Whenever Josh Smith is talked about, perhaps many fans, especially the Hawks, regret that he entered the NBA as a high school student and grew up with the team that was in a slump at the time. With his explosive talent, Josh Smith has made rapid progress in defensive field, especially his blocking ability, breaking the record for the youngest person to deliver 10 blocks in a single game when he was less than 20 years old.
And he, also the youngest player to contribute 1,000 blocks, can be said to be the patron saint of Atalanta's basket. However, in a good situation, Smith had no ball to play at the age of 30 because of a wrong choice. So, let's see why Smith was abandoned by the NBA at his peak.
The system that perfectly suited the Hawks decided to sign the Pistons.
First of all, it is necessary to say that after Josh Smith ended the 12-13 season, he did not choose to renew his contract with the Eagles, but accepted an offer from the Detroit Pistons to bring his talent to Motor City. Everything that happened later proved that his decision was extremely wrong, and even indirectly ruined his great future.
During the Hawks' 9 years, he slowly grew into one of the top interior players in the NBA, and if Joe Johnson is the team's offensive core, then Smith is the team's defensive gate. In the 2007-08 season, Smith averaged 17.2 points, 8.2 rebounds, 3.4 assists, 1.5 steals and 2.8 blocks per game, and with such an all-round performance, he and Johnson led the team back to the playoffs. In the face of the league's first Celtics, Smith did not shy away from the field in the showdown with Garnett, and helped the team and opponents reach the seventh, and it was this outstanding performance that made Smith famous and strengthened the team's team building model with him as the core.
The team took advantage of his speed, defense, bouncing power and other aspects to develop some tactics specifically for him, which made Smith even more successful. In the 11-12 season, Smith has begun to take over the core banner in Joe Johnson's hands, and the average per game has reached 18.8 points, 9.6 rebounds, and 3.9 assists, which is the best performance of his entire career.
In the 12-13 season, he has become the boss of the team. However, Smith became more and more inflated, which made the management more and more dissatisfied, but the team still wanted to keep him, but Smith refused. Eventually, he went to the Pistons at the moment when he was supposed to take off, and this was the beginning of his career.
The positioning of "no three, no four", technical defects are completely exposed.
At that time, the pistons were willing to sign him because they wanted to use Smith's good physical talent and defensive ability to form a strong interior combination with Greg Monroe and Drummond. However, the "small-ball era" at that time was coming, and for this combination without shooting, it was tantamount to the beginning of being blown up. However, before Curry could initiate a new round of tactical reforms, Josh Smith exposed his problems. Although he averaged 14.5 points per game in his career, Smith's self-directed scoring ability is very average, and he uses more bounce, strength and explosive power on the Eagles to work under the basket or at height.
Although he has a mid-range shot, his efficiency is extremely unstable, and his 45.2% shooting percentage throughout his career is not a qualified performance for a long-term player who has played the No. 4 position. Moreover, after having Monroe and Drummond, the relatively small Smith had to go to the No. 3 position, but he did not have enough ball holding ability to use it as a tactical starting point. To make matters worse, both Monroe and Drummond are traditional interior lines, and once they enter positional warfare, the interior lines become crowded and simply cannot create enough space for Smith.
In addition, Smith not only has a vague positioning, but is also blindly confident in his three-pointers, shooting 3.4 three-pointers per game in the 13-14 season, the highest in his entire career. However, the shooting percentage is a miserable 26.4%. Moreover, he only shot 28.5% of the three-point shooting rate in his entire NBA career, which is not the material for shooting three-pointers, but he did such a job.
As a result, the Pistons' record is not only not improving, but it is still declining compared to before. It is precisely for this reason that after only one and a half seasons here, Smith is not far from fading out of the NBA.
Personality problems, physical decline, and eventually self-severance.
Of course, in addition to the above problems, Smith himself has one of the biggest problems, that is, his personality. Having not played in the NCAA, for many high school students who skipped to the NBA, they didn't have much experience with campus basketball, which made it difficult for them to maintain enough team awareness and tactical literacy.
In addition, because the talent is strong, this also makes many of them unruly in character. The youngest player to enter the NBA, Andre Bynum, after leaving the demanding Lakers, became addicted to "washing and cutting blowing", and left the NBA at the age of 26. Although Josh Smith is not as showy as bynum, his personality is also very paranoid. In the later stages of the Eagles, he was dissatisfied with the team's offensive and tactical arrangements, so he openly called the team and eventually left the team. And when it comes to the Pistons, he is constantly shooting outside the three-point line, and the manager's arrangement has no authority in his eyes. Such a player who does not abide by the discipline of the team and does not obey the arrangement, naturally no team will want it.
In addition, with the plague of injuries and the increasing age, josh Smith's physical fitness on which he became famous has declined considerably.
Once he lost his talent, Smith had almost no advantage to support his continued playing in the NBA, which is the biggest reason why he was given up at the age of 30 without a ball, or even after not playing in the CBA for a long time.