Roy Hibbert: From Top of the World to Reclamation Project

Roy Hibbert was the favorite to win the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year award at this time last season. Oh what a difference a year makes.

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Few players have seen their status free fall as far as Hibbert’s has dropped over the past 12 months. In January 2014, he was the centerpiece of a best-in-league defense for a 25-5 team that stood atop the NBA standings. The Miami Heat may have had their Big Three, but Dwyane Wade looked washed. The West was the stronger conference with more contenders, but given the Indiana Pacers’ opportunity for safe passage through the weak field of East playoff teams, some saw them as a title favorite.

Then came the swoon. It wasn’t widely understood how badly things were unraveling in Hoosier State until after the All-Star break, but the threads started to fray in mid-January. A lot of it had to do with Hibbert beginning to play poorly, and what followed was a year that turned the Pacers from kings of the mountain to also-rans. Now, Hibbert is in a position where he needs to re-establish himself as a dominant player — if he can.

Roy Hibbert’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Year

Since NBA seasons start in the Fall and end in Summer, we don’t usually look at a player’s performance in a single calendar year. So there isn’t a great frame of reference for how Roy Hibbert played from last January to December.

But the numbers are wretched.

In the 99 games he played, postseason included, he averaged 10.0 points and 5.9 rebounds per game while shooting a horrific 42.0% from the field. This is where you look at that percentage and then remember that he is a 7-foot-2 center who has taken nearly three-fourths of his career shots from inside 10 feet or closer. How can he shoot 42.0% for a full year? Nick Young, whose shot selection can kindly be called questionable, has a higher career field-goal percentage than that.

With his continual poor performances late in the regular season, the fan slander grew and grew. It reached its peak during the Pacers near-loss to the eighth-seeded Atlanta Hawks in a seven-game first-round series. He scored zero points in two of those games and failed to put up more than 8 points in any of the first six games.

It is the norm these days for fans to resort to mockery, but his struggle was so real that former All-Stars were even clowning him on social media. Two-time scoring champ Tracy McGrady got in on the act, and Gilbert Arenas pulled zero punches while ragging on the 7-foot-2 big man.

The Pacers managed to win that series and even advanced for a rematch with the Heat in the Eastern Conference finals. But Miami handled their rivals rather easily, and the damage to Hibbert’s reputation was already done.

It would be a long summer for the whole team — and a tragic one for its star Paul George who broke his leg on August 2. For Hibbert, however, it was a time where he had to reassess not just how his team could contend again but how he could get his career back on track.

A New Season, A New Chance

To his credit, Roy Hibbert trained hard all offseason to get himself ready for redemption. He worked with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to work on some post moves.

Early in the 2014-15 season, the extra effort seemed to be paying dividends. Hibbert looked more adept on the block and was flipping in hook shots with ease. He was established deep post position and holding it with an ease that he has rarely shown.

He was even getting back to hitting the glass like in his earlier days. For 11 games in November, Roy Hibbert averaged 10.0 boards per 36 minutes, a number in line with the best rebounding years of his career. While these aren’t Kevin Love or Anthony Davis totals, they were certainly a vast improvement over 5.6 and 5.0 rebounds per 36 he grabbed last March and April, respectively.

It looked like the funk was gone and the All-Star-level rim protector had rediscovered the other parts of his game.

Of course, this is Roy Hibbert we are talking about so nothing seems to ever stay going well for too long.

On November 22, he sprained his ankle in a game against the Phoenix Suns and had to sit out the next four games to recover. It’s quite possible that he didn’t wait long enough, however, because when he got back on the court he looked more like the Roy Hibbert people was comparing to trash cans.

He shot 42.7% in December games upon his return and rarely showed the offensive punch he was routinely displaying before the ankle injury. In his first 13 games of the season, for example, he had three 20+ point games. He had zero in 16 games in December.

Really, the best thing that happened to Roy Hibbert in 2014 was when the year ended.

Roy Hibbert’s Worse Reputation Damage

Worse than the image hits Roy Hibbert has taken on social media, may be in how the officials now perceive him. No longer is Hibbert the epitome of a rim protector who has mastered verticality to go straight up and challenge shots without fouling.

Even in the playoffs last season it seemed as if he was no longer getting the benefit of 50/50 calls as he had in the past. And by the time 2014 came to a close, he was getting even less respect.

This play against the Utah Jazz in early 2015 is a perfect example.

Hibbert gets too much arm here for the ref to let this go, which seems like a no-brainer. But ask members of the Miami Heat and New York Knicks how much Roy was getting away with during the 2013 playoffs. He was routinely going up with a straight torso while stretching his arms forward, and if the shooter’s arms collided with Hibbert’s than that was just too bad. No foul. Play on.

There is likely more than just Hibbert’s reputation fall at play here, as refs now have more years of officiating experience with more players going vertical. They have gotten better at calling these bang/bang mid-air encounters in real-time and the league is better instructing them how to do so.

Still, the point remains: Neither refs, nor fans, nor anybody except maybe his coach respects Roy Hibbert’s game as much as they did just one short year ago.

Bouncing Back 

Injuries and off-the-court problems aside, it’s likely that no highly regarded NBA player had a worse 2014 than Roy Hibbert. So he will have to spend all of 2015 trying to convince people he is still a force in the paint.

And, in fact, like magic Hibbert seemed to shake off all the negativity of 2014 as soon as the ball dropped. In his first three games of the New Year, he avenged 17.3 points and 8.7 rebounds per game. Better still, he made 19-of-36 (52.7%) shots and the Pacers won two out of three.

But remember who we’re talking about here.

Roy Hibbert sprained his left ankle — for the second time this year — in the following game. He is now sidelined again. He did say that this injury was not as bad as the November sprain, however, so hopefully he will be able to get back soon and avoid the performance falloff that accompanied his last recovery.

Individual Rebounding

When NBA coverage talks about “rebuilding,” it usually means a once-great (or once-very-good) team strategically repositioning itself for the future. That’s what the Indiana Pacers need to do this season while they wait for Paul George to get healthy.

But Roy Hibbert is now on a personal rebuilding project. He has long had a chip on his shoulder, something he infamously aired in an emotional press conference during the 2013 playoffs. Hibbert got heated when asked why he finished 10th in Defensive Player of the Year voting. “Cause y’all motherf***ers don’t watch us play,” he said.

The statement had truth at the time — the Pacers were a rising giant that was never on national television and drew little mainstream media acclaim. But that criticism is doubly true now. And it really isn’t even a criticism anymore: No, national basketball writers do not watch the Pacers play. Not anymore. Not after the team fell apart last season, not after they watched Hibbert and his teammates struggle to score throughout the 2014 postseason, and certainly not after a catastrophic injury to Indiana’s star left the team hopeless.

So if Hibbert ever wants people to watch him again, he will have to earn it.

He needs to start rebuilding his image — and more importantly his game. He skated by on reputation early in 2014 before the Wizard of Oz curtain was pulled away in the playoffs. But now nobody thinks he is an elite player anymore, and only by becoming elite again will he ever make people remember how good he once was. Roy Hibbert needs to get back on the court and convince people he is as good as he thinks he is.