Josh Smith and the shrinking athleticism gap

There’s nothing quite like a lasting first impression.

From time to time, you meet someone who just seems so refreshing or different that the memory of that first encounter sticks with you for years to come. It’s not just the person, themselves, or the place or setting for the encounter, but all of the minute details and intricacies that stand out as a result of the life that your memory has breathed into the meeting. Everything becomes vivid. Everything is in color.

That’s what it felt like the first time I watched Josh Smith play basketball — or, at least, that’s how the memory stands out. For someone who had grown up playing and watching soccer, this was the first time the images from an arena on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean hooked me in with something truly different.

I’d seen basketball before, albeit mostly All-Star games. I’d also seen no shortage of incredible athletes, across a variety of sports. What I hadn’t seen was Smith, a player who was fluid, fast, versatile, skilled and flat out explosive all rolled into one.

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J-Smoove finished that game against the Steve Nash and Amar’e Stoudemire-led Phoenix Suns with a stat line of 20 points, 15 rebounds, four blocks and two assists. From a random January game in 2010, he became my favorite player, I became an Atlanta Hawks fan and the NBA became my passion.

A lot has changed since then.

Firstly, it would seem most obvious to point out that as the 2016-17 NBA season gets underway, Smith finds himself without a team for the first time since he was drafted 17th overall by the Hawks in 2004. The reasons why Smith finds himself on a proverbial island, cast off from the league he once thrilled, are manyfold. What has grown most fascinating of all, though, is that ever the walking contradiction, Smith’s game is both perfect for and diametrically opposed to the elements that drive winning teams in today’s NBA.

On the one hand, Smith is — or was — a supremely gifted basketball player. He understands the game exceptionally well, has great vision, strong defensive instincts and the physical tools and showman’s mentality to energize an entire building at almost a second’s notice. In his prime, Smith was the NBA’s ultimate Swiss Army knife, demonstrating positional versatility and the ability to stuff a stat-sheet in a way that no player other than LeBron James could come close to matching.

In the minuses column, Smith’s downfall has always been his poor shot selection. As the league gradually fell more in love with the 3-point shot, unfortunately for Smith’s coaches and teammates, so did he.

The irony comes in the fact that Smith’s shooting, particularly from distance, has improved as the years have gone on. It’s a flaw that has always been there, but one that was easily overlooked before the long ball was in vogue. Just as one-dimensional, old-fashioned, low post centers have seen the league change on them, the times passed Smith by before he (or the Detroit Pistons) could even realize it.

Not that he was the only high energy, fast twitch athlete left dazed by the game’s ever-changing style either.

A little over a month after Smith first captured my heart, Gerald Wallace made his one and only All-Star appearance. A versatile forward in his own right, Wallace prided himself on defense but also possessed an unerring ability to be able to hang in the air on his way up for dunks. With the incredibly apt nickname of “Crash,” Wallace bounced his way through the NBA — in games and later in trades — for the best part of 14 seasons.

When it came time to call it a day, Wallace attributed his pending retirement to an ailing body that had started feeling the effects of such a long stay in the NBA. Still, it was hard not to feel as if there wasn’t more to it than that.

Wallace was 32 when he played his last game in the NBA, but in terms of role and production, he was a shell of his old self from close to the time he turned 30. As Michael Pina wrote in a piece on Wallace for The Classical in 2013, the Alabama native’s play style made his decline inevitable, but that didn’t detract from its eventual arrival registering with a sudden thud.

"“Knowing that Wallace was due for a decline and understanding how that decline might look — and how suddenly it could happen — is not at all the same thing. In an era in which players all across the league have been able to sharpen different tools to account for a natural decline in physical ability, nearly all of Wallace’s abilities seem to have deserted him at once. It’s a collapse so complete that it defies analysis; even Wallace himself seems baffled by it.”"

While Wallace was never an elite shooter, unlike Smith, he was serviceable enough to ensure that singular aspect of his game couldn’t be left to account for his sudden irrelevance. Of course, the accumulation of miles were starting to weigh on Wallace by that time, but there were still plenty of signs of the athleticism that made him special to begin with.

Wallace’s tools were certainly waning, but perhaps more pressing for him then, and Smith now, is the fact that their gifts were being rendered less effective as the wider NBA caught up to their level.

It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that the Hawks/Suns game I spoke about earlier ended with Jamal Crawford making a buzzer-beater from just past halfcourt.

Like most NBA fans, the way in which I watch the game in the time since that game has evolved. If I was to watch that game with fresh eyes now, the precise and smooth stroke Crawford used to execute in the decisive moment could instead be the memory that would forge itself in my mind.

I’ve come to love the mechanics and the simplicity of the 3-point shot. There’s a certain appeal to the idea that anyone could shoot like Stephen Curry, and yet nobody else currently can. From my perspective, the appeal of the thunderous dunk or the blistering block has faded somewhat, and that’s not due to them becoming any less infrequent.

If anything, the kind of signature plays that made Smith and Wallace into highly paid men are close to commonplace now. The gap between the NBA’s most gifted athletes and those who are merely average by league standards has narrowed dramatically, as sports science has blossomed into a bigger driver in sport success. That’s a step forward for the quality of the NBA product and players overall, but it’s no consolation to Smith as he holds out hope for an NBA return.

Writing for The New Yorker in late 2014, James Surowiecki inadvertently described the factors that underlie Smith’s situation two years later.

"“Today, in sports, what you are is what you make yourself into. Innate athletic ability matters, but it’s taken to be the base from which you have to ascend.”"

Of course, even at 30-years-old, Smith’s athleticism matters, but it no longer matters enough that he can afford not to embrace the league’s current trend. It’s hard to give Smith credit for the kind of shots he’s grown fond of taking in the latter years of his career, but there’s a strong possibility that their increased prevalence was no accident.

Having never previously taken more than 2.1 3-pointers per game, Smith averaged 2.6 in 2012-13 and, in spite of decreasing minutes, has never dipped below that mark in the years since. The result may have been an incomprehensible number of bricks, but the intention may have had more thought behind it than the player would ever be given credit for.

Athleticism no longer stands alone as a sought after skill for NBA teams, rather it’s now about how a player can channel their athleticism on the court. In a recent ESPN feature on the work that goes on behind the doors of the renowned P3 Applied Sports Science in Santa Barbara, Ben Alamar elaborated on this concept.

"“The deeper tests of athleticism have provided athletes — and the teams that might employ them — with a much deeper understanding of what their physical skills and limitations are, and how those skills translate to their on-court performance.”"

That begs the question: Even if Smith’s athletic capacity was unchanged, would his skills be sufficient enough to maximize their benefits in today’s NBA?

In a recent interview with Shams Charania of The Vertical on his current situation, the often media-shy Smith gave a glimpse of some of the introspection, self-criticism and analysis that has likely played a bigger role in his career decisions than us on the outside will ever know.

"“I’m not a guy that is oblivious to my surroundings, I know that changes need to be made. It’s something that I have done wrong to now be figuring out my next move and figuring out what I need to do to be better.”"

What’s next for Smith would seem like anybody’s guess, but it seems improbable that he won’t get at least one more chance in the NBA. For a player who was close to unique for so many years to see things turn against him in such a hurry only acts as a testament to the ever-changing NBA landscape.

As Wallace can attest, Smith wasn’t the first to have the rug unceremoniously pulled out from under him, though, and I’m sure he won’t be the last either.