Indiana Pacers fire Nate McMillan: 2 early takeaways

When overachieving isn’t enough

When a team doesn’t mean its goals, eventually the general manager or president of basketball operations (or whatever the decision-maker is titled as) has to fall on the sword, but not before the head coach.

We see this with the Philadelphia 76ers who fired Brett Brown less than 24 hours after the final buzzer of their own sweep at the hands of the Boston Celtics. It wasn’t the man who gave him the team that had to go, it was the coach. And it makes sense, because the general manager does the hiring and firing, and in most cases doesn’t fire himself.

So when a team overachieves the way the Indiana Pacers have over Nate McMillan’s tenure, perhaps to the point that the organization sees itself as better than it is, sometimes we’ll see the head coach get burned. In this case, that might be just what happened.

As an example, check out Chris Herring’s analysis:

Maybe Nate McMillan is holding the Indiana Pacers back. Maybe, like when the Golden State Warriors replaced Mark Jackson with Steve Kerr, a fresh voice is the key. Or maybe Nate McMillan was a bigger part of the Pacers’ success than the organization is willing to admit, and they’re going to find that out the hard way.