There are some basketball skills that are very difficult to receive credit for improving. It’s very easy for everyone to credit LeBron James for adding a post-up game or Chris Bosh for extending his range to the three-point line because those are things we can easily see. Players become better shooters and we see their shooting percentages tick up, simple as that.

We’ll notice when someone improves in an area they’ve been generally awful in, too. If someone is always out of position on defense and gradually starts making better plays, viewers will catch on. The same goes for when a player that almost never passes the ball starts getting his teammates involved. Whenever you’ve spent a good chunk of your career hovering around one extreme, any deviation from that end of the spectrum will be hailed as a grand accomplishment.

But what about when someone already does something reasonably well? How can we tell when a defender or passer begins making the shift from good to very good?

In the recent case of Mario Chalmers, it’s been as easy as looking at his assist totals. Through five games, he is averaging 8.2 assists per 36 minutes, up from a career average of 4.9 and the highest mark since he posted 5.5 in his rookie year. Twice he has passed that magical double-digit barrier this season after a year-long drought, so naturally we take notice. But These numbers alone aren’t enough to make a case. Assists are highly volatile statistics, fluctuating based on a number of variables, including the rate at which pass catchers are scoring.

Sometimes, it’s the offense improving around the passer, not the player improving at passing. In the case of Chalmers, however, both the former and the latter seem to be happening right in front of us.

Let’s throw out raw assists for now, if only because it is so early in the season. What we really care about are the quality of assists. In Chalmers’ last double-digit assist game, he recorded 13 in the last regular season contest of the 2010-11 season with James, Bosh and Dwyane Wade resting before the playoffs. For one game, Chalmers’ role as a playmaker grew expontentially and so did his counting numbers. But most of those assists were on Eddie House jumpers as House was on his way to scoring 35 points. Chalmers simply waited at the top of the key as House ran around screens, delivered the pass and reaped the rewards.

There’s value in delivering well-timed passes to shooters, but dribbling around the perimeter and swinging the ball to open shooters is more of a passive version of playmaking. What we’ve seen in these five games is the complete opposite.

Tossing Fireballs

Most NBA diehards remember two years ago when Dwyane Wade quarterbacked a 90-foot, one-handed alley-oop pass to LeBron James. It was one of the highlights of the season, but those plays were largely confined to the natural chemistry between those two players. Miami was still a very efficient team in transition, but those hyper strikes were few and far between.

Two years later, everyone is getting in on the hijinks. Chris Bosh is running out ahead of the pack for easy scores, Ray Allen and Shane Battier are hitting trail threes and Chalmers is getting his fair share of cross-court helpers in transition.

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