Lost and Found at the Josh Smith Game

Mercurial talent is the term we use. It's a polite way of expressing our aggrieved bafflement at an athlete who is brilliant at some times and seems only barely competent or interested at others. It's accusatory, but it's also something like praise. The term is not used to describe players who are streaky or wild. It's reserved for those who, when they underdeliver, seem to be doing so somehow to spite us, and themselves, by withholding their genius like a nasty child hiding a toy from a playmate. Why won't you do that wonderful thing you do? we ask. It's a petulant question that mostly gets a petulant answer. A wordless glower, if that.

Did you see Josh Smith on Tuesday night? He tapped into the flow of Game 2 midway through the third quarter and spent most of the fourth carving the Dallas Mavericks defense into progressively smaller pieces, resulting in a series of lobs to Dwight Howard and dunks for himself. Smith flashed the three-point range he believes—still, somehow, despite a career of evidence—he has. He jumped passing lanes. He played point forward. After 11 seasons in the NBA, Smith seems older than he is. On Tuesday he seemed younger, and moved in that characteristically surprising way that gigantic, gliding men do. He was like a clipper with long arms and panoramic vision. It was his best game in years.

As Smith began to find his rhythm, a peculiar thing happened. Each time he touched the ball, a psychic bubble enveloped him, and he operated within a space in which nothing was difficult. He drove through the apparitional Dallas defense with perfect composure, swiftly yet at his own speed. His passes were like notes he was scrawling for himself. He put on a show, but he wasn't quite showman-like. Rarely does dominant play look so placidly inward. Even more rarely is Josh Smith dominant these days.

The nickname no one really cites anymore explains him. Smith is, or was, Smoove; he has a smooth game. This is what made him both special and maligned. Smoothness is contextual. When Smith is awash in buckets and blocks, it reads coolly—as a detachment that insulates him from pressure. When he's clanking contested 19-footers, he looks somnambulant. Perhaps he had stopped caring in Detroit, on a team without a point; at the very least, it appeared that he had. The reckless haste with which Stan Van Gundy excommunicated Smith suggested that something inside him had switched off for good. When he was cut in January, Smith's predicament posed a harrowing question: at what point do you sink so far into boredom that you disappear completely?

Apparently, Smith was not irretrievable. If it's too grand to say that Josh Smith is at home in Houston—in a supporting role on a good team; alongside Howard, a teammate half a lifetime ago in Atlanta AAU ball—or that he has rediscovered his vocation, then at least he's clearly engaged again. There's light behind those eyes that, even when he was at his zenith, have only ever dimly glimmered.

The mercurial athlete appears to taunt us, but that's just perceptional trickery. Players do not play for us, against us, or at us so much as in front of us. We're more like voyeurs than an audience at a stage production. The story of Josh Smith's career has bends and valleys like it does because that's the way careers go sometimes, in fact most of the time. On its face, it's odd that this straightforward truth would upset us, but then we are pretty confused about our role in all this. We'd like to think our sympathizing with athletes will push them toward success. Smith is not a distant figure, even if he is actually far away from us. He's a friend who can't get out of his own way. We want to help, but can't.

We're probably past the point where anyone believes Smith can channel his unique smoothness into something that thrills us every game. Even during his prime in Atlanta, when he was catching entirely too much shit considering how great he was year in and year out, he was prone to malaise. He's a role player now, one whom the Rockets both need and can't entirely depend upon. He's doing well, all things considered, but something sad about him persists. He's moderately washed up at just 29.

But maybe the expectations being as low as they are will help us see what can be so infectious about Smoove. On Tuesday night, his sudden seizing of the game came as a surprise, as opposed to something he was expected to do. It wasn't the fulfillment of an obligation; it was an impromptu firework show. It's a joyful feeling, to be startled by all the things a player can suddenly do. For the first time since very early in his career, that player was Josh Smith. At once, we remembered how dazzling he was while marveling at how dazzling he can still be. It was like meeting a friend all over again.