Doyel: This is not the same Ian Mahinmi

Just my luck, Ian Mahinmi wants to shoot after practice. He's my story, see. My interview. And now I'm waiting for this 6-11 center to shoot jumpers and make 50 of them from various spots — and if you've been watching Mahinmi play for the Pacers since 2012, you know this could take a while.

Only, it doesn't take a while. He goes to the left elbow and shoots until he makes 10 jumpers. He needs 11 shots. Now he's at the top of the key and can't leave until he hits 10. He needs 12 shots. On to the right elbow he goes, and somebody — I think it's assistant coach Nate McMillan — is counting off the makes.

One, two, three …

Mahinmi hits all 10 shots and moves on. Soon he's finished, needing no more than 60 jumpers to make 50, and now he's coming down to my end and …

Shooting some more.

Of course he is.

And these are going to be tougher. What's my deadline? Better push it back, because Mahinmi has to bank 18-footers off the glass, the kind of shot Tim Duncan has spent a career making in his sleep. The kind of shot Ian Mahinmi has spent his career avoiding. Because he can't make them. Not in games, not in practice, not in his sleep, not anywhere.

He makes the first one. And the second. And the third. Assistant coach Dan Burke is passing him the ball, Mahinmi is draining jumpers, and now he's talking to himself, to Burke, to anyone in the Pacers practice gym who can hear his French baritone.

"The bank is open," Mahinmi says, and makes 10 of the 11 shots he tries.

"It's open on Saturdays," Mahinmi says, going to the other elbow and making another jumper.

"And Sundays," he says, and makes another.

"The Mahinmi bank is always open," he says, and there goes another one off the glass, through the net.

And here's the thing: It didn't take Mahinmi all that long to make all those shots. He comes over to me, sweating and smiling, and I ask something that makes him smile even bigger.

Last year, I asked him. Last year, how long would this shooting drill have taken?

"I'd still be shooting," he says.

Mahinmi has never shot this well in his life, and not just here in practice. But out there in games, too. Preseason is preseason, and it can be misleading, but Mahinmi spent the offseason working on his game in ways he has never worked on it before — building up his body and his shooting range — and the results are staggering.

As Paul George told him the other day, "You've been working."

For one, Mahinmi showed up at camp weighing 260 pounds. His upper body, not small at 250 pounds, is now enormous. His legs are thicker. This was a fast, explosive athlete who has become faster, more explosive, stronger.

"His idea," Vogel said. "He wanted to come in here, ready to defend the biggest centers."

Mahinmi also wanted to come in with more skill, which is not easy for an NBA player to do at age 28. By that point you are who you are, you know? It's even more difficult for a bigger man, a post player, to work himself into a skill set he has never had.

But that's what Mahinmi did this summer, and for that let's give some credit to George Hill as well. They spent the offseason working out together in San Antonio, shooting alone and together, two-man stuff and pick-and-roll stuff and shooting, shooting, shooting.

"He worked so hard," Hill says of Mahinmi, "and you're seeing the results."

Mahinmi also is benefiting from the Pacers' shift to smaller lineups, because with the power forward also on the perimeter — usually the power forward in Mahinmi's (starting) unit is Paul George — that leaves the post in sole possession of Mahinmi. And while he's not the most skilled big man around, his athletic ability gives him the space to do as he pleases.

And Mahinmi will shoot the ball, please and thank you very much.

An apples-to-apples comparison — preseason games last season versus this season — shows a marked improvement in Mahinmi's efficiency. Even as his shooting range has become more ambitious, his field-goal accuracy has improved from 55.6 percent last preseason to 61.3 percent now. His free-throw shooting has gone from a woeful 31.3 percent to a bad (but much better) 46.7 percent. Used to be, Mahinmi was six times more likely to turn the ball over (1.3 per game last preseason) than hand out an assist (0.2).

This preseason, Mahinmi has more assists (1.2 per game) than turnovers (0.8).

"You can see the comfort level he has with the ball in his hands," Vogel says.

You can see it most of all with the shot. A year ago, Mahinmi was pretty much under orders to shoot — sorry, not to shoot — unless he was at point-blank range or the shot clock was ticking down.

"If somebody has to shoot it, fine," Vogel was saying about Mahinmi's green light, such as it was, a year ago.

This preseason Mahinmi is catching the ball 18 feet from the basket and launching jumpers, and he's doing it early in the possession, and he's making them. Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying Mahinmi is going to be a prolific scorer this season, which the Pacers open on Wednesday night at Toronto. But he's not the two-dimensional, defense-and-dunk player he was a year ago. The defense is still there. So is the dunking.

But now he can shoot it. In back-to-back games last week against the Bulls and Cavaliers, Mahinmi scored 30 points in 52 minutes. He was 12-for-18 from the floor, combined. So I asked him a few days later: How did you do this?

And this is what he said:

"I shot three or four hours a day this offseason," he says. "I made 1,000 shots every day."

Tell me more, I said.

"I won't reveal my workout process," he was saying, smiling but serious, which is fine. Shooters are allowed their secrets. And here's a secret: Ian Mahinmi has become, of all things, a shooter.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.

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