If you’re an outsider looking in, the past two years may have looked like a fall from grace for Marcus Smart.
He went from being the heart and soul of the championship-hopeful Boston Celtics to an oft-injured and disappointing Memphis Grizzly whose trade away from Boston helped bring the team a championship.
Now he’s seemingly marooned in the nation’s capital, still diving for loose balls and making hustle plays, but this time for a sub-20 win team instead of in the Eastern Conference Finals. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Smart’s time as a game-changing NBA player is not over, but it is certainly in its twilight. Smart is a rare breed of player, however, whose place in the league will long outlast his box-score production.
Take a look at the list of oldest active players in the NBA. There are still some high-impact guys on that list (LeBron James, Chris Paul, Al Horford, Mike Conley, and Steph Curry, to name a few). But a lot of the oldest players left barely play at all.
Look at guys like Garrett Temple and Taj Gibson — two veterans who have not really been NBA-caliber players in years. Temple and Gibson are on the Toronto Raptors and Charlotte Hornets, respectively, two of the worst teams in the league. They are not ring chasers.
Guys like Temple and Gibson are functionally assistant coaches who take up roster spots, which sounds like a concept with a lot of drawbacks, but it is actually incredibly beneficial to each respective team’s young core. Since they are still professionals, they can serve as in-house models for how players should be approaching life as an NBA player.
The day-to-day life of someone like Temple or Gibson is probably no different from how it was a decade-plus ago, when both players were playing far more impactful minutes. It benefits young players so much to have a role model in the locker room to talk to and imitate to sharpen their sense of professionalism.
This brings me back to Smart. Read this feature of him published in The Athletic a couple of years back which has stuck with me ever since. Smart is, by all accounts, one of the best guys in the NBA (even in spite of his long history of on-court antics). It will benefit Bilal Coulibaly, Alex Sarr, Bub Carrington, and whoever the Wizards take at no. 6 to be around Smart every day and learn from him.
Think about the Houston Rockets of the past couple of years. The disorganized, ugly, meaningless basketball they played over the first half of the 2020s gave way to their current brand of gritty, hard-nosed hoops once vets like Fred VanVleet, Dillon Brooks, and Jeff Green walked through the door.
The Wizards should strongly consider keeping Smart around because guys like him are the key to a successful rebuild in the NBA.