Bird Is on the Spot Almost as Much as His ‘Erratic’ Pacers

As a coach, Larry Bird can be even more cold-blooded than he was as a player.

He doesn’t hesitate to call his players out, to name names when they don’t perform to their capabilities.

Over the last two years in the playoffs he has continued to express surprise and dismay at how his team could not play at its best when it mattered most.

The Indiana Pacers proved something to him by rallying from an 18-point deficit to beat the New York Knicks in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals last week, then finishing the Knicks off at Madison Square Garden in Game 6.

Now it’s Bird’s turn to show something to his players.

He needs to provide a strategical and emotional boost to a team that didn’t give its best effort in Game 1 of the NBA finals and didn’t have an answer for Shaquille O’Neal.

You would think the sting of a 104-87 loss to the Lakers and the embarrassment of a one-for-16 shooting night by Reggie Miller would be enough motivation for this veteran group of players.

But, as they have demonstrated throughout the postseason, with their inability to close out an injury-riddled Philadelphia team and their dawdling in taking the hammer to an injury-riddled New York team, they don’t always have it within.

So in addition to settling on a way to defend O’Neal for Game 2 tonight, Bird must provide that fire and will to his team.

The second game of a series is usually the opportunity to witness the most dramatic adjustments.

“The one thing I want to adjust is to the way we have to play hard,” Bird said. “When we play hard, good things happen.”

Bird and the coaching staff often question the players’ toughness. Thursday, assistant Dick Harter said the team has been “erratic.”

They’re always the first to point out that the Pacers are a weak rebounding team, and rebounding--more than any other statistic in the box score--is a measure of heart and intensity and desire.

During the Pacer-Knick series, some of the questions started to go the other way, as players wondered if they shouldn’t have changed their double-team strategies for Latrell Sprewell and Allan Houston.

The knock on Bird has been that assistants Harter and Rick Carlisle handle the Xs and O’s, and Bird acts as a figurehead.

The Pacers don’t really dispute that, they see it as a positive.

“Larry delegates a lot of responsibility to our assistant coaches, but there’s no question who the head guy is,” Chris Mullin said.

“To me, that shows a lot more confidence. A lot of guys have trouble letting things go, because they feel insecure or whatever. Larry, that’s not a problem with him.”

“It’s like all staffs, where everything is his choice and his say,” Harter said. “We try to help him in certain areas. Rick does the offense and I try to do the defense. I think we’ve worked well together.”

Bird must be doing something right. In three years on the job his teams have advanced to the conference finals every time and the franchise finally broke through to the NBA finals this year.

Bird’s sales job consists of attitude, of playing like angry champions. His players know what to do, they just forget to do it at times.

His counterpart, Phil Jackson, has tried to convince his Lakers to believe in an offensive system, to accept a hierarchy, to adopt a sometimes nontraditional mental approach.

“It’s a religion,” Laker reserve center John Salley said of the Jackson way. “You have to buy into it, or you don’t buy into it. You know, Jesus didn’t really heal people on his own. He said, ‘Do you believe you can be healed?’ If you said yes, then you could. If you believe you can win, then you can win.”

The more Salley talked, the more it sounded as if the Lakers and their star-studded fan base belonged to a cult.

“Yeah,” Salley said. “But it’s a cool cult, man. . . .

“They’re spending more money here,” he said, looking around Staples Center. “They’re buying the $1,200 seats--well, $3,000 seats now. It’s really good. It’s a great cult.”

Sometimes it’s amazing how little these high-paid coaches do.

Jackson was at it again in Game 1, sitting patiently and not calling a timeout while the Lakers’ 15-point lead dwindled down to two in the third quarter. He let the players work things out, and eventually they pulled away again.

Jackson is just beginning his tenure as the Lakers’ coach, while Bird has said this will be his final year. You don’t get the sense that there’s an overwhelming sentiment among the Pacer players to win it for the outgoing coach. It’s probably because so many of their key players don’t have much time left to play near their peaks themselves and are desperate to win a championship.

That could be the problem. Sometimes the motivation to succeed is stronger for the sake of someone else, because you don’t want to let them down. That was the thinking behind Florida Coach Billy Donovan’s creative idea to have his players write the names of someone special on their ankle tapes before an NCAA tournament regional final game and play on their behalf.

Gimmicks like that probably wouldn’t work in the pros. But if the Pacers get down two games to none in this series, they’ll be reduced to playing to avoid getting swept. Something has to be done.

“I don’t think it’s a change of tactics as much as it’s a change of disposition,” Harter said.

“We’ve got to take our mean pills and get ourselves down and ready to get after things and get on the floor. And if we don’t come out of it with some bloody noses and skinned-up knees, we’re not going to beat this team.”

If it’s mean pills the Pacers need, then Bird should be the one standing by the door of the locker room, with the bottle of medicine in his hand.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com.