Through pain and intense pressure, USC’s Isaiah Collier is rediscovering his ‘why’

The star freshman point guard, widely projected as a lottery pick in the next NBA draft, plays in large part for his late cousin Khalil…

Freshman PG Isaiah Collier has had his ups and downs this season, and missed a month with a hand injury, but his joy for the game often shines through, leading the Trojans to be at their best. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Luca Evans (OC Register)  —  LOS ANGELES — By mid-December, the joy had drained from Isaiah Collier’s face, a weary smile all that remained.

Two days after USC’s head-scratching overtime loss to Long Beach State, the freshman point guard ambled over inside a dead-empty Galen Center. He moved quietly and spoke even softer, hunching his shoulders as he sat in a baseline seat to talk. A purple rubber bracelet, inscribed with the words “Live Like Khalil,” dangled from his wrist.

A trainer was waiting for him near the free-throw line to resume, the only people left in the gym after this Tuesday practice. Collier made just five of his 12 free throws against Long Beach State. Even the easy points haven’t come easy.

You’ve had a pretty strong start to your college career, a statement was posed. He interrupted. “Not the start that I wanted,” he said. Draft hype around him had been ceaseless since he first put on a USC jersey, and he was scoring in bunches, but he was also averaging more than four turnovers per game. And losing.

“I feel like I’ve just been struggling since college started,” Collier said.

Collier was always at his best when he played with love. He was young when his father Dwain first noticed his son studying old DVDs of Magic Johnson and Pete Maravich, flipping one-handed dimes, his joy contagious in the basketball he shared. But he had been burdened with carrying USC’s offense on his shoulders before he had played a minute of college basketball, burdened with mighty draft expectations he never asked for; he is still just 19 years old and has looked it at times.

It was easy to see, through every headstrong drive in transition and messy footwork and ball skipping out of bounds: by December, Collier was buried inside his own head. Few know, truly, how deep.

After he woke up this Tuesday, Collier sat around, lost in thought.

Why am I doing this?

The answer lay in Khalil Hardison, his cousin who was really more like his brother. The answer lay in Patricia “Mom Pat” Thompson, his grandmother-in-law, who used to drive three hours on the weekends just to watch him play in high school. The answer lay in loss. The answer lay in family. The answer lay in love, to rediscover the Isaiah Collier he knew himself to be.

“Then I told myself,” Collier said, “you know why you’re doing this.”

This was born from love. Collier caused chaos in the house growing up, always with a ball in his hand, dunking all over a Nerf rim. Stop making so much noise, his family would tell him.

But he’d run amok, born with a natural burst, channeling a special blend of physicality into a youth football career for the Tucker Football League in Atlanta. His nickname, Dwain said, was “Pick-Six.”

“Learning just, the IQ part from the safety’s part, really just reading the field – I think that helped me a lot as a point guard when I was younger,” Collier said.

That IQ, though, took plenty of time to develop at Wheeler. It’s funny how history repeats itself, Thompson said. In Collier’s freshman year of high school, he played fast. Too fast. Stuck in one gear, sometimes. He was high-risk and high-reward, blended together in what Allen Whitehart – coach of frequent Wheeler opponent Milton High – called a “high school body as a freshman.”

In time, his reads grew better by the year, as Whitehart remembered. By his senior season, former Wheeler teammate and current USC freshman Arrinten Page (22) recalled, “it just looked like he was a professional playing against amateurs.” He was always at his best, simply, when every movement came carefree.

“The way he passes, and everybody else is smiling – if all five players on his team are smiling, you’re probably in for a tough night,” Whitehart said.

In his freshman year at USC, Collier has been far and away the team’s best playmaker, averaging four assists per game. But he’s also been his own worst enemy at times. As of Monday afternoon, he ranked second in the Pac-12 in turnovers per game. His defense has come and gone from possession to possession. His shot, at 33% from 3-point range and 66% from the free-throw line, has been shaky.

A day after the loss to Long Beach State on Dec. 10, Collier sent a text to Thompson, who’d helped to mold Collier into the best prospect in the nation.

Damn, we struggling bad, Collier wrote, USC sitting at 5-4 with the worst yet to come.

Yeah, you guys are, Thompson wrote back. Let’s talk.

“It was, basically, just getting back to being me,” Collier reflected, of the conversation. “Just having that joy on the court.”

The Colliers, for decades, have stuck together. If Dwain moved somewhere, his sister Natashia followed, and vice versa. So Natashia’s son Khalil grew up with Collier – peas in a pod, as Dwain called them. They were cousins. They were more so brothers.

Khalil was older. He had played for Wheeler before Collier; he had a leader’s air about him, Page remembered, that you felt when he walked into the building. He drove Collier around before he had his license, taking care of him growing up, no questions asked.

In the summer of 2022, Khalil died in a traumatic accident.

A year and a half late, the memory still haunts; Collier’s family requested the details not be re-printed. Khalil was simply gone, in the blink of an eye. And Collier, and the rest of the family, were there when it happened. Saw it happen.

Just a couple of days later, Page remembered, Collier was back practicing for Wheeler.

“I don’t know,” Page reflected after one late-January practice at USC. “I couldn’t explain it, for real.”

Behind Collier and Page, Wheeler won the Class 7A state title that year. In a whirlwind decision that November, Collier committed to USC. Life moved. And yet the losses kept mounting, heavy. Collier’s grandmother-in-law Patricia died this past fall, a woman who was one of his biggest supporters in high school.

Collier has been even-keel ever since high school, rarely expressive with his emotions. He doesn’t talk about Khalil much, Dwain said.

Privately, though, he started seeking therapy not long after his cousin’s death.

“I dealt with a lot off the court that many people don’t really know about,” Collier said in December. “But, I mean, everything just sees everything that’s going on on the court.”

“I had to grow up really fast,” Collier continued later. “It all happened fast, too.”

With a few seconds left in overtime against Long Beach State, down by three, Collier crossed over and burst to the rim for a layup. It was swatted away softly. Ballgame.

Two days later, after practice, assistant coach Eric Mobley sat with Collier and a laptop and ran through that final play again. All he needed to do, Mobley pointed out, was come to a jump-stop. Counter. Slow for a minute, and play under control.

“Getting more time with the speed, quickness of the college game, understand that he’s being scouted, just gonna get better with time,” Thompson said. “But the thing about him – he don’t have the necessary time to do that. He gotta do it now. Because he’s under so much scrutiny.”

In late November, Collier was tabbed by ESPN as the No. 1 pick in a 2024 mock draft. Within a month, tasked with the ball in his hands in a struggling offense, he’d dropped to the fringes of the top 10. He scored in bunches, but was too often again stuck in one gear or caught between gears. He wasn’t scared to make mistakes in high school, Collier said. Now, he was overthinking.

“I don’t know how he’s coping with it,” Thompson said. “I really, really don’t. He’s a young man who’s been put under the microscope.”

In early December, Collier ventured into Mobley’s office, a coach and father who’d sent two future pros – Evan and Isaiah Mobley – through USC. Mobley told Collier about when his sons were in his same position: at the top of the mountain, their games nitpicked like never before, caught up in social media pressure.

And Mobley gave Collier the same advice he’d given his sons: unpack your bags.

It’s not the end of the world to stay another year. Life is beautiful.

“If you think that way, then no pressure,” Mobley said. “But if you’re thinking, ‘I gotta get one-and-done, I gotta do this,’ it’s gonna eat you up.”

Those days, immediately after the Long Beach State loss, were filled with conversation. Introspection. Collier’s why, his passion and purpose, had drifted away, under a wave of external expectations and internal pressures.

“I just been thinking about my past performance,” Collier said on Dec. 12. “I don’t think I’ve been my best me. So I mean, it’s just, having that love.”

“Like I got right here,” he gestured, to the band dangling around his wrist. “Just, ‘Live Like Khalil.’”

You know why you’re doing this.

“Truly say, he plays for a purpose,” Dwain said of Isaiah. “Because Khalil played basketball, and he never got that opportunity to go to college, to experience that, to actually play college basketball on the basketball team.”

“And I think he’s playing, of course for himself, and for Khalil too as well.”

Coming out of high school, the family talked to “a few people,” Dwain said, about the potential of Collier skipping college and going straight to the G-League in preparation for a pro career. But Collier was firmly against it. His mind was set – he wanted to play college ball.

You’re gonna see a different Isaiah, Collier promised a couple of days after the Long Beach State loss. It took a few games; finally, though, he hit his stride in a two-game winning stretch in late January. He racked up 11 assists against just a couple of turnovers in wins over Cal and Stanford, carving the Cardinal up for 26 points.

In the second half of a loss to subsequent Washington State, though, Collier exited with a hand contusion. A day later, USC announced he’d be out for 4-to-6 weeks. He watched a 1-5 stretch from the bench, USC falling into irrelevancy at the bottom of the Pac-12 standings.

But Collier never thought about packing it up and sitting the rest of the season to preserve his stock, head coach Andy Enfield said. He remained around the team, pushing to get back as quickly as possible. A day after his surgery, assistant coach Chris Capko recalled, Collier was telling the program he’d be back in two weeks.

“It probably allowed him to take a deep breath,” Capko said, “and realize he missed it.”

He returned almost exactly four weeks after the injury, remarkably quickly, coming off the bench last Wednesday against Cal. He started slow, rust on his fingers on jumpers and floaters, not scoring a single point in the first half. A couple of minutes into the second half, Cal had taken a 16-point lead.

And then the joy returned, unlike anything he’d shown all year.

For ten minutes, leading a grueling comeback into overtime, Collier attacked without a shred of inhibition. He bullied his way to an and-one, nabbing a steal and roaring for a tomahawk jam, driving for another foul down three and bounding away clapping his hands.

“LET’S GO!” he roared.

“I notice when he plays the game with joy,” Page said. “Because he plays a little bit more free. And when he plays free, you can tell everybody on the court’s playing free, too.”

It wasn’t enough, ultimately. With 27 seconds left, down by three, Collier missed a layup and USC lost in overtime. He was likely fouled, hit on the top of the head. He also could have jump-stopped, as Mobley pointed out months ago, and countered. Both are true. Learning is not linear.

But this was the different Isaiah he himself had promised.

“You could feel his energy tonight,” Enfield said postgame. “How, he was so excited to be on the court, and he was playing extremely hard, and he was trying to do everything he could to help us win.”

Collier leaned against the hallway postgame, wearing a hoodie and beanie, still expressively optimistic despite a team that has since dropped to 9-15 overall and 3-10 in Pac-12 play. After the injury, it never crossed his mind to shut his season down, he said. He hadn’t even made his mind up, Collier affirmed, on whether he’d enter the draft come the summer.

Indeed, he’d unpacked his bags.

“I started something,” Collier said, on choosing not to sit. “So I’ma finish it.”

ocregister.com

___________

TrojanDailyBlog members —  We always encourage you to add factual information, insight, divergent opinions, or new topics to the TDB that don’t necessarily pertain to any particular moderator post or member comment.