Indiana Pacers: Is Tyreke Evans really a Lance Stephenson upgrade?

Even though the Indiana Pacers made some praised moves this offseason, Tyreke Evans has yet to come into his own for this team.

Whether you are mixing chemicals in a lab somewhere or mixing players on the court, chemistry can be a dangerous thing. In both cases, it can really blow up in your face.

That’s probably not how the Indiana Pacers brass is feeling just one month into the new season, but there’s no question Tyreke Evans has been a disappointment after being signed to lead the second unit in the wake of cutting lose Indy darling Lance Stephenson.

While it is still early on, it’s clear that rival Eastern Conference squads like the Toronto Raptors and Philadelphia 76ers have made strides toward the top with additions of Kawhi Leonard and Jimmy Butler, respectively.

That, along with the ridiculously deep roster of weapons for Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens to choose from if they ever figure things out, could wind up putting the Pacers right back where they ended last season — on the outside looking in.

The truth is that Tyreke Evans was indeed an enticing and relatively low-cost player to add as a step up from Lance Stephenson. But despite the logic, and despite leaving enough cap space to be a real player in the 2019 free agency sweepstakes, the addition of Evans has so far failed miserably.

His averages, and most importantly his percentages, are down across the board … dramatically. So far this season, he is putting up 10.7 points, 2.8 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1.1 steals per contest. Granted, he is only playing 20.9 minutes per game, but even with teammate Victor Oladipo noticed his lack of offensive punch this season, joking that he was doing his best John Stockton impression. Of course, the only exception is Stockton actually put up historic assist numbers, whereas Evans has fallen way short.

Although he’s capping 37.5 percent of his 3-pointers, he’s been inefficient overall, shooting just 38 percent from the floor.

The hardest part of this is that Victor Oladipo is looking ready to return from an absence of what will be at least five games, and in that time Tyreke Evans has done little to prove he can fill in with the starting unit, let alone that he is still the player he was last season. In the four-game absence of Oladipo (so far), he has averaged 9.0 points, 3.7 assists, 3.0 rebounds and 1.5 steals per game.

But was this something that could’ve been avoided? While hindsight is always 20/20, Evans’ career was trending down for many seasons before last year’s ridiculous, near-career high output in every statistical category. The Memphis Grizzlies‘ Grit-N-Grind has a way of bringing out the best in certain players, and perhaps this anomaly should have been obvious.

After all, the Pacers rostered one of the most situationally great examples in Lance Stephenson. After his rise to relevancy (and nightly triple-double threat) in the 2012-13 season, Lance bounced around five different teams in just three short years. The sad truth was that Lance Stephenson could only be an effective factor in a Pacer uniform.

Sometimes you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, but this isn’t one of those times. Despite Lance’s slight resurgence and steady play for a sturdy 82 games last season, he has again regressed in his Los Angeles Lakers reserve role this season.

The bottom line is that Tyreke Evans needs to step up and play like he did in Memphis to make good on this investment. While he has all the right ingredients to be an improvement on the Lance-factor of last season, he has yet to prove it to Pacer Nation.

It’s a long season, and hopefully it’ll happen for the Pacers to make a deep playoff run.