INDIANAPOLIS — The best insight T.J. McConnell got into what has put Pacers coach Rick Carlisle on the precipice of becoming the 11th NBA coach to amass 1,000 regular-season wins came during the first round of the 2024 playoffs when McConnell was struggling in the Pacers’ series against the Bucks.

The 2023-24 regular season was arguably the best of McConnell’s career and it was bothering the veteran point guard that he wasn’t upholding that same standard in the playoffs. Through the first five games against Milwaukee he had reached 10 points just once and was shooting 37% from the floor. In Game 5, he was 3 of 10 from the floor for six points and had just three assists against two turnovers and the Pacers were -18 in his minutes in a 115-92 loss.

So in between games once the Pacers had returned to Indianapolis, Carlisle made a point to stop by McConnell’s house just to check on him, to spend some time talking about something other than basketball but also talking about a few things that might help him get right.

The next game, McConnell scored 20 points on 7 of 9 shooting, dished out nine assists and grabbed four steals to help the Pacers clobber the Bucks in Game 6 and he followed that with much better series against the Knicks and Celtics.

“He just comes over to my house and is there to talk about life and what he thinks could help me on the floor,” McConnell said of Carlisle, who sits at 999 wins with his first chance to crack 1,000 Friday in the Pacers’ game against the 76ers in Philadelphia. “It’s something that has stuck with me since he didn’t have to do that and it was something I really appreciated. It kinda showed in the next game and that’s when we kinda made our run. … It’s just the feeling that he knew I was disappointed in myself and just took time out of his day to come over.”

McConnell has better perspective than anybody on the Pacers’ roster of what it means for Carlisle to be approaching 1,000 wins, but even he finds it hard to fathom what he’s about to accomplish. The son of a coach and nephew of multiple coaches, McConnell has played 11 seasons and is still a long way away from even playing 1,000 games much less winning 1,000, sitting at 720 in his career. Carlisle has been a head coach since McConnell was eight years old and won his championship with the Mavericks when McConnell was a freshman at Duquesne.

But McConnell has seen enough to get a sense of what Carlisle had to do to get here. Carlisle broke in as a head coach with the Pistons in 2001 with a gritty, defense-oriented team at a time when scoring in the league was relatively low. He was successful with a similar style during his first stint with the Pacers and then he had to adapt to optimize Jason Kidd and Dirk Nowitzki in Dallas and then he came back to Indiana and took an entirely different approach when building a whirling ball-movement oriented offense around Tyrese Haliburton.

“I heard something early in my career that it’s the people who adjust to change and what not who last the longest,” McConnell said. “From the first time he’s been a head coach to now, he’s adjusted to the style of play and how he coaches and I think that’s a testament to him. For him to be one game away from 1,000 wins, it means you’re really good at what you do.”

As has been the case every time he’s approached a coaching milestone, Carlisle had little interest in discussing the meaning of 1,000 wins when asked about it Wednesday. In fact, he actively tried to cut the discussion short.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” Carlisle said. “… I’m just not comfortable talking about this. I think you can understand.”

But he opened up a little when he was asked about the people he might be thinking about, and, in his mind, thanking when he passes that milestone. He mentioned former mentors Bill Fitch and Chuck Daly, his wife Donna and his daughter Abby as people who have meant so much to the journey.

He will be in truly elite company when he crosses the threshold. There is only one other active member of the 1,000-win club, Bucks coach Doc Rivers. The other nine are Gregg Popovich, Don Nelson, Lenny Wilkens, Jerry Sloan, Pat Riley, George Karl, Phil Jackson, Larry Brown and Rick Adelman.

Popovich holds the record with 1,390 wins and Carlisle would have to average 50 wins per year for almost eight more full seasons to get to that figure. The 66-year-old Carlisle doesn’t seem to have any interest in this statistic at all, but he also certainly doesn’t want to stop at 1,000.

“Putting the whole thing in perspective, I don’t know,” Carlisle said. “I got a lot of years on my contract. This was never a destination. The journey is to come in every day and try to get the team better, try to get myself better. I do that by hiring great assistants that I can learn from and I’ve been very blessed in at area too.”

What Carlisle still finds most rewarding is making players better whether that ultimately pays off for him personally or not. After Wednesday’s practice, he spent about half an hour working directly with center Isaiah Jackson on the form on his jump shot even though Jackson, at this point, rarely takes jump shots. Jackson hasn’t taken a 3-pointer since the 2023-24 season when he was 0 of 4 from beyond the arc and he hasn’t made one since 2022-23 when he was 2 of 14. But it will be a helpful skill for Jackson for the long run, so Carlisle was working with him on the fundamentals of shooting mechanics.

“Whatever accomplishments happen in life, what you learn after many years and many decades is that other people’s dreams that you may have helped them achieve in one way or the other are far more meaningful than things you accomplish yourself,” Carlisle said.

Still, whenever Carlisle does get to 1,000 wins, he will not be allowed by his players cross that threshold quietly.

“Us as players have to make sure that he’s celebrated for that,” McConnell said. “We will. He’s not going to escape that, I promise. But he wants it to be about the team and all the teams he’s coached previous. He wants it to be about the players, and that’s just who Rick is.”

Dustin Dopirak covers the Pacers all season. Get more coverage on IndyStarTV and with the Pacers Insider newsletter.