Indiana Pacers Coach Frank Vogel has his team on a roll.
by Ben Smith
Yes, he can still do it. Since you're asking. “Some things you never forget. Even if you'd like to,” says Frank Vogel. It's a frigid December afternoon and he's leaning against a wall in the Banker's Life Fieldhouse practice facility, a slight man in navy Indiana Pacers sweats and short dark hair flecked with iron filings of gray. The gray makes him look older than he is; the rest of his features remind you that he's still two years shy of 40, and the second-youngest head coach in the National Basketball Association.
On this day he's 22 games into his second full season as the Pacers' coach, and it's been some 22 games. The Pacers are 19-3, the best record in the NBA. Two days prior, here in Indianapolis, they'd beaten the Miami Heat, the two-time defending NBA champs. But back to that thing Vogel can still do.
It involves a toothbrush and a basketball, and the balancing of the latter on the former. Twenty-five years ago, when Vogel was a 13-year-old hoops junkie, his ability to brush his teeth while spinning a basketball on his toothbrush landed him a gig on David Letterman as one of Letterman's “Stupid Human Tricks.”
He's achieved something more significant since, of course.
Larry Bird never intended to hire the guy. It was late in the 2010-11 NBA season, and the Pacers, adrift somewhere in the nether regions of the Central Division, had just let go head coach Jim O'Brien. Bird, the team president of basketball operations, needed someone to occupy the head coach's seat for the rest of the season, and O'Brien recommended one of his assistants: Frank Vogel.
“Frank was more a workout guy,” Bird remembers. “He worked the players out, did scouting reports, stuff like that. Obviously, Jimmy felt very highly of him, and I took a chance. And that's what it was. I took a chance.”
It paid off. Vogel proceeded to coach the Pacers to a 20-18 record and got them into the playoffs for the first time in four years. And even though Bird still wasn't thinking of him as the long-term hire, eventually Vogel became the obvious choice. “I was really looking to get us through the season and then go out and see what was out there,” Bird says. “But we interviewed Frank and … he was very positive, very organized, knew a lot about what he was doing. It made it pretty easy, in the end.”
It wasn't the first time Vogel had grown on someone. He went to Juniata College in Pennsylvania intending to be a doctor, but coaching was always a notion. Eventually he decided he wanted to do it on a bigger stage than Division III Juniata, and so he transferred to Kentucky to pursue his goal there.
Kentucky, after all, was where Rick Pitino was. And Pitino was Vogel's guy.
“I just loved his style, his approach,” Vogel says. “It was a positive approach. It wasn't a drill-sergeant approach, which a lot of coaches at that time were coaching. It was a have-fun mentality, build confidence, outwork everybody in sight.” So he did what you do when you're 20 years old and the future looks boundless: He wrote Pitino a letter. And then another. And then another. He wrote “a bunch of letters,” Vogel recalls, and in return, he got “a bunch of form letters back.”
On to plan B. The next summer, Vogel wangled his way into a basketball camp where he knew Pitino was working. It was a chance for him to finally tell Pitino face-to-face what he wanted to do, and Pitino responded with a reflexive “Well, if there's anything we can do ….”
It was the opening enough for Vogel. “I took him up on it,” he says. It led, eventually, to Pitino's assistant, Jim O'Brien, taking Vogel under his wing, and everything took off from there. From Kentucky he followed Pitino to the Boston Celtics as video coordinator, became O'Brien's assistant in first Boston and then Philadelphia, and finally arrived with O'Brien in Indianapolis in 2007.
Now he coaches a Pacers team that lost in seven games to the Heat in the Eastern Conference finals last year, and is the class of the entire league so far this season. It's Vogel's job to keep it that way.
George Hill's never seen anyone quite like him. Through high school and four years at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and six years in the NBA, the Pacers point guard has known all manner of coaches, but none so relentlessly upbeat as Frank Vogel. Every day is a good day, it seems, even in a season that lasts from October to June. “He's different,” Hill says. “But in a good way. He's up about everything. He gets excited about a lot of stuff. Some stuff we might not get excited for, he gets excited for–but he keeps us going. He's the captain of this ship and we feed off of him.”
And if there are echoes there of the Pitino acolyte, it's no accident. The kid who was first drawn by Pitino's positive approach has become a head coach for whom “positive” is the go-to word from virtually everyone in the organization.
“He's very good at, right after the game, not saying very much,” says assistant coach Dan Burke, who's served under every Pacers head coach since Bird. “It's just bring it in and tomorrow is this, and then he collects his thoughts and he says what he needs to say the next day. You know, when you say stuff in the heat of the moment, you might regret saying something, especially to an individual or even to the group. He guards himself really well on that, and again, he stresses the positive and what we do well, and to keep doing what we do well. It's been very good for these guys. They thrive off of it.”
So does Vogel, clearly. There's an easy approachability to him that no doubt plays well in the locker room and on the practice floor, but with it comes the calculation of a man who's spent 15 years in the NBA in some capacity, and knows how a long a slog the 82-game season can be. “You know, you can't live this lifestyle if you're gonna celebrate like a championship if you've won and act like it's the end of the world when you lose a game,” Vogel says. “You've got to have an even keel to manage a length of a season like this.”
No problem there, Burke says. “We used to joke, even with Larry Bird, that he had six bullets to use and you don't want to use them all at once,” he says. “You don't want to use them all in one game. I don't know if Frank ever uses two bullets.”
Everyone notices that. And appreciates it. “He's a player's coach, and he has the utmost respect,” Hill says. “He's a guy that will go to bat for us, good or bad. When you have a coach who will do anything possible to make you the best you can possibly be, all you can do is give him the same respect.”
