Bird Set to Leave Pacers, Despite Turnaround A month ago, Larry Bird was basking in the league-wise praise of his in-progress rebuilding of the Indiana Pacers. And he won kudos from his peers too, as he was recently named the N.B.A."s executive of the year. Now, he's decided to quit his job as president of the Pacers, a move first reported by The Indianapolis Star on Tuesday. Bird, according to The Star, will meet with team owner Herb Simon today to make his plans official. Bird has operated on a year-by-year basis with the Pacers, choosing to go with handshake deals as his commitment. Bird's decision is somewhat surprising, given that he said last month that he was strongly considering coming back to the resurgent Pacers. Former Knicks president Donnie Walsh is returning to work with the franchise, and he could be a candidate to assume Bird's duties. " (I want to talk to Simon about) the direction of the team, what kind of job he thinks we're doing, if there's anything he sees that we should be doing better," Bird told The Star on May 30. Just a number of questions. I've got a lot of them written down to ask him, and hopefully we can get the answers we like and move on. There does not appear to be a rift between Bird and Simon, or other issues brewing with the Pacers. Bird, who became the Pacers" president in 2003, helped assemble a group of young talent, and some reasonably-priced veterans, that won 61 games this season and reached the second round of the playoffs before losing to Miami. It seemed the nearly seven-year rebuilding project of Bird's was in the right place, with Frank Vogel as head coach and the team building a winning culture within its small-market budget. And Bird became the first in league history to win player of the year, coach of the year and executive of the year honors in a career. "It's obvious why he got Executive of the Year," Vogel told the Associated Press. If you look at how this particular team has been built, it's really remarkable. To be able to build this team with mid-lottery picks and trades is just - it's near impossible to do. So why is Bird quitting? Bob Kravitz writes in The Indianapolis Star that he thinks Bird, 55, may need to step back because of long-running back issues. "Over the past year, we had a few conversations about what he might do," Kravitz wrote. One day, he would sound like he was staying. Another day, he would sound like a goner. But the one thing he would always bring up was the pain he was feeling in his eternally balky back, the fact it was so difficult to sit for hours on end and watch tape or sit in a gym and watch prospects. Unless there's a backstory with which we're completely unfamiliar, this sounds like a health, or quality-of-life issue, at its core.