Indiana Pacers: Lance Stephenson is finding a groove
By Tony East
The Indiana Pacers are on a three-game win streak. Lance Stephenson hitting his stride is a big reason for that.
Lance Stephenson, as I wrote about not too long ago, was struggling early on in the season. The Indiana Pacers reserve wing player was struggling to gets shots to go down and couldn’t buy a free throw. Now, he appears to be more engaged and effective on a night in night out basis.
During the Pacers’ last seven games, Lance has a shooting percentage over 50 percent in four of them. In the first 10 games, he only accomplished this once.
It seems truly simple, but Lance is finally accomplishing the objective of basketball: scoring points for his team. In the last two weeks, his True Shooting percentage has improved from 31.9 percent to 42.3 percent. A 10 percent increase in efficiency is a welcome improvement for any player, but especially for a guy like Stephenson, who is already good at other non-shooting aspects of basketball.
Also encouraging is that Lance has brought his offensive rating up from an embarrassing 76 to a still-bad-but-manageable 91. When he came in the game before, the offense came to a complete halt. Now, the offense at least has some competent moments, and Lance himself is a part of it all.
His high usage, high assist rate, low turnover rate combo was already good, but now with the shots actually going in, it’s great, as the defense has to respect him in all aspects of the offense.
Defenders have been helping off of Lance all season long, as the shot has not been falling for him. Against the Pistons, he finally made them pay for doing just that.
Ish Smith helps on the drive to the basket here and leaves Lance wide open for a 3 at the top of the key, thinking the struggling shooter won’t score. Lance cans it, and the Indiana Pacers trim the deficit to just one point:
Those looks open up the whole offense. Over time, the defender will stop helping off of Stephenson if he continues to knock those shots down, and that will lead to easier looks at the rim for the whole team.
His shot selection has also been a big reason for his improvement scoring the ball. He took 25 3s in the first 10 games for the Indiana Pacers, just 2.5 per game. Since then, he has taken only eight over the last seven games, which is only 1.1 per game. Given that he is shooting a terrible 21.2 percent on these looks throughout this season, taking less of them is certainly a good thing.
29 percent of Stephenson’ shots come at the rim, which is where the team wants an efficient scorer like Lance to be shooting. He’s still great at getting to the rim, and once he’s there, his athleticism allows him to make any situation easy. He was only shooting 45 percent at the rim two weeks ago, but over that span, he has increased that figure to 54.5 percent. That still isn’t great, but again, it is a welcome improvement over his start to the season.
More of this is exactly what the Indiana Pacers want to see from Stephenson:
The last area where Lance is succeeding is both concerning and encouraging at the same time.
Stephenson is hitting 44.1 percent of his looks from 16 feet to the 3-point line, or basically, long 2s. It is discouraging that he is taking a lot of these shots and making a decent percentage, as it is a tough and inefficient shot, meaning his percentage could easily fall.
However, it is encouraging that the shooting percentage is so high. That shows that he can score from many areas on the court with his jump shot, suggesting his 3-point percentage could go up, and shows he is taking these looks mostly when he’s open.
His strong run of play shooting the ball started against the New Orleans Pelicans. Here, he comes off the screen and recognizes he has a slow big man switched on to him. He steps back and the bank is open for a long 2:
Lance is starting to find a groove with his shooting. Everyone knew his shooting was unsustainably bad at the start of the season, but nobody knew how high he could get his shooting percentages. If he has reached his averages now, then he may be stuck as a slightly negative player.
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However, if he can continue to keep shooting well, then those averages will obviously go up. If that happens, Lance can be a net neutral player or even a net positive. Let’s hope these shooting percentages keep going up.