A familiar scenario has played out in Indianapolis this summer. Veteran personnel executives Donnie Walsh and Larry Bird created an off-season game plan to fortify the team’s weaknesses and just as they were about to cement the final piece, ownership stepped in and voided the plan.

Conflicts between the folks who know the game and the folks who hold the purse strings are pretty common in sports, but what makes this latest episode remarkable is that the moneyman for once is right.

As they say, there’s a first time for everything.

The big picture part of the plan was sound. The Pacers wanted to get more athletic and play a more uptempo style.This makes good sense, as under coach Rick Carlisle the team has finished 26th, 29th, and 20th in Pace Factor, a metric that measures how many possessions a team has each game. Teams that play at a slow tempo usually do so to maximize advantages like having a Shaquille O’Neal or Tim Duncan near the basket. The Pacers have an O’Neal, Jermaine, but he isn’t nearly as dominant as the game’s top superstars, and with top downtempo teams like Detroit and Miami in the conference, a change in approach seems like a good idea. It’s never a good sign when the local NFL franchise plays faster than your NBA team.

To this end, the Pacers began revamping the roster, adding swingman Marquis Daniels, power forward Maceo Baston, and guard Darrell Armstrong.They shed salary deadweight Austin Croshere, reserve point guard Anthony Johnson (who is better suited for the half court style), and picked up a trade exception in letting forward Peja Stojokavic go. So far, so good, the team had reduced payroll and gotten younger and faster. Then they moved toward a sign-and-trade deal for former Pacer/present Hawk forward Al Harrington. That’s when the fast break of the Pacer’s summer slowed to an old-style crawl.

There was a deal in place in which Atlanta would re-sign Harrington to a six-year $57 million contract and trade him and reserve pivotman John Edwards to Indiana for their trade exception and a draft choice. This was all but considered a done deal until a month ago when Harrington fired his agent. His new representative, Arn Tellem, took over and after coming up to speed on the negotiations, the old deal looked good to go. Then Pacers owner Herb Simon stepped in and nixed the deal; reports from Indianapolis said that four years and $36 million is the max Simon will okay for Harrington.

While it’s highly unusual for two such popular veteran execs like Bird and Walsh to be overruled, the most stunning thing is that Simon is right. Harrington is a league average player as illustrated by his Player Efficiency Ratings (John Hollinger’s metric for measuring the sum of a player’s contributions on a per-minute basis),which for the last three seasons have been 14.9, 14.4, and 16.0. The league average is 15.

Given that bit of data, one would think that $30 million for six years — what Indiana could spend without a sign-and-trade arrangement — would be a tad high for Harrington and $57 million is near madness, but his value changes in the context of the current free agent market. Harrington is probably more valuable than Peja Stojakovic, who received $55 million, so why not go for it? However, in the fair salary tracker at www.82games.com Harrington was worth only $2.4 million a season for his work. So the conflict between Simon and Bird/Walsh is one of a player’s worth in reality versus his worth on the vastly overheated NBA free agent market.

So what now for the Pacers? They may be better off without Harrington. His absence leaves them with Danny Granger and Marquis Daniels at the three; both are young and have shown enough promise to believe that they can man the position effectively. First round draft choice, Shawnae Williams, is behind them on the depth chart. The Pacers unlike most Eastern Conference teams do a good job of developing their talent. While having Harrington would have given the roster more proven talent, the Pacers still look like a playoff team, and depending on how the new additions develop and whether O’Neal stays healthy, they could advance deep into the postseason.

So what now for Harrington? He may have overplayed his hand, though I certainly wouldn’t cry for him if he’s relegated into accepting a mid-level exception deal for $30 million. Golden State is the most logical destination as they need a quality three to replace Mike Dunleavy, a below average player. The current rumor is of a four team deal that would allow the Warriors to net Harrington and move Dunleavy to the Los Angeles Clippers, sending Joe Smith to Atlanta, and Corey Maggette to Denver. The Clippers would get severely hosed in this deal, and one would suspect that the deal is the fantasy of some Bay Area hoopshead, but talk of it keeps coming up.

Walsh has been with the Pacers for 20 years and Bird is a legend. At this stage of the game, they will probably have to live with getting overruled by ownership (all of Walsh’s comments have been conciliatory), and the longterm impact of this episode will be determined by the Pacers performance in the coming season.