BREAKING NEWS: Former Dallas mavericks basketball head coach Rick Carlisle now with indiana pacers sent a message to Jason kidd concerning his….see more

Rick Carlisle has been around the NBA long enough to see what’s over the horizon.

When the now 65-year-old began his second head-coaching stint with the Indiana Pacers in June 2021, he could tell the league was undergoing a paradigm shift.

The prior decade was defined by LeBron James and Steph Curry forging a superstar era that left little room for anyone else to hold the Larry O’Brien Trophy. But the league’s titans were beginning to age out of contention, and the NBA’s burgeoning parity era was forming a superstar vacuum that would open up new ideas of roster construction.

Carlisle had a bold idea that has now become fundamental for many of the league’s top teams: He wanted to discard the playbook.

He returned to Indiana, preaching that multi-step play sets would look archaic in a few years. In a sit-down with The Athletic in December 2021, Carlisle explained how he envisioned a future where he didn’t call plays at all. He wanted the team to live in its “flow game.”

“I think there’s a balance that you always want to strike with your best players so that they don’t become this guy that just does one thing,” Carlisle said in that interview.

Two months before the franchise-changing acquisition of Tyrese Haliburton, Carlisle was already preaching the high-octane system that would power the Pacers’ Cinderella NBA Finals run three-and-a-half years later. It didn’t make sense for his lineup at that moment, but Carlisle was priming the organization for a change he knew would come sooner or later.

Carlisle’s vision, which has manifested in this blistering Pacers system based on reads and principles rather than convoluted plays, needed a conductor to bring it harmony. That was going to be a tall task for a coach who has clashed with a litany of point guards in his two-decade coaching career, including several with Hall of Fame credentials.

The coach and star guard came together at the perfect moment, with Carlisle looking for a partner he could trust and Haliburton seeking to learn from a fresh start after the Sacramento Kings discarded him. Haliburton brought bravado without ego. He was malleable, but worthy of autonomy in due time.

“He came into this really leaning into the opportunity,” Carlisle said. “New start, I’m all in from day one, I’m going full bore, I want to learn, coach me hard. I know there’s going to be ups and downs. I’m gonna navigate it. He’s a guy you can always talk to about the hard times and the good times.”