Marcus Smart brings veteran grit and a reunion with Ime Udoka to Houston, but fans must balance Defensive Player of the Year expectations against his more recent history.
The Houston Rockets haven’t had the most eventful offseason, and have definitely been overshadowed by various other teams in the league. This transaction cycle has been dominated by star players getting traded and signing new contracts, which has completely reshaped the league.
Rafael Stone and Houston’s front office opted to go in a different direction, with their biggest addition this summer being a two-year, 12 million dollar deal. This, of course, was the signing of Marcus Smart as an unrestricted free agent.
As discussed on Roundtable, he’s a gritty point of attack defender. A former Defensive Player of the Year, in fact, and the first guard to win that honor since Gary Payton 1996, per Basketball-Reference. Smart is also reuniting with the coach that helped him with DPOY back in 2022.
I think that year is important to note, though, because that will be five years ago at the end of this upcoming season. That’s a long time in the league, actually being the average length of an NBA career nowadays.
So he’s basically played another full NBA career after winning Defensive Player of the Year. I would strongly urge people to get any ideas or hopes of that version of Marcus Smart out of their head. He’s simply not that guy anymore at 32 years of age.
I am happy to say he’s not anywhere close to completely washed, though, because I was genuinely worried for a while. After getting traded away from the Boston Celtics in the summer of 2023, his career took a turn for the worst.
He only suited up for 20 games in the 2023-2024 season, but I’m not sure how much of that was on him. That was still more than twice as many games as Ja Morant played, signaling the end of that era of Memphis Grizzlies basketball.
After a 27-55 season, the team decided things weren’t working and traded Smart to the Washington Wizards after another 19 games. He then only played 15 games in DC, and his NBA future seemed bleak.
55 games played in two seasons didn’t look very inspiring, but the Los Angeles Lakers still took a chance on him, and thankfully so. He played in more games than his prior two seasons combined, and started in 54 out of 62 of them.
He showed to still have the same intensity, seemingly being more inspired and motivated when playing for a team that’s actually competitive. Houston fans saw that themselves this past postseason, as he helped LA force an upset in Round 1.
While I’d be a little surprised to see him starting 50+ games again, I do expect him to get more than 20 minutes a night, defend like his life depends on it, and shoot around league average from deep. Be warned, he’s still a very willing shooter, despite the percentages saying he should be more reserved.
