Darren Collison is quietly getting his season back on track

After a slow start, Darren Collison is starting to get his season back on track for the Indiana Pacers.

You’ve all heard the expression “as slow as molasses in January” before. It refers to something so monumentally slow that you need an idiom to discuss it. Molasses has such a high viscosity that it has become the benchmark for something that is painfully slow. But molasses has a competitor now. Darren Collison‘s start to the Indiana Pacers 2018-19 season was equally slow.

Collison was atrocious in the Pacers first five games. He had a negative +/- in four of the teams first five games – somehow he was a -1 in a 28 point win over Memphis and a -1 in a 20 point win over San Antonio. In that stretch, DC shot a ghastly 11/32, including 3/10 from the outside. When his hallmark is his outside shooting, that’s rough. I even suggested the team play him fewer minutes.

It wasn’t just his shooting either. In terms of passing specifically, nobody took care of the ball better than Collison last season. He led the league in assist-to-turnover ration at 4.2. However, in the first five games of this season, DC had 20 assists and 9 turnovers, good for a 2.2 ratio. He was being more careless with the ball than he was last year.

The two things that made Collison so effective for the Pacers last year were his shooting efficiency and his turnover efficiency. Through the first quintuplet of games, he was doing neither of those things.

But I put the word “was” in italics in the first paragraph for a reason. DC is turning it around, and the Indiana Pacers needed him to do so.

In the past trio of games, Collison has been a positive in +/- in all three. Even against Portland, a game the Pacers lost by 10 points, DC was +9. He is finally turning the corner this season, and you can see it paying dividends for the team already.

Against Cleveland, viewers finally saw it all click. Collison looked lethal, getting to his spot and knocking down shot after shot. He was aggressive early, getting five points in the first frame, including a nice three-point shot that had escaped him earlier in the year:

Collison has hit half of his deep balls over the last three contests. Sure, his percentage on the season is still only 33.3, but he’s slowly getting it back to the league-leading number he had in 2017-18.

DC’s mid-range shot has been helping him be more effective too. He’s shooting 59.1% on long two’s, which is a significant career high for him, and a solid enough 44.4% from 10-16 feet. He has started leveraging his gravity as an outside shooter to get easy mid distance shot attempts. One shot fake is all he needs to get an open look, and he’s using that power wonderfully.

Perhaps the biggest change in DC’s talents over the past three games has been his passing. He had 6 assists in each one of the trio of games, totaling 18. The best part? Only three turnovers. He is diming up open guys right when they get into space, like this masterful pocket pass to Myles Turner:

Collison’s improved play has him back to being the floor spacing maestro that he was last season. In the teams first 5 games, they shot 8.4 percent better from three when Collison was off the floor. In the last three? That has basically flipped. In the last three games, the team has shot 11.8 percent better from deep with Collison on the floor. Both of these sample sizes are small, but if the recent trend continues, DC will be an important piece for this Pacers team.

Darren Collison is important to this Indiana Pacers team. Sometimes his importance manifests itself in ways other than counting stats. Either way, his sudden early season improvements have been huge for the team. Hopefully, they continue and aren’t just a brief moment of success.