Sacramento Kings Made Right Call on Darren Collison Over Isaiah Thomas
The Age of the Point Guard has proven a boon for the NBA. By tethering its fortunes to the flashiest, fastest and fleetest of foot, the league is encouraging a brand of basketball grown logarithmically in global popularity.
Damian Lillard and John Wall, Derrick Rose and Chris Paul—four names on a list of elites that easily runs 10 deep. The position has never been stronger, and the league has never been better.
Sadly, that also means players who in any other era might’ve made the Hall of Fame may wind up being labeled as second-class also-rans. Players like the Sacramento Kings’ Darren Collison, whose once-promising career has been perpetually beset by disappointment, disillusionment and flat-out bad timing.
That is, until this season. Now, the cannon-fast Collison is poised to prove his team’s decision to move forward with him over the punchier, pluckier Isaiah Thomas wasn’t just the prudent one, but the right one as well.
Begin where anyone else would: squarely with the stats.
| Stretch | Points | Assists | PER | Win Shares per 48 |
| First five seasons | 11.9 | 4.9 | 15.7 | .100 |
| 2014-15 | 15.9 | 7.0 | 20.5 | .191 |
Small sample size aside, Collison has shown improvement near-across the board. And while the reasons may be manifold, there’s one that can be seen as encompassing them all: being in the right place at the right time. Even if it means deferring to those who came before.
"You just can't come in and start the leadership stuff, that is part of the being a point guard, but you've got to introduce yourself and try to get to know your teammates one by one and try to go from there," Collison told Sactown Royalty’s Blake Ellington before the season began. "I understand what it takes to be a leader."
More importantly, Sacramento understood what it needed to take Mike Malone’s high-octane offense to the next level. Namely, a point guard willing and able to push the pace, without relying too heavily on ball-stalling heroics.
That, more than any single strategic concern, may have been why the Kings opted to jettison the faster, flashier Thomas. To wit: According to Grantland’s Zache Lowe, last season Thomas dribbled the ball nearly 200 times more per 36 minutes than Collison, who averaged merely 3.9 dribbles per touch while serving as the primary backup to the Los Angeles Clippers’ Chris Paul.
Despite that disparity, Lowe remained skeptical over whether the Kings could truly take the next step after making what seemed like a clear-cut downgrade in the backcourt:
"Collison has never been Thomas’s equal as a scorer or a passer. He’s hesitant about penetrating the defense in the half court, and his inability to read the floor has frustrated coaches at just about every stop. Ask the Mavericks about him sometime.
Collison is a speed demon, but the Kings ranked about average in pace last season, and—get this—they played much faster with Thomas on the floor. The guy might pound the ball in the half court, but he loves to run, and he’s always calling for the ball, body already leaning toward the other team’s basket, when the Kings grab a defensive rebound.
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Thomas may be the better basketball player in a vacuum. The question is whether he’s better for these Kings.
Financially, Collison's three-year, $16 million deal promises to be lighter on an already tenuous Kings ledger. Particularly in light of the $8 to $9 million per year Thomas was purportedly seeking, per The Sacramento Bee's Ailene Voisin. (Thomas would eventually sign a four-year, $27 million tender with the Phoenix Suns.)
As for the numbers, the early returns are nothing short of jaw-dropping.
Per NBA.com (media stats require a subscription), Sacramento is registering a team-high plus-13.9 over 409 minutes with Collison on the floor. With Collison on the bench, that number drops to staggering minus-20.6, the lowest on the team.
That trend holds when it comes to overall net rating as well, with the Kings charting at a plus-13.8 with Collison in the game, and a whopping minus-23.1 when he’s not.
That such a gap exists regardless of minutes—where you’re almost always liable to find one player with outsized plus-minuses—only throws Collison’s importance into starker relief.
Thomas’ impact last season, meanwhile, was far more meager: a plus-minus of plus-0.6 and a net rating of plus-0.2 with him on the floor, and a plus-minus of minus-8.8 and a net rating of minus-9.7 with him on the bench.
But it’s how Collison has managed to mesh with Sacramento’s foremost duo—DeMarcus Cousins and Rudy Gay—that could prove the biggest boon to his future SacTown prospects.
In 306 combined minutes, the trio is registering a net rating of 19.5, according to NBA.com. What’s more, of the nine Sacramento lineups that have registered a positive net rating over at least 10 minutes of shared court time, five of them feature the Collison-Gay-Cousins troika.
The result: an upstart core as statistically impressive as they are committed to a common goal. Here’s Collison in a recent interview with SacTown Royalty’s Ellington:
"I really think it's just practice. Our work ethic, the fact that we get out there defensively. We're always getting after each other. We're fighting, we're arguing, we're trying to win every single game against each other, so it starts in practice too. We're trying to make a commitment on the defensive end and I think that's where it starts. We consider ourselves as one of the top defensive teams in the NBA and that's our goal, so I think that's what's helping us out right now.
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You’ll notice there’s nary a word about Sacramento’s ever-evolving offense. Instead, Collison chooses to hammer home the team’s commitment to defense, an area of strength for the 6’0” point guard ever since he was selected by the then-New Orleans Hornets with the 21st overall pick in the 2009 draft.
Such deference to basics tells you all you need to know about Collison, a player whose journeyman drama can’t help but cultivate a unique kind of hardwood humbleness. They are the words of a man acutely aware that this may indeed be his last, best chance of resurrecting the promise of the past, of squashing the belief that his spot somehow belonged to a better player.
It’ll likely be years before the Collison-Thomas debate finds full closure. In the mean time, credit the Kings for not only landing one of the bargains of the summer, but for finding a player whose journey from cast-off backup to comeback kid represents a kind of redemption-in-miniature for a long-wayward franchise.
All stats courtesy of NBA.com/media and current as of November 24, unless otherwise noted.
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