Watch Oklahoma City Thunder @ Boston Celtics, live on Sky Sports USA from 7pm on Sunday
Sunday 3 February 2019 20:30, UK
The improvement in Marcus Smart's shooting is allowing him to stay on the court for longer periods, allowing him to terrorise opponents with his elite defensive skills, writes Mark Deeks.
For the entirety of his career thus far, the question about Boston Celtics guard Marcus Smart has always been what kind of impact he could have if he could just hit more of his shots.
Headed into this season, Smart was a career 26.9 per cent three-point shooter in the regular season. This is not a good mark on its own but it was worse in context - for the most part, these shots were either wide open (a Marcus Smart three-point attempt has long been a victory for the opposing defense), or unnecessarily difficult (Smart is nothing if not confident).
He was also particularly streaky; all shooters except the very elite are streaky, to be sure, yet Smart was streakier than most.
For every hot night, such as his game-changing seven made three-pointers in game three of the 2017 Eastern Conference Finals, there would come a fortnight of solid 'brick work'. Yet Smart seemed inextricably linked to the relatively high volume that made the streakiness so cringey at times. Heading into this season, Smart had a 321-1,194 career success rate on regular season three-pointers. For comparison's sake, noted poor shooter Magic Johnson shot 325-1,074 in his career.
The allure behind the jump shot examination came from what else Smart offered. A guard in some form without a defined position, Smart had neither the shot making talent for the off-guard spot, nor the ability to fully see the floor or get enough separation with the handle to penetrate and create from the point guard spot consistently.
Yet he made up for it with his defense, tenacity, hustle, effort, size and footwork. Any of the platitudes so often used (or sought) by coaches to describe their favoured players and their intangibles were used, aptly, for Smart.
And now, we can see what he is like when he hits his shots.
On the season thus far, Smart is shooting 36.2 per cent from three-point range. This far surpasses his career-best mark of 33.5 per cent, set as a rookie, and even farther surpasses the 30.1 per cent he shot from that range last season.
33 per cent to 36 per cent is the difference between Wayne Ellington and Ish Smith. He has made as many three-pointers so far this season as team-mate Terry Rozier, who is supposed to be the scorer of the two, and has more than players such as Nic Batum, Eric Bledsoe, Malcolm Brogdon and Nemanja Bjelica.
Indeed, Smart's offensive improvements are not just limited to better three-point shooting. The three-point rate (a measure of how many of his total shots are taken from three) is also up to 63.3 per cent, a significant increase on his 48.3 per cent mark of last season, something itself borne out of better shot selection inside the arc.
Perhaps buoyed by the offensive talent around him, the Brad Stevens offensive system that results in a ton of open looks (and which really should have been more successful than it has been), his new contract or simple incremental development, Smart has put away many of the floaters and awkward running bankers he used to similarly insist on taking.
They are the most inefficient shot in basketball, and particularly so when in the hands of Smart, who shot a lowly 29 per cent on 100 shots from between three to ten feet last season. This season, he has taken only 41, and the pull-up mid-range jumpers are mostly gone, too.
Nonetheless, it remains the defensive end on which Smart truly makes his imprint, and so it shall always be.
Historically, a player's position was considered best defined by what position they defended against. This somewhat nebulous concept nevertheless made some sense when applied in a heavily man-to-man era, when zone defences were illegal, when switches were discouraged due to the slow-footed big men bred to play primarily around the basket and defend Shaquille O'Neal who once dominated rosters.
Now, however, the NBA is a switching league. With an ever-increasing focus on pick-and-rolls (which start increasingly far away), floor spacing, perimeter-based big men and the resultant rises in athleticism and ball skills for bigger guys, switching is now the new norm.
Essentially, everybody defends everybody.
Defining positions therefore does not matter so much in the league anymore, and Smart is the embodiment of that.
For all the work over the last generation to devise defensive metrics that better encapsulated a player's impact on that end better than the traditional measures of steals and blocks ever could, they all have the same drawback. Essentially, defense is only measurable in as far as what actually happens. Yet one of the most critical aspects of defence is nigh-on impossible to measure - denial.
This is the area in which Smart shines brightest. His flops and the resultant offensive fouls drawn are well documented, as is the intense way with which he competes and antagonises while just staying on the right side of the referees.
Yet Smart's true value comes in the way opposing offenses actively avoid whoever he happens to be guarding. Because his size and defensive prowess allow him to defend any guard or wing forward, Smart can be - and is - put on the opponent's back-court star. He will play anybody from Damian Lillard to Kawhi Leonard. And those opponents are in for a tough one-on-one perimeter match-up, if even they can get the ball in the first place.
More than anyone in this league, Smart can take opponents out of the game. He denies opponents space, cuts and even lazy forays to the half-court line to get the ball in the first place, with a relentlessness and reckless abandon most others can only manage in short spurts. And now that he is hitting enough of his shots, he is not taking himself out of the game in the process any longer.
As Smart goes, the Celtics go. It is fair to say that Boston have not had the season that most expected, ranking only fifth in the Eastern Conference and five-and-a-half games behind the Milwaukee Bucks in first.
But after a 10-10 start, they moved Smart into the starting line-up, and are 23-8 with him in that role. If this is a coincidence, we will need to see some supporting evidence,
