How Josh Smith's contract has become the worst deal of the summer

You couldn't have asked for a possession much more representative of Josh Smith's season--maybe the Pistons' season in general--than the one that he had at the end of Detroit's game against the Knicks last night in New York. Down two with under a half-minute to go, Smith was squaring up against Knicks star Carmelo Anthony deep on the right wing, the two really bumping and getting physical. Then Anthony seemed to think to himself "wait, what the hell am I doing?" and instead backed off Smith, giving him the long jumper, which he was ready and willing to fire away. The shot air-balled badly, as if Melo had gotten a piece of the shot, but he was a step or two too far off Josh for that to be a possibility. It was just another ill-advised, badly missed jumper to add to the J-Smoove 2013-14 highlight reel.

Truthfully, Josh Smith had one of the better games of his disappointing season in the Knicks showdown--21 points on just 14 shots, to go with 12 boards, five dimes and 8-9 shooting from the line. But it's the missed jumper--along with the season-high eight turnovers--that will be the enduring memory of Smith's game, as the crystallization of the frustration that Pistons fans must be feeling watching their prized off-season acquisition costing them so much with his poor outside shooting and poor decision-making (largely as it relates to his poor outside shooting).

Four years after Detroit GM Joe Dumars' infamous off-season free agent splurge--the one that netted them $80 million worth of Charlie Villanueva and Ben Gordon, two career bench players who quickly proved incapable of consistently producing even as reserves--much of the Detroit faithful was holding their collective breath to see what Dumars would come up with in the first off-season since 2009 where he would have significant cap space to work with. The return this summer seemed significantly less disastrous--All-Star-caliber Hawks power forward, signed for a could-be-worse four years and $54 million, and tantalizing young point guard Brandon Jennings, swapped in a sign-and-trade with the Bucks for the frustratingly slow-developing Brandon Knight and given a three-year, $25 million deal to keep him in Detroit into his prime years. 

Of course, there were misgivings about both players. Jennings had struggled to score efficiently in his young career, shooting over 40% from the field just once in his four years in Milwaukee, and his distributing could be a little erratic for a point guard. And of course, Smith was already infamous around the league for his reliance on his outside shooting, despite the fact that there had been virtually zero evidence that he was anything resembling a good outside shooter--Smith was just a 28% three-point shooter over his nine years in Atlanta, and in his final season as a Hawk, he shot a jaw-dropping 77% at the rim and a stupefying 33% not at the rim. 

But both Jennings and Smith were such obviously prodigious, prolific basketball talents that there was thought that maybe combining them in Detroit, with the potentially dominant frontcourt of Greg Monroe and Andre Drummond, and a veteran head coach in Mo Cheeks, that the duo could touch the higher reaches of their respective upsides. In ESPN's team preview for the Pistons, Bradford Doolittle and the SCHOENE projection system marked them for a fifth-place finish in the East, with a robust 49-33 record, citing Dumars' oft-stated philosophy that "if you put truly talented players on the floor together, they're going to find a way to make it work." Doolittle allowed that the "risk for implosion" was considerable, given some of the players involved, but concluded that "talent is always worth the gamble."

Needless to say, the talent has not proved to be particularly gamble-worthy for the Detroit Pistons thusfar. Jennings has been very erratic, particularly with his shooting, which has dropped to 38% on the backs of two straight two-for-double-digit shooting nights, and his handling, where he's averaging a career-high 3.3 turnovers a game. But he is also averaging a career-best in assists with 8.2 per game, and he's getting to the free-throw line more than he ever did with the Bucks, so it's not all bad for Brandon. Besides, he's still only 24, playing the most challenging position in an entirely new system with entirely new teammates, and he's only making about eight million a year, getting about average starting point guard pay for what is, on the whole, about average starting point guard production. Not a rousing success, but not a total disaster, either.

Smith, on the other hand, is making it real hard to find any mitigating factors with his contract. With the Pistons, the concerns about his outside shooting have been realized, and then some--he's shooting nearly four threes a game now, by far the most of his career, and barely making a quarter of them. But what's far more concerning is that not only is he shooting way too much from three, and not only is he shooting a typically low percentage from mid range, but he's also posting the worst shooting numbers of his career at the basket. He's been around 60% around the hoop for most of his career, with a career-best 62.6% last year, but this year, he can't even crack 55% close to the bucket. Without that, you look at his shot chart for this season...

...and there's really not a whole lot to hang your hat on. His overall field goal percentage for the season is a scant 40%, which is the second-lowest in the entire NBA among players who have taken at least 500 shots this year (#1 being Jennings, natch), and easily the worst of his career.

But of course, Josh is known as one of the league's most versatile talents, a box-score stuffer who contributes in stats across the board like few other players, so you can't judge his season on field goal percentage alone. Unfortunately, his stats are down pretty much across the board. He's only averaging 15.2 points a game (lowest since his second season), grabbing fewer than seven rebounds a game (lowest since his second season), handing out just over three assists a game (lowest since '08-'9), and blocking just 1.5 shots a game (lowest of his entire career). And you can't blame any of these on decreased playing time or a decreased role, as his 35 minutes a game and 23.6% usage rate are almost exactly in line with his career averages. 

Take it to the advanced stats, and it gets even uglier. Josh's Player Efficiency Rating is a scant 14.3, easily the lowest of his career and below even the assumed NBA average of 15.0, and his Win Shares per 48 Minutes is a subpar .036, where in his best seasons, his PER was over 21 and his WS/48 was around .150. According to Offensive Win Shares, he's actually been worth negative wins, and his offensive rating is well below 100. (Worth noting that both of the last two points were also true for J-Smoove last year, possibly an alarming sign of his already-declining efficiency that should've been heeded by Dumars and company).

All told, it's pretty clear that offensively, Josh is having a career-worst year, and one that ranks him on the whole as a below-average starting forward. Is he making up for it on defense, at least? Well, he is still averaging both 1.5 steals and 1.5 blocks a game, a line item only he and New Orleans big man Anthony Davis can put on their resume thusfar this season, and he's been worth 1.3 Defensive Win Shares, according to Basketball-Reference. But the Pistons rank just 22nd in the league in Defensive Rating, and according to 82games.com, their DR is actually almost two points better with Smith off the court than on (107.6 rather than 109.3), and their Effective Field Goal % three points better (49.5% insteead of 46.5%).

The really sad thing about Josh Smith's year, and the contract Joe Dumars gave him last summer, is that it's not entirely Josh's fault, since he was basically signed to play the wrong position. A career power forward with the Hawks--2010-11 was the only other year he played fewer than half of his minutes at PF--he was forced to move to the three with the pre-existing presence of Greg Monroe and Andre Drummond on the Pistons' front lines. The disparity of his production at the three and at the four is staggering: According to 82games, Smith has a PER of 17.7 while playing the four and is holding opposing PFs to a PER of just 15.2, while his own PER is a miserable 11.6 at the three, and opposing SFs are putting up a near-All-Star-caliber 18.6 PER on him.

It's enough to make you wonder what the Pistons could have done this season if they had invested in a true wing over the summer--Kevin Martin, say, or O.J. Mayo, or even Carlos Delfino or Chase Budinger if healthy--rather than stuffing a four-shaped player into a three-shaped hole and merely hoping that talent would win out. The Detroit five-man unit of Jennings, rookie shooting guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, sharpshooting small forward Kyle Singler, Monroe and Drummond has actually had a pretty nice return in just 29 minutes of floor action together, posting a 112 ORtg and a 93 DRtg. But when Josh is in at the three, the team's production craters, defensively weaker with Josh out on the perimeter and offensively disastrous with him jacking threes and long twos.

So giving four years and $54 million to a player with declining production who doesn't fit on your roster to begin with is bad, but it is the worst deal of the off-season? Thusfar, I think the answer is probably yes--most of the other questionable signings of the off-season (Jose Calderon to Dallas for four years / $29 million, Kevin Martin to Minny for 4/$28, Al Jefferson to Charlotte for 3/$41) have all returned decent production, or were lower-stakes to begin with. 

The only other contract that really compares is the one a different J.R. Smith got with the New York Knicks, getting about $18 million for three years to (so far) provide sub-replacement-level play. He's been much worse than Josh, no question, but again, six mil a year for a poor-performing player is a whole lot easier to swallow than an annual bill of almost $14 mil, and for three years rather than four. Not to mention that J.R. was coming off a career year, and was just about the only option the capped-out Knicks had for a second-unit scorer, while Josh was a real reach for a team with all kinds of options. I think you'd have to give J-Smoove the edge here. The only deal that really beats him out in terms of long-term destructiveness wasn't a free agency signing, but the trade the Nets made giving up basically their draft prospects for the next half-decade to the Celtics for Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry, three players who have yet to really give any indication that they're not totally washed up.

However, you do have to give Joe Dumars a sort of stay of execution for his free-agency blunder, until we see what he does this coming off-season, when incumbent power forward Greg Monroe becomes a restricted free agent. It's pretty clear that Smith, Monroe and Drummond cannot thrive alongside one another, but if Dumars lets Monroe walk (or even trades him before this year's deadline) and builds around the frontcourt of Smith and Drummond, the results for Detroit could be a lot more positive. Josh at the four this year has been quite productive, and when he's shared the frontcourt with Drummond sans Monroe, the returns have been solid, so it's possible that the two could be a successful pairing long-term. 

Combined with the expiring contracts of Rodney Stuckey and Charlie Villanueva, the savings from not resigning Monroe could also enable the Pistons to become bidders for potentially helpful and better-fitting wings like Luol Deng, Danny Granger or Gordon Hayward. (Or possibly even LeBron, D-Wade or Carmelo, if Dumars really feels like dreaming big.) It's possible that the Smith signing was just Step One in a much longer-term plan for Dumars than we can currently see. It'd be a little surprising to see the Pistons build around Smith instead of the younger, more efficient Monroe, but maybe the Pistons see Smith as a more versatile, higher-ceilinged player than the is-who-he-is Monroe, and it's not like they're going to be able to trade that J-Smoove contract for anything after the season he's having anyway.

For this season, though, the returns have been uniformly ghastly, and a team with enough talent to really challenge for home-court advantage in the historically weak East is instead on the fringes of the playoff picture at an underwhelming 14-21, losers of their last five to such subpar competition as the Magic, Knicks and banged-up Grizzlies. And if they don't fix this soon, or if they end up resigning Monroe and expecting that eventually their frontcourt trio will learn how to gel together, expect a lot more Josh Smith shots like last night's game-losing airball before all is said and done.