Larry Drew, please print off the above image and tape it to Josh Smith’s locker. If he crumples it up and throws it out, replace it. He needs to see it, and he needs to ponder it.
What Smith would be looking at, by the way, is a visual representation of the 22 points that Milwaukee’s Luc Richard Mbah A Moute scored against the Golden State Warriors on Friday night. As you can see, he set up shop in the paint and went to work. The Warriors hope new acquisition Andrew Bogut will get healthy and solve the problems Moute’s shot chart represents from their point of view.
Anyway, back to Josh Smith. I hear a lot of chatter about the guy. Should he have been an All-Star? Is he the most underrated player in the league? While I firmly believe that Smith has the tools to be one of the top fours in the Eastern Conference (and he is a four, not a three), the answer to the first question is no. The answer to the second one is obviously no as well. I mean, how underrated is a guy who’s constantly deemed underrated? Not very.
Josh Smith is one of those guys… I want to love him, but I can’t. He simply doesn’t go about playing the game the way he should. As I mentioned in a recent “Starting Lineup” post, Smith shoots more shots from 16 to 23 feet than any power forward not named LaMarcus Aldridge, yet he only connects from that range at a 33% clip. Smith is also 12th at his position in total three-point attempts, and although 32.8% isn’t that bad, I feel like he’s about as liable to shoot an airball as he is to knock it down from that distance. Plus, he can’t be in the paint if he’s shooting a three. That right there is actually the biggest issue, even more so than the shaky percentages.
If Josh Smith is shooting a 20 footer he’s 20 feet away from the basket.
Is that where you want the guy who leads your team in points in the paint? F@ck no! That’s where the other team wants him. Smith’s shooting percentage is down close to five percent from two years ago, back when he also averaged nearly an entire additional offensive board per game. He’s simply playing into the opposition’s hand far too often right now.
With Josh, it’s not all about his elite athleticism, either. If you watch him play you’ll find that his talent becomes very apparent when he hits the block. Make no mistake about it, my friends… Josh Smith is as gifted a basketball player as he is an athlete–he’s simply not a jump shooter. For example, just a few nights ago I watched him leave his defender bolted to the floor on a crunch-time post up against the Nuggets. He’s got good touch around the rim, so he finished… as he does 64% of the time. He had 33 points in that game. That being said, I can understand how an infrequent observer could come to the conclusion that Smith is a pretty limited ball player. It looks that way when he’s bricking Js.
The point of this post is not to criticize Josh Smith. Like I said, I want to like the guy. I want to sit here and tell you he’s an All-Star. However, I can’t do that when he’s taking four threes against the Washington Wizards (no, I don’t care that he happened to make two of ‘em). With all due respect to Trevor Booker and Kevin Seraphin… this is not a sentence that I need to finish.
