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Josh Smith waived by Pistons: Stan Van Gundy isn’t messing around

By Ben Beecken

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Josh Smith was signed to a four-year, $54 million contract about a year and six months ago by the previous Detroit Pistons regime.

We’re just a few months into Stan Van Gundy’s tenure as both front office boss and head coach, and the former Miami and Orlando head coach identified one clear area that the 5-23 Pistons could improve by subtracting a player that received heavy minutes: by cutting the supremely talented but eternally inefficient Smith.

The former Atlanta Hawk consistently improved over his first six seasons in the league after being drafted out of high school with the 17th pick in the 2004 NBA Draft by Atlanta. By the 2009-10 season, Smith was 24-years old and a borderline All-Star. Since then, however, Smith morphed his game from a player that attempted 64.7% of his shots from within three feet of the rim to a small-ball small forward that has jacked up 65.4% of his shot attempts from beyond 16 feet since the start of the 2010-11 season.

And while the league (save for Byron Scott and the Minnesota Timberwolves) has largely discovered that, as a general rule, the more quality three-pointers a team takes, the more threes are made, the more efficient a teams scoring becomes, and the more games are ultimately won, Smith has struggled with the idea of a “quality” three-point shot. Since shooting 33.1% from beyond the arc in that 2010-11 season (not horrible, but barely league-average-y), he’s shot a horrific 27.5% from deep while attempting a staggering 3.7 threes per game.

Somehow, someway, Smith decided to start fancying himself as a gunner in today’s NBA, and it robbed him of any chance he had to make an All-Star team. The physical tools are unquestionably present, but after dominating in the paint in the early stages of his career, he became a player that jacked up not only three-pointers, but also long two-point shots early in the shot clock and in transition situations.

Now, Smith is in his age-29 season and obviously entering what could be a rapid decline phase. He’s owed a ton of money, and Van Gundy correctly identified that his team would be better without Smith than with him from both a purely on-court standpoint as well as in the locker room, and it made more sense to free up gobs of minutes at the forward spots by letting him walk for nothing.

It’s a gutsy move simply from a public relations and salary cap standpoint, but something that no doubt would have been nearly impossible for Van Gundy to convince a front office to do if he was not himself the boss of basketball decisions. This is a perfect example of exactly why SVG craved this autonomy, and why he ultimately will be successful if ownership indeed allows him to do seemingly hair-brained things like waive a perceived star that makes tens of millions of dollars and flush all of that owed cash.

From a basketball perspective, this will make the Pistons better. Whether you want to look at Basketball-Reference.com’s Win Shares or the fantastic BoxScoreGeeks.com’s Wins Produced, it’s obvious that Detroit will improve simply by never putting Smith on the court again.

It’ll be interesting to see how much the still-bad Pistons will improve this year, but it’s an exciting and out-of-left-field move for the great Stan Van Gundy. He’s going to get the ship turned around, and moves like this will only expedite the process.

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