Doyel: Pacers hearing Nate McMillan’s new voice

It was a hard and regimented practice, as they always are under Nate McMillan, but an unusually sloppy one. The Indiana Pacers were coming off their first loss earlier this preseason at Chicago. They were running a shooting drill, timed and using all 94 feet of the court, and shots were not falling.

Players were looking down. Heads were sagging. McMillan was blowing his whistle and gathering his $85 million roster into a circle and talking about the weather.

“Sunshine,” McMillan was yelling, “or rain? Who are you going to be?”

McMillan went on to explain: Shots will not always fall. Calls will not always go your way. This game, it won’t always be easy. You can react with sunshine and stay positive, or you can react with rain — and make a bad situation worse.

Now McMillan is bellowing.

“Are you going to be sunshine?” he yells. “Or are you going to be rain?”

This is a new role for Nate McMillan to have, and a new voice for the Pacers to hear. When Pacers President Larry Bird replaced coach Frank Vogel in May with McMillan, Vogel’s assistant since 2013, he said he wanted a new “voice.” It did not make sense then.

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It makes sense now.

Nate McMillan doesn’t sound anything like Frank Vogel. He doesn’t even sound like Nate McMillan, at least not the McMillan this roster had been hearing for three years. That McMillan worked for Vogel, one of the nicest, sunniest coaches in professional sports. And so McMillan was sunny as well.

“That was my job,” he says. “Frank was positive. He was just a positive guy. My job was to assist Frank, and not become or try to become that main voice that these guys heard.”

He has a new job now, a new voice, a new atmosphere. McMillan, whose team opens the season Wednesday at Bankers Life Fieldhouse against Dallas, isn’t an assistant anymore. He’s still sunny, certainly sunnier than the drill sergeant nicknamed “Sarge” when he coached Portland from 2005-12.

But the Pacers know the forecast can change in a moment.

* * *

Everyone had to sit in the high chair. Even Larry Bird.

This was Bird’s rookie season with the Boston Celtics, Bill Fitch was the coach, and Fitch tolerated no foolishness. He didn’t care who you were — role player, veteran, historically good rookie out of Indiana State. Screw up in practice, and he had a spot for you.

“We had a stage on the side of our court where we practiced,” Bird was telling me Monday at practice, chuckling as he looked off into the distance — past the Pacers in 2016, back to Boston in 1979. “When Fitch grabbed a guy, the guy would have to go up there on the stage and sit down. Fitch would stand up and look them right in the eye. We always called it the ‘high chair.’ And every one of us was in that high chair.

“I loved it.”

Bird believes players crave discipline. He craved it, and he was the best player on almost every floor he ever played on. He won’t say it — he likes them both, and he will not compare McMillan to Vogel — but structure is clearly among the main reasons he made the move to McMillan.

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Players loved Vogel, but he wasn’t tough on them. Maybe because he wasn’t tough on them. He didn’t yell, not even when they showed up late to practice. Which they did, apparently, from time to time.

“Frank’s a good coach,” says second-year guard Joe Young, “but everybody’s late, and he wouldn’t say nothing. Coach Nate doesn’t play by none of that. He wants everybody on time. He’ll call out PG (superstar Paul George) if he wasn’t on time.”

Give me an example, I ask Young. He nods. He won’t name names, but he tells this story from a few weeks ago.

“There was a vet late for practice,” Young says, “and Coach Nate was like, ‘Nah, we can’t have that.’ He was about to put us on the line and make the whole team run! It’s just a whole different atmosphere here.”

Young is smiling. Maybe he’s wincing. Hard to tell, but for sure he’s shaking his head. So I’m asking him: Do players like this new atmosphere?

No, he says.

“We love it,” he says.

* * *

McMillan is working on being nicer.

He doesn’t agree with my sun versus rain analogy — he won’t like that last sentence, either, about trying to be nicer — but this is what I see: Vogel had the spotless mind of the eternally sunny coach, whereas McMillan’s disposition is more like Indiana weather — give it 10 minutes; it could change.

And he wants to soften up his storm clouds.

He knows he has to be different than he was in Seattle from 2000-05, where his roster had youth, and in Portland, where his roster had knuckleheads. In the Pacific Northwest he was “Sarge.” Here in Indiana, with a mostly veteran roster of almost entirely strong character —  and in an evolving NBA era where power resides with the players — Sarge can stand easy.

It’s a work in progress.

“I’m not a guy who likes to play games,” he says. “I like to come in, get our work done. I think it’s fun when you're working hard and winning. I’m not a fun guy to be around if we’re losing. Everybody wants to win, I know, but I have to really work on losing.”

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Has to be nicer, sounds like. But Bird didn’t promote him to be Vogel 2.0, nice ol’ Nate McMillan who for years was the good cop to Vogel’s good cop. Bird wanted a new voice, a different voice — more Bill Fitch, less Frank Vogel, somewhere in between — and in Nate McMillan he found it.

“Sometimes he motivates, and some guys respond to that,” says nine-year veteran Thaddeus Young, acquired this offseason from Brooklyn for the Pacers’ 2016 first-round pick. “Sometimes he yells and throws out things like ‘sunshine and rain,’ and guys respond to that. And sometimes we think it’s funny. But it’s been very, very good so far with the different methods and techniques he’s used.”

McMillan is partly cloudy, in other words. At times, sunny. Other times, something darker. Those are my words. These are his:

“I wouldn’t agree with that,” McMillan says of my weather forecast. “You can be a disciplinarian and still be sunshine. My role is to come out and coach them and challenge them. If I’m just a hard-ass 24/7, then that’s a little different. I haven’t been that kind of guy (here), because I think you have to communicate with players a little different than I did in the past.”

Indeed, he has weekly, one-on-one meetings with key rotational players — and not just to tell them what he thinks.

“I want to know what they think,” he says.

But sometimes, unlike the Pacers’ previous coach, McMillan thinks his players need a good tongue-lashing. Last week in Milwaukee he entered the postgame news conference with the game’s box score, with key statistics — ones he won’t tolerate — highlighted in yellow. Earlier that night, McMillan had stunned his team during a timeout when he lit into them for playing selfishly.

This season, this Nate McMillan era, it starts Wednesday. Let the sun shine. But know this: Clouds may form in the distance.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.