Basketball, when properly played, is about patterns. It is a game of precision passing, cutting and moving to create open space. When done right, it is a beautiful game, not simply one of leaps and dunks and no defense.

Patterns emerge in basketball, and you see them or you don’t. Yet recently, one of the best players to ever play the pattern game, 
Larry Bird, seemed to miss the most obvious one.

It was jarring to hear Bird, who now occupies the president’s seat with the Indiana Pacers, explain his decision to fire coach Frank Vogel as a) not a firing; and b) a result of players going deaf to a coach after three years.

While it’s true that most millennials have attention spans of fruit flies as a result of too many brain cells killed early in life while playing video games at the dinner table, that seems a poorly thought-out reason for firing a coach who in six seasons led your team to the playoffs five times, the conference finals twice and won nearly 60 percent of his games.

Bird was peeved that the seventh-seeded and barely playoff-caliber Pacers were knocked out in the first round this year, but how many times did Vogel turn the ball over or miss an open 3-pointer? That would be none.

If Bird is correct, though, Brad Stevens is on NBA life support. He just completed his third season running the Celtics, is widely talked about as among the game’s brightest young coaches and has dragged a bag of doorknobs into the playoffs the past two years. Think what he might do if given a competitive team.

In Bird’s world, it probably wouldn’t be enough.

“Just the history,” Bird told reporters in Indianapolis last week after saying his decision not to renew Vogel’s contract wasn’t a firing but a, well, beats me.

“My experience has been good coaches leave after three years. I played for Bill Fitch, and I’ve seen it happen firsthand. I’ve talked to Red Auerbach on the subject a lot. We had K.C. Jones for five years. Nicest man I ever met. And they let him go. And we were having success.”

Admittedly, Bird did practice what he preached. He served three years as the Pacers coach, promising he’d pull the plug after his third season. His team went to the Eastern Conference finals all three years and the NBA Finals once, and he walked, so at least he believes what he’s saying. But that doesn’t make him right.

“I know a lot of you didn’t expect us to make the playoffs, but obviously I have a lot higher expectations than most people about how our team should play and how far they should go in the playoffs and compete every night,” Bird explained, thus justifying his talent evaluation without saying it. “I just came to the conclusion that I felt it was necessary for these guys to hear a new voice, but it’s tough.”

It’s also misguided, and the proof is staring back at Bird from the playoffs. Since Vogel was axed, only five NBA coaches have been manning the big whistle more than three years. Four had their teams in the conference semifinals and at least two, and possibly three, could reach the conference finals. Do players hear better in San Antonio, Portland, Miami and Toronto than in Indianapolis?

Gregg Popovich is the poster boy for stability. He’s coached the Spurs for 20 years and won the NBA title five times. If it was up to Bird, he wouldn’t have lasted as long as Davy Crockett did at the Alamo.

That’s not to say players don’t tune out coaches. That certainly seemed to happen to a degree to Stevens’ predecessor in Boston, Doc Rivers, with at least one of his charges, Rajon Rondo. Then again, Rondo is the Henry David Thoreau of the NBA. He marches to the beat of his own drummer, a beat he alone often hears.

Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge played with Larry Bird and has been around the NBA all his adult life. As a coach, he suffered from the three years and sayonara syndrome in Phoenix, yet his conclusion on coaches and the hearing pattern of players seems to have evolved in the opposite direction.

Rivers worked for nine years with Ainge and could have stayed longer. Stevens is halfway through a six-year contract, and word is Ainge might give him an extension. Of course, Stevens has an advantage on Vogel because Ainge moves players in and out of Boston as if he’s running a travel agency on the side, so while Stevens has been here for three years, many of his players have been here about three minutes. That, one assumes, factors into the echo chamber effect Bird alluded to when axing a coach he admitted deserved a better fate.

So who’s right, Bird or Ainge? Hard to say, but if you look at the conference semifinals, you have a good argument that Larry Bird misread the pattern this time. Or he could just have looked closer at the last Pacers team to make the conference finals.

It was Frank Vogel’s team. He was in his fourth year as their coach at the time.

So much for three-year plans.