by Doug Ammon

As the Sixers rung in the New Year in Phoenix, Arizona, Hollis Thompson was 2,000 miles away, at home and bed ridden during what was the one of the most trying periods of his young NBA career.

The then 23-year-old had contracted an upper respiratory infection just as the team embarked on its longest road trip of the season, a seven-game stretch that would see them travel to Florida before traversing the West Coast over a 13-day span.

Before the infection hit, Thompson was averaging a respectable 8.2 points per game in 29.2 minutes of action. He was seeing increased playing time after a rookie campaign in which he logged just over 20 minutes a night.

He had established himself as a reliable long-range shooter in 2013-14, knocking down 40.1% of his threes, which was the highest mark on the squad for players who featured in more than 10 games and the highest among all rookies in his class.

Thompson’s sophomore season was supposed to be a chance for the swingman to take the next step in his career, but when the team tipped off their holiday road trip on December 21 in Orlando, he was barely able to make it to the arena because of his illness.

The missed games started to pile up, and the infection didn’t get better. Before the team’s December 27 road meeting with the Utah Jazz, he was sent back home to focus full-time on getting better, effectively placing basketball on the back burner for his foreseeable future.

In all, he missed 11 straight games, and it wasn’t until nearly three weeks after being sent home that he rejoined the team, seeing action in a January 13 home meeting with the Atlanta Hawks. Down 20 pounds as a result of the debilitating illness, Thompson was brought back slowly by head coach Brett Brown.

He struggled initially to readjust to the pace of the game but within a few weeks had reclaimed a consistent place in the rotation. Over his next 11 games, he didn’t log more than 24 minutes in any contest and didn’t reach double figures in points.

When he finally did tally double digits, it was in a 12-point performance on January 31. But more important than his dozen points were his four made three-pointers on six attempts. It was a performance that many probably glanced over, as it came in a relatively uneventful 91-85 loss to the red-hot Atlanta Hawks, but it may just have been the light switch-flipping type of performance that Thompson needed to spark his 2014-15 season.

After shooting just 33.1% from distance over the first three months of the season, he shot 53.5% in the month of February, 41.1% in March, and 47.8% in April. Thompson’s February three-point shooting percentage was the second best in the NBA for that month.

In the final three months of the season, he shot a combined 47.5% from three-point land, by far his hottest streak in his short time in the league.

When this season finished Thompson, ended up converting the exact same percentage of his three-point attempts as he did as a rookie, 40.1%, but he did so by knocking down 48 more threes in 120 more attempts despite playing in six fewer games. In doing so, he joined Kyle Korver as the only player to hit over 40% of his threes in his first two seasons as a Sixer. Among all rising sophomores ever, his 40.1% conversion rate from distance is 12th-best, just ahead of Wesley Matthews (40.0%, 13th) and Bradley Beal (39.6%, 14th).

Adding even more intrigue into his impressive comeback was his 51.8 effective field goal percentage on the year. A statistic that is becoming increasingly popular among NBA analysts, eFG% factors in the difficulty of shooting and making a three and provides an adjusted field goal percentage where made threes count for more than made twos. Thompson’s 51.8 eFG% was the highest on the Sixers this season, a true measure of his effectiveness and efficiency.

Thompson’s illness could have temporarily derailed his young NBA career, but instead his resiliency made 2014-15 a season to remember rather than forget. As he enters his third offseason as a professional, he’ll hope that the hot end to his year carries over to the next.