Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe recently tracked down Larry Legend for an interview that led to a feature on Bird in yesterday’s paper. Since it’s written for Boston readers, it focuses mostly on Larry’s Celtic past and the most entertaining part coming from, as John Karalis of Red’s Army notes, a story about Bill Walton drinking Wild Turkey by himself all night and into the morning in Larry’s kitchen after the 1986 Cs won the NBA Finals.
For Pacers fans, the most interesting quote comes about the front office’s oft-discussed long-term plan to finalize the franchise turnaround since the fallout from the Malice at the Palace.
As for his 2009 Pacers, Bird said, “We’re rebuilding and people tend to forget that. We have a plan, and after next year we’re going to have a lot of money and I want to get a core of guys here to build with and hopefully take seven or eight of ’em with us going forward, and if we can do that, I think we’ll be better.’’
The Pacers are still recovering from the melee at The Palace of Auburn Hills in 2004.
“It changed everything,’’ said Bird. “It hit harder here than you can ever imagine. It not only killed our fan base, but everything we tried to do that year to win. We felt we were very talented. It just stopped on that night. We had a decent bench and good players and felt we were going to make a great playoff run, but it all stopped.’’
Interesting.
I’m sure he’s alluded to it before, but this is the first time I can recall Larry saying something as straight-forward as “we’re going to have a lot money” in the 2011 Summer, which suggests that there probably won’t be any big moves happenign before then. Just given the fact that, aside from Danny, the bulk of payroll is full of non-expiring deals for at least marginally overpaid players that no other GMs particularly want (MDJ, Troy, TJ, Jeff) or young, low-salaried players that the Pacers probably aren’t shopping, I wasn’t expecting any major moves until Troy, MDJ, TJ and Tinsley’s deals come off the books anyway. But it’s interesting to hear Bird talk publicly about his plans to have “a lot of money.” I’m sure he’s mentioned such sentiments before, so I’m not saying this is some be revelation or anything, but it is a little nugget of info to remember.
Unfortunately, 2011 is a ways away, and the club will be largely treading water until some sort of significant talent infusion occurs, but Pacers fans have waited this long — what’s another 18 months? Ultimately, it’s the only operating philosophy that makes sense.
In other news, speaking of the Celtics, I spoke in depth about Larry’s former team with the aforementioned John Karalis of Red’s Army on the latest episode of my new podcast “Talking About Practice.” The podcast is officially being done for my NBA-wide blog Both Teams Played Hard and will cover the entire Association, but my goal is to try to make it as Pacer-related as possible as well. For many episodes, I’ll try to get a guest who can talk about our upcoming opponent or people who can just talk Indy in general. Karalis for instance discusses the Pacers win over Boston during our conversation.
You can click the “Talking About Practice” graphic to the right ( ———> ) for the RSS feed for the podcast, check back regularly at BTPH (there will be a very good Episode #3 up on Monday) or subscribe through iTunes.
Let me know what you think or what types of Pacer discussion you would like to hear about.
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