010-11, when McMillan last served for a full season as a head coach. The pace of the NBA is up from 92.1 possessions per 48 minutes to 95.8 this season, the fastest pace in 23 years.

It’s also worth considering that not all head coaches are married to one particular style of play. McMillan stated in Monday’s introductory press conference that his coaching philosophy will depend on what the roster looks like after the draft and free agency.

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However the question on if McMillan is the person best-equipped to turn the Pacers into an uptempo, modern NBA offense.

The Pacers ran the 11th-fastest offense in the league last season, averaging 96.6 possessions per game despite ranking 24th in offensive efficiency.

For the most part, McMillan ran very efficient offenses in his previous stints, albeit with slower-paced teams.

In addition to the basketball portion of the search for Vogel’s replacement, Bird stated that the team needed a new voice.

The insistence that the locker room needed a new voice is certainly confusing given that the “new voice” has been in the locker room for three seasons.

McMillan will stress different things than Vogel and is a bit more of an old school type who intends to make player accountability and structure a crucial part of the team. But hasn’t that been what McMillan has been doing with the team already as an assistant?

All of these factors isn’t to say McMillan is a bad head coaching hire. He comes to the Pacers with a 478-452 (.514 win percentage) over parts of 12 seasons as a head coach.

The Trail Blazers dramatically improved under McMillan over his time as head coach. Portland went 27-55 in the season before McMillan was tasked with turning the team around.

Improvement came over time. The Blazers declined to only 21 wins in McMillan’s first year but with the arrival and development of Brandon Roy and LaMarcus Aldridge, the Blazers peaked in 2008-09, when they won 54 games.

Aldridge has been strongly opposed to playing center throughout his career and that forced the Blazers to  play a traditional center with him. The pairing of two big men who work best in the half-court necessitated a slower offense.

McMillan will likely change that around and stated he believes that the Pacers’ promising big man Myles Turner is best-suited as a center, which would allow the Pacers to play a bit smaller than McMillan’s previous time allowed him to play.

Turner is undoubtedly the big man of the future for the Pacers and while McMillan and Bird stated that Turner could play either power forward or center, the admission that Turner is primarily a center puts the writing on the wall for last year’s starting center and free agent Ian Mahinmi.

Bird and McMillan stated that free agency and the draft will determine the Pacers’ style of play for next season, but we can assume that the Pacers look at Turner as the center going forward.

It’s no secret that the Pacers will look different next season.

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Bird has made McMillan the man to lead the Pacers over the next few seasons, but his hiring is a head-scratching decision given what the team wants to do as he doesn’t have a track record of doing it.