DENVER — Who would have thought, if you picked between the two Wake Forest point guards from back in the day, that the first one to win an NBA championship would be… Ishmael Larry Smith, and not Chris Paul?
CP3’s quest for a ring has been well-documented over the years: the angst that has followed the soon-to-be Hall of Famer as he’s gone from team to team for more than a decade, looking for the squad that could finally deliver. By contrast, the 34-year-old Smith has been on a much different path.
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“Journeyman” is a pejorative in this league, a dismissal of a player whose talent and character remain high enough for him to remain in the game, but not good enough to find a permanent home. Smith is much, much more than that. Players like him comprise the backbone of the NBA — true pros, able to make any situation, in any season, work. Here he is, having been in 762 regular season games over 13 seasons, and having become the first player in NBA history to play for 13 teams – the last (for now) being the Nuggets, where he’s been this season after being traded from Washington, along with Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, last summer.
Yet no one dismisses what Smith brings to a team, even one as loaded as Denver, which will take a 1-0 lead into Game 2 of the finals Sunday against Miami, and for whom he plays the elder statesman role.
“It’s obvious why he’s stuck around as long as he has. He’s such a good dude. Guys love him,” says Jeff Hornacek, who coached Smith in Phoenix in 2013-14.
“Anybody asks me about my professionalism, I tell them, I learned a lot from Ish,” says KCP, who’s been on three teams with him. “Just being with him in Detroit, and him moving around, and (us) meeting up in Washington. It never seems like it bothers him. He stays happy, smiling, like always supporting the group. I learned a lot from him.”
Year after year after year, since coming into the league as an undrafted rookie in 2010, Smith has had to start over. He was with the Warriors at the very beginning of the franchise’s turnaround, with Steph Curry (who he played with in AAU in North Carolina, on the Charlotte Stars) and Klay Thompson, in 2011 — but just for six games.
He played for the Bucks the year before they drafted Giannis Antetokounmpo. He suffered through what may have been the nadir of the “Process” 76ers, in 2015-16 — yet managed to score 20 or more 16 times on what wound up being a 10-win team. He’s been on multiple Pistons and Wizards incarnations, and Grit-n-Grinded with the Grizzlies to a seventh game against Oklahoma City in the Western Conference semifinals in 2011 (and, yes, eventually, he wound up playing for the Thunder, too).
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But he hasn’t been out of work, or out of the league, since President Obama’s first term in office.
“Honestly, man, I’ve got faith in the Lord,” Smith said Saturday. “Whatever way He kind of did it, that’s the way He did it. And I’ve played in every role. When I was in Philly, trusting the Process, it was like, ‘Hey, Ish, you’ve got to get us a bucket.’ Even if we won 10 or 20 games. I was rolling. I was in every role. My first three years, it was like, ‘Ish, you’re a young guy, we need you, go out there and play, come early.’ And this was when it wasn’t no Uber, so you get there in a cab early, or get a cab with one of your coaches, get your one-on-one, two-on-two. And you’re not going to play. Get your suit on – remember when you had to wear suits on the bench?
“Then I get to Phoenix. And I’m like, all right, we got a bunch of misfits here. And we win 48 games. … then you’re playing with AD (Anthony Davis) in New Orleans, throwing lobs left and right. So I’ve been in every role. Then, I was in Detroit. My role in Washington (was) ‘Ish, come in, change the pace.’ I’ve averaging like 11, 12 (points) off the bench, five, six assists. … now, you’re in like this leadership role, where guys are like, ‘Ish, what you think about this?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not used to this.’ ‘Cause you see the game now from here, instead of being out there. Out there, it’s easy. It’s like, okay, the low man’s here, he’s going to play like this, read and react. You’ve been doing it your whole life.”
Smith knew, of course, that he would not have the career of Paul, who set the standard for point guard play in Winston-Salem, a place that’s sent multiple floor generals to the league — from Muggsy Bogues and Jeff Teague to Frank Johnson and Danny Young. (Not mentioned: Charlie Davis, who played for Cleveland and Portland in the early ’70s, but was better known for being the first Black player in Atlantic Coast Conference history to be named ACC Player of the Year, in 1971.)
It took humility — most coming honestly, because Smith is that kind of man, from that kind of family. His mother cleaned houses in the mornings and raised him, along with his two sisters and a brother, in the afternoons. His father taught at a high school in the morning, then did janitorial work in the evenings, for the family company.
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There were no excuses in the Smith home, and no shortcuts. When Smith was entering his senior year at Central Cabarrus High in Concord, N.C., he wanted a car — “a green Honda Accord, $2,500, 1993,” Smith recalled. His father pointed down to the baseboards in a classroom at his father’s school.
“‘Ish, you want this car?,'” his father asked him. “‘We’re going to pull (the old baseboards) off, and you’re going to put some new baseboards down. They need new baseboards. That’s how you’re going to get your money.’ That’s kind of indicative of how I was raised, why I work, why I don’t trip. If you told any of us that we’d be sitting there, at this time, when we were young, we would have signed up.”
It’s still hard, though, in a league that tests you every day, and that works overtime to grind you down, question your worth, to not get jaded about the business. Yet Smith never has complained about the myriad trades that have been a regular part of his Februarys, or the minimum contracts, or the sporadic playing time.
“He’s been like that forever,” says Stan Van Gundy, now an analyst for TNT, who coached him in Orlando and Detroit.
“He’s just, he totally gets how fortunate, not just himself, but anyone, is to be in the NBA and playing. He’s just one of the most grateful people — not just in the NBA — that I’ve been around. He appreciates everything that’s happened. And he’s worked his ass off to get all this. But he doesn’t even really talk about that. He’s just seriously grateful to be able to play in the league, and everything else. … I never saw a day, not one, where Ish was down and didn’t have enthusiasm, didn’t have energy. Not one day.”
Smith always had his quicks. Kevin Durant praised his speed early in his career. Smith’s wicked crossover and ability to get into the paint at will against almost anyone is valuable to any team, in any era.
“He used to embarrass me and Aaron Brooks in practice,” said Miami’s Kyle Lowry, who played with Smith in Houston in 2010, Smith’s rookie season.
“Too fast, couldn’t keep up with him,” Lowry continued. “I ain’t going to lie, I used to dislike having to go live practice against him. But if you go back and look at his journey and the things he’s been through, to finally get to this point of getting to the finals, I can’t wait to just see him and say hello. Every time I see him, he’d still call me ‘Vet.'”
In Phoenix, Smith had to fight for playing time with Eric Bledsoe, Leandro Barbosa and Goran Dragić, on a team that shocked the league by going 48-34.
“He just had that smile,” Hornacek recalled. “He practiced hard all the time. If he didn’t play for a night or two, I could go to him and say, ‘We need to pick up the pace, get these guys moving,’ and off he’d go. He wasn’t a shooter, but he knew how to run the offense. We got into a groove with him, the Morris Brothers, Gerald Green. They just loved playing with him … but besides playing with him, it was just his personality. For him it was about the team. Obviously, every guy thinks about how he can stay in the league, but for him it was about the team winning. … He’ll be the (Udonis) Haslem. He should be 42 years old and still at the end of somebody’s bench. Because he’ll be helping that team win.”
Van Gundy recalled one time when the Pistons were going through a rough patch, having lost three or four in a row.
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“I had been in early, sitting in the office, getting ready for practice, but not in a great mood, to say the least,” he said. “Ish was always one of the first guys to come in, to do his shooting and stuff. I had to walk across the practice court to get to the training room. I was going to go talk to our trainer about injury updates and stuff before practice. So I come walking through, and I’m sure I don’t have a smile on my face or anything. And Ish is out there shooting, and Ish just turns around to me and says, ‘Coach? Can you believe that they pay us for this?’ How do you not smile at that point? How do you not have your entire mood changed and have an entirely different perspective on what’s going on? He’s an amazing guy.”
Van Gundy would get personnel updates on players around the league from his director of player personnel, Adam Glessner, who’s now the Spurs’ Senior Director of Basketball Intelligence. Part of Glessner’s job was to find out everything about as many players as possible, talking to coaches who’d coached them, or team personnel who’d worked with them, to add to Detroit’s dossier on potential acquisitions down the road. Obviously, since Smith’s played with so many guys over the years, Glessner and Van Gundy figured Smith would be a font of juicy inside information.
He wasn’t.
“It’s one of the downfalls of Ish,” Van Gundy said, laughing. “I said it’s useless getting intel from Ish, because he loves everybody and thinks everybody’s the greatest guy ever. He’s so positive on everybody. It’s ridiculous. But it’s all legitimate. It’s not like he’s trying to BS you. He has an innate sense of finding the positive in every person. It’s not like he’s naive or anything. Ish knows the deal. But what he chooses to focus on, in every situation and every person, is the positive.”
It’s why Smith is fine with playing only a little more than nine minutes a game this season. The Nuggets have Jamal Murray to handle the rock, and have revitalized Bruce Brown’s usage as a point guard, as he played effectively earlier in his career. So Smith sits. Yet the one achievement Smith’s never been able to reach through his play is now three victories from happening, in a season where he’s rarely played at all. The Show is funny that way.
“It would be gratifying, honestly,” Smith says. “And, that’s not everything. A piece of jewelry isn’t any and everything. But, man. The years you go through, the 13 years and counting. The years you won 10 games. The years you were enjoying a city, you’re on a team, and all of a sudden they call you and say, ‘Ish, you’re about to get traded.’ Then the years you’re in Detroit and keep hitting your head on the ninth seed, then you finally get in the eighth seed and play Milwaukee, and they bust your head. Those, it just feels like it’s putting an icing on the cake.
“A ring isn’t everything, but man, it (would feel) good.”
GO DEEPER
Ish Smith Pop Quiz: How many of his 13 years' worth of teammates with rings can he name?
(Top photo of Ish Smith: Garrett Ellwood / NBAE via Getty Images)
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