Got scapegoat?

Basketball fans in Boston have found this a tiring, frustrating season. Most losing campaigns are. Fans in Indiana have even more reason to be frustrated, as the championship-contending campaigns they expected the last two years have each blown up in their faces.

At a certain point bitter, grumpy fans inevitably start looking around for someone to blame. Today the Indianapolis Star's Bob Kravitz takes shots at lots of folks, most pointedly Rick Carlisle.

A couple of years ago, Indiana Pacers president Larry Bird talked about the Three-Year Burnout Rule. It was like Al Davis' 10-Year Burnout Rule, except it applied to professional basketball rather than football. After three years of listening to a single coach's voice -- whether he was Miami's Pat Riley or Toronto's Sam Mitchell -- players stopped paying attention.

That, one suspects, is where the going-nowhere Indiana Pacers now reside.

They've tuned out coach Rick Carlisle.

They've tuned out the entire coaching staff.

And more and more, it seems like they've tuned out the season.

In classic smarmy style-- does he even know what he wants to say? or is he intentionally padding his criticism with token praise?-- Kravitz works in great little passages like this one:

Clearly, Carlisle deserves some of the responsibility for the decline of this season. He has too often coddled his stars. He has made some odd late-game decisions. And as long as he has been here, players have felt constrained by his paint-by-numbers offensive style.

And yet, I'm not ready to say he's at the heart of the problem, or that he should be in any kind of trouble with management. If anything, Carlisle represents the least of Indiana's problems.

Fact is, Carlisle took a good team to 60 victories and an Eastern Conference finals. He took a wounded team and did one of the finest coaching jobs in recent memory, leading them to the playoffs last year after the brawl and all its attendant fallout. As much as everybody wants to blame somebody -- and why not start with the coach? -- the fact is, injuries have forced him to use 30 starting combinations.

Kravitz may have no idea where he really stands on what Indiana ought to do but I do: Carlisle is one of the best coaches in the NBA. What he was able to do with a series of overachieving, undertalented Pistons teams in Detroit was very impressive. The same is true in Indiana. If for whatever reason the Pacers decide to cut ties with Rick I would count it a major coup if the Celtics could land him.

Indiana's last two seasons have been devastated by bad luck and horrible injuries. If the fans are dumb enough to call for their coaches head over it, and management dumb enough to listen, they'll only be making things worse. That ought to be the title of Bob's column.