There were a lot of reasons why they underachieved. They had some injuries. Larry Brown, who is an excellent coach, had grown stale with the players for some reason. I think some of the guys lost their focus. So now I come in, and they’ve come off this year where they could never get above .500, and nobody seemed to know what to expect. But I felt right from the beginning that we had a good chance to win the championship—if they would receive me well, and listen. That was the scary thing. I didn’t know. How would they react to me? My gut was they’d at least say, “Yeah, let’s give him a chance.” That’s all I could ask.
The expectation around town was for me to get the Pacers back in the playoffs. I kept saying that myself publicly, but I knew I wanted much, much more. The governor of Indiana came out and said we should win 50 games. I said I’d make sure we won 50 games if he could get us a balanced budget. I tried not to get caught up in any of the talk around the city. I just went to the office every day in the summer. Dinah and I didn’t go out much. We got the papers, but they really don’t write much about the Pacers in the off season. I know my friends in Terre Haute were expecting a lot, but that’s because they knew how seriously I was taking this job.
The Pacers tried to get me to do all sorts of promotional things, but I told them from the beginning that I wanted the team to be the focal point, not me. That didn’t stop them from asking me to do things, or me from turning them all down. I still do that. The one thing I didn’t want to do was be in television commercials to sell tickets. So they got a couple of my players together, and they did this commercial where they were on a road trip to French Lick to visit the house where I grew up. That’s fine. Just leave me out of it. In the summer of ’98 when they had the lockout, they couldn’t use any of the players so they had to make reference to me, but I still wasn’t actually in it.
That was one of the first things I explained to my guys at our first meeting in Orlando, where we had our training camp. I told them, “This is your team. I don’t want the attention, and I don’t need the attention, so let’s get that straight.” I knew I would be on the cover of the media guide for my first season coaching, but I told them after that it wasn’t going to be that way. The last thing I wanted was for them to think I had any plans to upstage them. The truth was, I had no interest in media attention whatsoever. I was going to do what was required of me but not much else. All the publicity was one of the reasons I considered passing on coaching. I knew once these guys got to know me, they’d see that.
When I talked to the team on that first night, I told them I believed we could win a championship. But if we were going to do it, we had to make it happen in the next two or three years. They already knew that, especially guys like Reggie Miller and Mark Jackson, who were in their thirties. Reggie will be able to play longer than Mark because of his body build, and because he knows how to play in decent shape and under control. But Mark Jackson only knows how to play a certain way—full speed ahead—and because of that, he gets hammered. I really have respect for that guy. Have you ever seen anyone compete as hard as Mark Jackson? I know he doesn’t have all the ability in the world, but I didn’t either, and what set us both apart is the way we competed. When I came into my first season with the Pacers, my single biggest concern was that we didn’t have a leader on the team. But Mark Jackson and Reggie Miller turned out to be two of the best leaders I’ve ever been around.
In my first team meeting, which lasted around twenty minutes, I pulled out the charts Rick Carlisle and I had done on conditioning, and I showed them to the guys. I explained that it was important for every single player to be in top shape, not just the starters, because you never knew when you were going to be called upon. I told them about an old teammate of mine from the Celtics, Eric Fernsten, a 6-foot-10 guy who didn’t get to play much. It was 1981, and we were playing for the best record in the league that season. We flew to Houston for a game against the Rockets, and we ran into a lot of foul trouble. Eric Fernsten had to go in. Fernsten was one of those guys who kept himself in good condition even though he never really got to play in the games. He gets in there, and we shoot a free throw and miss it. But Eric gets his hand up there and tips it in. It gave him confidence, and a few minutes later he got another basket. We won that game, and it helped us win the best record in the league. I told them it could happen to any one of them, just that way.
The next thing I told them was that I would not tolerate anyone being late. To me, it’s disruptive and disrespectful, and it was the one thing I would not change my position on. I told them a couple of more things I expected through the course of the year, and then I got up and walked out.
I think they must have been a little startled, me getting up and leaving like that. All of a sudden, Coach was gone. They stayed in there for a little while, and I don’t know what they did. I never asked. But I knew one thing: when we started going at it, they knew exactly what to expect.
I’m sure when I first came in there and started running those guys, they weren’t too happy about it. It’s a lot of hard work—it’s brutal, really—and I’m sure they complained, but they never complained to me.
Right from the beginning, they understood they would be running and running. One thing I believe in, and I told these guys, “As much as you hate the defensive drills, you’ve got to get through them.” Early on, we had those guys in a stance, sliding up and down the court. The first thing that gets sore is your groin. You’ve got to work through that soreness, and then you’re pretty good. Then you can get in shape and do all the other stuff and be able to maintain that stance. You’ve got to get that groin soreness out of there early, like in the first three days of camp, so you can move on. If you are fighting that, forget it. Hey, you can get out there and run and run and you might be a little sore, but if you don’t get down there and defend, I don’t care what kind of shape you’re in, your ankles won’t get you where you want to, or your legs. As hard as I worked in the off season, with my running and lifting and conditioning drills, I could never prepare for the first week of Bill Fitch’s practice, because until you are with the team and doing those defensive drills, it’s not the same. It’s hard to really get in a proper defensive stance back in French Lick when you’re not really guarding anybody.
A lot of the stuff I put them through is what Bill Fitch used on us while he was coach of the Celtics. It’s hard. I know it is, because I went through it myself, but my feeling is I wasn’t asking these guys to do anything I hadn’t already done myself.
Our shootarounds, which are held the morning of the game to prepare for the opponent, are tougher than a lot of teams’ practices. We always work for at least an hour. The last fifteen minutes of it is shooting, but for the other forty-five minutes they’re knocking each other all over the court. They better be. They know that’s what I want from them.
I’m sure there were times when they were wondering why we were doing that. Shootarounds aren’t supposed to be like a regular practice. But I’ll always remember our shootaround before playing Chicago in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals. We were running plays, taking charges, telling guys to take one another’s heads off. Guys were fighting, and I mean really fighting through picks. Guys were getting mad. We had to separate a couple of ’em, so nobody got punched. It was one of the best practices we had all season, and I knew we’d play well that night. We beat the Bulls 92–89 to force a seventh game, and Rik Smits, who the media was getting on for being too passive, came up huge with 26 points.
The same thing happened during our second road trip out West in February. We had a day off in Sacramento, so we held an hour-and-forty-minute practice. I called the guys together and told them, “Look, I want all-out war today. I want to see something. Show me what you got.” Well, you’ve never seen so many bodies fly. A guy would get knocked on his butt and his sweat would be dripping all over the floor, but he wouldn’t even stop long enough to dry it up. So the next time down, someone would come flying down the floor and slip. Then some guy behind him would fall, and the next thing you know, you got three guys rolling on the floor, going at it …I loved it. When we walked off that court, I got them together and said, “Hey guys, we’ve got no problem tomorrow night.” And, sure enough, in the first half of that game against the Kings we played an almost perfect half of basketball. I knew it. You just can’t come off a practice like that and not be ready to go into the game. We beat the Kings by 22 points on their floor.
One of the things people said about the Pacers was that they were a good, veteran team, but they weren’t mean enough. I was asking them to have an edge, and that’s not always an easy thing, because in some cases it’s not their nature. If you take Antonio Davis, one of our young guys who plays forward and center, that kind of aggression is not a problem for him. But Dale Davis, our power forward, is nothing like that. He’s just a very nice guy. You have to get him mad before he’ll play that way. We have a kid, Austin Croshere, who was hurt most of his rookie season. But on this particular day, he was coming back, so I told him, “Go in there and knock Dale around every chance you get. Don’t worry about fouling him.” So Croshere goes in there and starts hacking away at Dale. Davis is looking over at me, but I keep calling the foul against him instead of on Croshere. He takes it about three times in a row, then all of a sudden he gets riled up, and he starts playing like a monster. He wasn’t going to get into a fight, because he’s been around too long for that, but he played as intense as I had seen him all year. It really worked. I was happy to see Dale playing so intensely.
You don’t really want to play too many mind games with these guys, though. Most of the time I was as straightforward as I could be with them. I would tell our guys, “Now listen, I want an hour of hard work, all-out. We could stay here an hour and a half, but I’d rather be done in an hour with you guys working your butts off.” You know what the great thing was? They’d do it. I never for a minute stopped realizing how lucky I was to have guys that will respond that way. It’s why I wanted to coach this team, and only this team. Because I knew they were veterans whose time was running out to win a championship. I felt as though they were competitive enough as a group to want it badly enough to make the necessary sacrifices, and I was hoping they would be willing to listen to someone like me who had been there before, who had done the work, and who had won championships.
When I told them I believed we could win a championship, I wasn’t just saying it to motivate them. I truly believed it. And it wasn’t just on some kind of feeling I had. I looked over their stats, and the opponents in our conference, again and again. I studied our personnel. We needed another player to take the scoring pressure off our center, Rik Smits, and Reggie Miller, but we got that on August 12, 1997, when we traded for Chris Mullin. I had played with Chris on the Dream Team in the 1992 Olympics, and I knew what kind of pro he was. We were really happy to get him, but we had to trade one of our young big men, Eric Dampier, to get him. It was hard for Donnie Walsh to let Dampier go. I didn’t want to get rid of him either. Eric is a helluva talent, and he’s big, and he can run. He makes mistakes, but I honestly believe, the way we did things last year, he could have been a lot better player now. But we had a lot of big guys, and it was really major to find someone who could stand out on the perimeter and hit shots like Mullin, which would stop people from doubling down on Rik Smits or trying to double Reggie Miller out on the wing. With Chris out there, they couldn’t do that. Sure, we gave up a ton, but with Reggie getting older and Mark getting older, we had to play for now, not three years down the road.
One thing I told my guys from the very first day of practice was if you have an open shot, you better take it, ’cause if you don’t, you’re coming out of the game. I never thought one of my problems as a new coach would be to get my guys to score, but they are all so unselfish. It’s ridiculous. We beg them to shoot. I don’t care if they take seven shots in a row; if they’re open, shoot it. That’s how I approached it as a player, and that’s how I wanted it as a coach.
During the exhibition season we had this one game where every time Mark Pope was in there, we took the lead. Mark was a second-round pick who had played for Rick Pitino at Kentucky, and he was doing great. He’d get us a couple of baskets by grabbing a rebound or boxing out a defender, the little things. So it comes down to being a close game against Cleveland. I’ve got Mark Pope in the game, and I know everyone is wondering why, because he was a rookie, but I liked what I saw out there. We’re in a time-out, the score is tied, and we set up a play where Reggie is going to drive baseline and kick the ball back out to Mark. There’s around five seconds left, and Reggie kicks it out to Mark, who has a wide-open 10-footer. With one second on the clock, he looks at the basket, but he doesn’t shoot it. Instead he passes the ball out to Reggie, who takes an off-balance shot. He misses, and we get beat.
The next day I called Mark into my office and said, “Mark, I’m going to tell you just one thing. If you ever, ever, turn down a game-winning shot, I don’t care if you are a rookie or a ten-year veteran, I will cut you on the spot. I’ll get rid of you. I will not have anyone on my team who is afraid to look at the basket.” He didn’t say a word. He just walked out, and that was it. About two months later, Donnie Walsh told me Pope’s agent called and said how his client had learned a lot, and he really likes Indiana, and he’ll never turn down another shot. It’s one of the best things Mark could ever have learned.
I know sometimes even my own staff thinks I take the shooting thing to extremes, but I don’t care. What good is it to have a shot if you don’t feel confident about taking it? Once in a while, in our tape sessions, Rick Carlisle gets carried away. He watches a play on film and says, “Aw, that was a bad shot.” But here’s my philosophy: any shot that doesn’t go in is a bad shot, because you didn’t get anything for it.