When the Hawks go to Detroit tonight looking for their seventh consecutive victory, they won’t have to worry about Josh Smith taking over the game with his versatile skillset or hope Smith shoots the Pistons out of the game because of his insistence on taking shots he’s never made consistently.
Smith is, of course, capable of doing either of those things on any given night. Pistons boss Stan Van Gundy decided the tradeoff wasn’t worth it and made the rare move of waiving Smith outright (no buyout or amnesty) with two years and $24 million left on his deal. The Pistons are taking a cap hit and are on the hook for the money less the prorated amount of the $2 million deal Smith signed with the Rockets for this season.
The Pistons are 7-0 since cutting Smith after posting a 5-24 record with him and the Rockets are 5-4 with Smith and 20-7 without him. It was easy to dismiss the correlation between Smith leaving and the Pistons winning when the victories came against bad teams such as the Magic and Knicks. But then Detroit won at San Antonio on Tuesday and at Dallas on Wednesday and the Smith-less Pistons started gaining more attention.
Says Sports Illustrated: "Getting rid of Josh Smith was the best thing that could happened to the Pistons."
Chimed in ESPN Stats & Info: "The Pistons have been a top-three team both offensively and defensively since waiving Josh Smith. They were one of the league's worst teams overall with Smith."
Concluded Deadspin: "The difference between the Pistons before and the Pistons now isn't that they got rid of a cancer. It's that they got rid of a lousy shooter who had to play out of position and never made sense on their team. That's difference enough. They needed space, and now they've got it, and now they can play."
None of this will surprise Hawks fans. They loved it when Smith harnessed his considerable talent to lead the Hawks to victories, which happened quite often. But they groaned when Smith sailed passes out of bounds on fast breaks as a guard pleaded for him to please give up the ball, or when Smith pulled up for clanked jump shots at the worst times.
Back during the 2011-2012 season, WSB-TV's Zach Klein talked to a couple of opposing coaches who confirmed what was obvious to anyone who watched how opponents invited Smith to float to the perimeter and shoot. "He takes long two-pointers, which is the worst shot in the game," one coach told Klein. "We hope he scores his first two shots, because we know he'll keep shooting from out there."
After that season Smith cut down on the amount of field goals he attempted from beyond 16 feet. Last season Smith took more 3-pointers than ever, which theoretically was better than all of those long twos because 3-pointers are more efficient. But Smith isn't a good perimeter shooter, period, so giving him credit for taking more 3-pointers inspires the kind of pretzel logic reflected in this headline: "Josh Smith on pace for worst 3-point shooting season in history, but only because he's playing smarter."
Smith did not end up setting that record last season--his 26.4 percent 3-point shooting edged out Antoine Walker's 25.6 percent 3-point shooting in 1999-2000 (minimum 200 attempts). This season Smith is shooting 22.2 percent on 3-pointers with 54 attempts in 37 games, so at least he's cut way down on the attempts.
That Smith didn’t fit with Detroit was obvious to everyone but since-fired Pistons GM Joe Dumars. His signing of Smith is among the many blunders that led to the downfall of the Pistons. Dumars left an odd legacy as a basketball executive in Detroit, where he helped build a perennial contender in the East without the benefit of lucking into a superstar and then systematically destroyed what he had built with a series of inexplicable moves.
As for Smith, he and his representatives always felt he got an unfair rap in Atlanta (I was the AJC Hawks beat writer for three of Smith's seasons here so I regularly heard their complaints firsthand). The gist of their defense was that Smith took more heat than other Hawks players who also deserved it (which probably was true sometimes) and that every player is going to miss shots sometimes (which missed the point by a mile).
It’s too simple to say the Pistons are winning only because they got rid of Smith. But it’s fair to say they (and the Hawks) couldn’t effectively play a space-it, pass-it and shoot-it offensive style with a high-usage, low-efficiency player like Smith as one of the main cogs.
