5 best Boston Celtics to never win a ring

3. Marcus Smart

To be fair Smart’s career is not over, he’s still only 26 and he is under contract with the Celtics for at least the next two seasons. But until the team gets over the top and cashes in with a title, he has a spot on a list like this.

Smart is easy to root for, as a gritty smaller guy (6-foor-3) who embraces defense and can guard multiple positions capably. He will never be an elite offensive player, but when the 2019-20 season was suspended he was averaging a career-best 13.5 points and a tied for career-best 4.8 assists per game as he was converting nearly 35 percent of his 3-point attempts. Before the 2018-19 campaign, when he made a career-high 36.4 percent from 3-point range, he had never made more than 31 percent from beyond the arc.

In terms of Win Shares, however obviously, Smart has always been a very positive contributor on the defensive end of the floor. But he has also made a notably positive impact offensively over the last two seasons (a total of 3.9 Win Shares), in line with becoming a better perimeter shooter.

Smart’s overall value may always be hard to fully quantify, due to intangibles that won’t show up on the stat sheet and defensive matchups he takes so his teammates don’t have to. He’s really the perfect guy for the exact middle of this list.