The Good Lance, the Bad Lance, and the 2017 Lance

Before the 2017-18 season began, Lance Stephenson was supposed to be the Indiana Pacers third-best player, but he has yet to live up to that billing.

The dawn of Lance Stephenson’s eighth season has been a thunderous one.

Not thunderous like Domantas Sabonis’ thunderous. That’s the good type of thunderous, the type that wakes people up for their former ambivalence into a state of stunned awe, like when Dr. Grant sees a dinosaur for the first time in Jurassic Park. Stephenson’s season has been the type of thunder that you hear 30 minutes before your alarm goes off and you sincerely question if you should just try again tomorrow.

Against the Brooklyn Nets on October 18, Lance was mostly Good Lance. He tied with Sabonis to lead the second unit with 16 points. He missed 13 shots to do it, but so what, nobody expects him to play cautiously or shoot sparingly. Pacers’ fans want Lance to play with a swagger, that irrational confidence that makes Lance Lance. As long as he’s depositing the ball through the cylinder, the Pacers’ and their fans can live with whatever route it takes to get there, head-scratching or otherwise.

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Then Indiana played Portland, Miami, and Minnesota. Lance was mostly Bad Lance. There were the 4 points on five shots against Portland, the 4 points on nine shots as an against Miami, and he dropped 2 against Minnesota. Add up all of those missed attempts and he’s shooting .263 from the floor, 208 points behind the average of Indy’s leading scorer Victor Oladipo (.471). Lance is ninth on the team in scoring average, he’s a net -5 in +/-, and he’s posted the highest defensive rating on the team (128.6), which, as in golf, is really bad.

During the first three games, it’s not a coincidence that the Pacers won the game when Lance was productive and lost the two when he wasn’t. Especially without Glenn Robinson III, Indiana doesn’t have the firepower to consistently compensate for an ineffective Lance. If they want to win games, they need him. He just can’t be the ninth leading scorer on a team that has seen eight players play in every game. That can’t happen.

So, is the end nigh!?

Like that moron who is either waiting until Christmas or hasn’t figured out that the freakin’ light is green, let’s not be in a hurry here. It has only been four games, there are still 78 to go, and unless you’re Earl Watson (sorry, Bro.) then there’s no need to make hasty or rash decisions.

Remember three paragraphs ago when I said Lance is shooting a bunch of points worse than Oladipo? He’s also shooting 185 below his career average (.448) and 198 points below his Pacers’ average (.461). He has never shot worse than the .333 he posted during his rookie year. Meaning the .263 looks more like the type of anomaly you regularly get with a super small sample size.

There are a ton of reasons why a veteran’s numbers fluctuate. A lot of times it’s when a player sees his role change, which is why Oladipo is shooting 7.8 points higher than his lifetime average. He’s the number one option on a decent team, of course, he’s scoring more.

But that’s not Lance’s case; neither is age, nor an uncomfortable new surrounding nor did the Pacers sign another player that would make him feel like his sixth man role is threatened. There are two reasons that I think we can attribute this Bad Lance spell too.

One is that he’s now playing off the ball. Cory Joseph has been handling the point, meaning Lance is having to adjust to the new role. However, Lance had the best two seasons of his life playing off the ball with those Eastern Conference Finals teams. There are ways to be productive at the two, like being aggressive on screens and attacking when you do get the ball. The role should eventually suit him well.

I think the best reason for Lance’s nascent season slum, is just that, he’s in a slump.

It happens on occasion. Even during Lance’s near-all-star 2013-14 campaign, Bad Lance would sometimes surface and he couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn. 14 times, that year, he scored in the single digits. From November 29 to December 2 he actually did it, gasp, three times in a row.

Next: We found love in a hopeless place

Unlike in Earl Watson’s case, the season’s not yet over. Has it been bad? Yes. Ugly? That too. But there’s still time for Bad Lance to walk into the phone booth and Good Lance to emerge. That said, if he’s still a 26-percent shooter come Christmastime, this would be a very different article.