It’s hard to figure out where people truly sit when it comes to Marcus Smart.
Smart has been a Celtic for all seven years of his NBA career. It seems his popularity in Boston has grown each year and two seasons ago, Smart grew to a near cult figure in the city.
Early in the 2019-20 season, Smart had a fun moment where he freed stuck basketballs from the top of the backboard in consecutive games. After the second one, he was showered with MVP chants as the crowd had fun with him and his moment.
After the game, Smart saw the moment as something more than just a goof; it was a poignant connection between him and the fans.
“I remember a time when those chants were different types of chants for me,” Smart told me. “I just stayed with it, kept working, finally people are seeing the things that I’m valuable, that I bring to the table on every given night ... Being here the longest, everything I do in the city, and the way this crowd shows love and appreciation is something you have to respect and admire from a city.”
Smart has a hoodie that says “I love Boston, Boston loves me.” His hustle and desire have made him very popular.
However, this past season has seen part of the Celtics community grow angrier and more vocal about his performances. The question seems to be whether the number of people losing faith in Smart is growing, or if a small segment of Celtics fans is growing louder with their displeasure, amplified by sports talk radio and increasingly vitriolic social media.
Smart, like everyone this past season, had his fair share of struggles, many of which were understandable. He was one of many NBA players who missed significant time due to soft tissue injuries this season, straining a calf at the end of January and missing 17 games over more than a month. He also obviously dealt with a number of ailments caused by his rough-and-tumble style, while also dealing with personal tragedy off the court.
“For me, personally, I lost about four or five people, literally, within four to three months of each other,” Smart said, without adding details. “Coming into work every day and putting a smile on your face when you’ve lost a loved one or going through what you’re going through personally, it’s tough. But you’ve got to do it, and that’s it.”
So Smart did it, and to varying degrees of success. The eye test from this season showed me that when Smart played within himself, didn’t go overboard with his shot attempts, and moved the ball, he did pretty well.
The Celtics were 10-2 this past season when he notched eight or more assists. According to Cleaning the Glass, the Celtics were +5.5 per 100 possessions with Smart on the floor and Walker off, a number bogged down by 206 possessions of the double-big lineup with Daniel Theis and Tristan Thompson that went -6.6.
The team was +1.1 with Smart and Kemba Walker on the floor, still a net positive but not quite as good, which lends credence to the notion of Smart as lead point guard if the team moves on from Walker. However, Walker’s numbers were bogged down by his mid-season return from injury rehab.
Statistically speaking, it’s hard to determine what worked and what didn’t for the Celtics. Smart was asked to do a lot this season, playing point guard some days and playing off ball others. Walker struggled early but came on late. Guys were in and out of the lineup all year due to COVID-19, so Smart was often asked to fill just about every defensive role on the team.
It’s hard to ask someone to do all of those things and then ask “why isn’t he more consistent on offense?” We already know that’s been somewhat of a struggle for him for a while, but you can’t criticize someone for bad penmanship when he’s juggling while signing his name. There has to be some understanding there.
Part of what has made him so valuable is that ability to juggle. I’ve often compared Smart to a can of that expanding spray foam you use to seal up cracks in your basement. The Celtics have relied on just being able to spray Smart into whatever hole in their roster and he’s done a pretty good job filling it ... even if it gets messy from time to time.
There aren’t many guys like him out there. His faults appear glaring because all of them happen when the ball is in his hands, and fans are almost exclusively ball-watchers whose opinions are based on whether shots fall.
That’s not a knock, by the way. That’s what we all do watching every sport. Did the receiver catch the pass? Did the batter hit the ball? Did Smart hit the shot? You don’t care about nuance at all. You watch to see results.
The weakest part of Smart’s game is the one thing every fan can easily consume and understand. Made shot = good, missed shot = bad. Smart misses more shots than most, and on his worst days, takes more shots than most at the same time. His overall field goal percentage has crossed the 40% mark once in his career. He’s only twice crossed into acceptable 3-point shooting range (basically anything over 34%, which equates to shooting better than 50% on 2’s from an efficiency standpoint). And even when he has, he barely has.
It is hard to accept that a guy making 2.3 of his 6.6 3-point attempts is shooting at an acceptable rate, but the math bears this out. This season he shot 33% from 3 (93-282) which is not good. He shot 48.2% from 2 (110-228), which is good. But he still scored 279 points from 3 and 220 points from 2, which simply makes taking more shots from deep more valuable.
In some ways, Smart is a poster boy for the NBA’s new math. He would have had to hit 30 more 2-pointers to get to where he was from 3, so it doesn’t even make sense to take those 2’s unless they’re layups or somewhere in the restricted area. However, he’s still a guy who is missing 65% of those “efficient” shots or more. Fans really can’t accept that a guy who misses as much as Smart does from 3 means he should take more 3’s, but if he’s not hitting 2’s at Kevin Durant’s rate, then he might as well maximize the value of every shot attempt.
This is Smart’s mentality. It flies in the face of what’s enjoyable to watch, but it fits right into the concept of providing value. And value is the name of Smart’s game. The types of shots he takes and misses skew the perception of Smart’s value, much of which comes on the defensive end and in organizing his teammates. It’s a classic iceberg-type situation where the part you see above the water is only a small percentage of the overall picture.
Still, the acceptable line of where Smart’s value tips varies from person to person, and that applies to people in basketball as well. No one knows that line better than new President of Basketball Operations, Brad Stevens, who has been the only NBA coach Smart has known.
No one understands the value of what Smart does quite like Stevens, who has ridden every loop in the Smart rollercoaster many times. Only he has the truly intimate knowledge of Smart’s impact on the team and how much offensive deficiencies have really hurt.
This piece will publish and the comments section will fill with arguments for and against Smart, just like they have in any Smart piece ever written anywhere. This time, though, we might actually get our answer.
Stevens has sung Smart’s praises at every pass, and now he controls Smart’s fate. Smart’s future could include everything from an extension to a salary dump, and that decision rests on Stevens’ desk.
Either end tells you where Smart’s true value has been all along. If Smart is traded, the type of deal will express in the truest terms how much the team believes in him. If Smart goes in a deal for some middling role player, then we know he’s hurt the team too much over time. If Smart is included in a deal for a third star, then he’s a high-value guy coveted by the team, and others in the league.
Smart, for what it’s worth, wants to see this through. He’s been here the whole time, and he wants to stand on that parquet floor and pull a banner up into the rafters.
“My job is to go out there and do everything I can to help the team win. The business side you leave to the front office and you just hope they do the right things and they do things to help this team,” he said at the end of the season. “We probably have a lot of fans, just a lot of people on the outside probably thinking this and that, but three out of four years we’ve been to the Eastern Conference Finals, we’ve been to the playoffs every year, and this is one year when we didn’t have everybody, we didn’t have a full year, and it affected us. I think we’re alright, but that’s not my decision to make.”