Can Less be More for Josh Smith?

To describe Stan Van Gundy as "fed up" would be inaccurate. Or it would plant the wrong image in your mind's eye. Stan Van—who is, remember, both head coach and president of the Detroit Pistons—didn't go into conniptions during a late-night film session and decide, as Josh Smith clanked yet another 19-footer, that he needed Smoove to not be on his basketball team anymore.

Van Gundy reportedly shopped Smith to literally every other team in the NBA before on Monday morning, presumably with that characteristic Well shit, what are you gonna do? look on his face, he outright cut a player with two years and $27 million left on his deal. Van Gundy decided to eat Smith's contract because he simply couldn't figure out what to do with him.

Josh Smith seems to not totally know what to do with Josh Smith. His body is like a car he has never learned how to drive. He came into the league out of Oak Hill Academy, an NBA talent factory in Virginia, as an absurd athlete who wasn't quite a basketball player and has spent the past decade fluctuating between maturation and regression. It speaks to his talent and worth ethic that, despite his shaky decision-making and insistence on playing as if he were LeBron James, he had some brilliant years in Atlanta. A good Josh Smith game is something to behold: some flashy dunks, drive-erasing defense, a few slick face-up moves, a couple space-bending passes, and the whole time, a sense that you're watching a singular talent. No one else is good in the exact way Josh Smith is good, and that is what makes him so frustrating when he is bad.

Some folks are arrogant enough to think they can climb Everest. Smith has always been pretty sure he could jump over it. What besides hubris explains the ill-advised three-pointers, out-of-control drives, and spot-up jumpers from nowhere in particular? Smith could be—and has occasionally been—a great player. It's his belief that he's a transcendent one that hastened his exit from Detroit.

Smith was marvelously terrible during his season and change with the Pistons. He and Brandon Jennings—another guy one could imagine Van Gundy trying to offload— composed an abysmal volume shooting tandem, rejecting conventional shot selection wisdom and instead heaving up whatever felt right to them. They fought the math, and the math won. Smith is a capable scorer from eight feet and in, and yet he habitually drifted even farther from the hoop in Detroit than he did in Atlanta. By some measures, he was the worst shooter in the league in 2013-14. This season hadn't been much better.

Smith infamously told USA Today's Jeff Zillgitt in January of this year that "I'm confident in each and every play I make. I don't think about it. I just play and play with confidence." That's a mockable comment, but it's also truthful. We are what we are in our own heads, whether that jibes with reality or not. Smith sucks with aplomb because he doesn't think he sucks. And he thinks if he didn't step into every stupid shot with aplomb, he actually would suck.

What's next for Smith is unclear, but the optimists are dreaming of him getting scooped up by a contender and excelling in a limited role. That is likely the only way forward for Smith: to do more by being asked— or being ordered, if need be— to do less. He could find his calling as a superior post defender and garbage bucket getter, a sort of big-man version of what happened with Andre Iguodala once Iggy stopped trying to take on entire defenses by himself.

The question that looms over Smith's now-precarious career is whether that's something he wants to do. He has to level with himself, to look in the mirror and lie a little less than he has been. If he does that, the memories of these past couple sour years will lift like a fog. He may never be what he was during his best days in a Hawks uniform, but he could become something altogether thrilling again.