Dave McMenamin
Multiple Authors
MARCUS SMART WAS scanning Anthony Edwards’ shooting line in the box score as he slumped in a chair in front of his locker. It was March 10, moments after the Los Angeles Lakers had defeated the Minnesota Timberwolves 120-106, jumping from fifth in the Western Conference playoff race to third.
As Smart reviewed it line by line, he suddenly perked up, his exhaustion turning to something else: a sparkle of satisfaction.
Edwards, the Minnesota Timberwolves’ 24-year-old superstar, had scored just 14 points and went 2-for-15 from the floor — including 0-for-5 in the 23 possessions Smart guarded him.
The same Edwards who tormented the Lakers’ wing defenders last spring on his way to averaging 26.8 points in the lower-seeded Wolves’ five-game gentleman’s sweep of L.A. had been stifled by Smart, the former Defensive Player of the Year who joined the purple and gold on a discount deal months after that first-round upset.
While the win represented a glimmer of hope for this year’s Lakers squad that so far has displayed too much inconsistency on both ends to be feared as a top contender in the coming playoffs, it meant so much more for Smart.
He wasn’t supposed to still be locking up All-Stars at age 32.
Not after his last two injury-riddled, irrelevant seasons.
He played 20 games for a 27-win Memphis Grizzlies team in 2023-2024 and 15 games for an 18-win Washington Wizards squad a year ago, while his former team, the Boston Celtics, soared to a title without him.
And he certainly wasn’t supposed to be holding on to the stat sheet with his right hand, which he had come dangerously close to losing eight years ago.
All of which set up Smart’s attitude for this season — one he has pushed the Lakers’ star trio of LeBron James, Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves, and the rest of the roster, to adopt: If he can change the trajectory at this stage of his career, after what he has been through, who is to say the Lakers can’t change theirs for the last couple months of the season?
“We’re tired of hearing people talk s—, basically,” Smart told ESPN. “I know I am. And if you’re a competitor, if you have any type of competitor in you, you’re going to be tired of that too. So you want to try to prove ’em wrong.”
DESPITE PLAYING 56 games for the Lakers so far, and leading them with a team-best plus-minus of plus-209, the most consequential shot of Smart’s career in L.A. still came as a visitor.
It was Jan. 23, 2018, and the Celtics, then the No. 1 team in the East, were on the road to play the Lakers, then the No. 11 team in the West.
Former Lakers guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope had gone to the line with 5.7 seconds remaining and L.A. up by one and missed both free throws, with the second clanking off the rim and into Smart’s hands.
Smart, who already had 22 points in the game, took the rebound and dribbled frantically up the court until he got to the 3-point line, where he pulled up for 3 at the buzzer.
His shot hit the front iron and rimmed out, and the Celtics lost the game 108-107.
Later that night, at the team hotel, he replayed the shot in his mind and frustration boiled over.
He punched at a picture frame in his room and, this time, he didn’t miss, shattering the glass and leaving a 5-inch shard wedged inside the flesh of his palm.
“I got rushed to the ER and lost a lot of blood,” Smart told ESPN. “I passed out. … That’s how much I lost.”
When he regained consciousness, after receiving 20 stitches, Smart realized the severity of his wound.
“The doctor looked at me in my eye and told me, ‘I don’t know how you still have use of your right hand,'” Smart said. “‘You should honestly be thanking God every day.'” The piece of glass that had sliced into his hand was just millimeters from severing its use entirely. “They said it laid perfectly in between every tendon in my hand without damaging anything,” Smart said. “And they had to leave the extra piece in, because they said it will cause more damage if we go get it out.”
Smart missed 11 games before he was back on the court, helping Boston reach Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals that season before losing to James and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The Celtics reached the postseason in all nine seasons Smart was there, including a run to the 2022 NBA Finals to cap his DPOY campaign, before they lost in six games to the final glory run of the Golden State Warriors’ dynasty.
That next year, Boston lost to the eighth-seeded Miami Heat in the 2023 conference finals, and the team retooled, sending Smart to Memphis in a three-team deal that landed Kristaps Porzingis on the Celtics.
It was there, in Memphis, that Smart began to lose his grip — figuratively and literally — on his career.
SMART’S RIGHT HAND fuels his most important skill: his anticipation on defense. He has amassed more than 1,000 steals in his career by sticking his hands where they don’t belong. And it only became more mangled in Memphis.
In January 2024, he ruptured a tendon in his proximal interphalangeal joint — where the finger bends — ending his season.
“I’ve had two dislocations with torn ligaments in two of the fingers,” Smart said. “I’ve had glass in my hand. I’ve torn ligaments on my right thumb and had surgery there. I dislocated four out of my five fingers in total … my whole right hand just has been through a lot. So to be honest, I’m blessed to even have my right hand.
“For six years after the incident with the glass, I still had glass in my hand and I played with it. And there would be times where because of that, my hand would go numb. A lot of times, a lot of games, I couldn’t control it. I had to play and there were a lot of times when I’m shooting the ball and just, I had no feeling in the arm, the hand.”
Meanwhile, Memphis had bigger problems. Ja Morant, suspended for the first 25 games of 2023-24, went on to play just nine games, leading a roster so riddled with injuries that 33 different players suited up for the team at some point that season.
The Grizzlies missed the playoffs — the first time in Smart’s career he was on a team that failed to qualify for the postseason — while his former team went back to the Finals to face Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks. “I was watching every bit of it,” Smart said. “Does it hurt? Of course it hurts because you were the one there from the start before 2014, when Avery Bradley was still there, you guys were in the rebuild and so you watched everything grow. You were there when the seed was planted and everything. So it definitely hurt.”
The start to his next season in Memphis was even harder.
Over the team’s first five games, Smart averaged just 5.6 points on 23.5% shooting (16.7% from 3), and the Grizzlies stumbled out to a 2-3 start.
After an ankle injury sidelined him for two weeks, Smart returned and Memphis went 10-2 in its next 12 games before he suffered a partial tear of the proximal extensor hood of his right index finger.
Around this time, Smart says, he felt a shift in how the Grizzlies organization treated him.
He says he felt pressured to play through it.
“I wanted to be 100%, to give everything I got,” Smart said. “As I’m still working out and getting ready, they’re just like, ‘No, your doctor said you’re ready now.’ And I’m like, ‘I hear what my doctor said, but … it’s how I feel. Yes, surgically the finger is fine. But physically, no. The finger is still weak. I’m still strengthening it. This is my dominant hand.’ So, they didn’t want to hear it and they just kept saying, ‘You need to play.'”
Furthermore, during his rehab, Smart heard “a rumor going around that people said I don’t want to be here,” he said, despite actions that would suggest the contrary — from giving customized boxing gloves to his teammates, to his wife inviting the roster to his birthday party, to writing personalized holiday cards and stuffing them with gift cards for all the staff.
After a 21-game absence, he returned to the lineup Feb. 5, 2025, on the road against the Toronto Raptors.
His hand still didn’t feel right — he went 0-for-6 — but Memphis outscored Toronto by five points in the 18 minutes he was on the floor in the win.
What happened next made him feel like the “scapegoat” for a franchise in flux, Smart said. The following day, he was traded to Washington.
When reached by ESPN about Smart’s claims, the Grizzlies had no comment.
The deal was part of a three-team trade with the Sacramento Kings. Memphis had to include a first-round pick in what essentially became a salary dump, to get off the remainder of Smart’s $20.2 million contract for 2024-25 and $21.3 million for the following season.
The maneuver allowed Memphis to avoid luxury tax implications with its planned extension for Jaren Jackson Jr.
“The Marcus that you got intel on from Memphis was probably not as consistent with the Marcus that he was in Boston and in his entire career,” a Wizards source told ESPN.
“I think a lot of things went into that. But at the core, we knew who he was as a person and felt really comfortable adding him to a group. And he exceeded expectations in the short amount of time he was with us.”
Smart credits the Wizards for how accommodating they were to him during the 2½ months he spent with the team.
“Washington was great,” Smart said. “I just had to get healthy. … That was my main thing.”
Smart reached a buyout agreement with the Wizards in July to become a free agent, giving back $6.5 million of his 2025-26 contract according to ESPN’s NBA front office insider Bobby Marks.
And then the Lakers came calling.
L.A. HAD LIMITED options to upgrade its roster coming off that playoff loss to the Wolves.
Outside of trading a future first-round pick, the Lakers’ only avenue to reshape their roster was opening up the $14.1 million non-taxpayer midlevel exception by not re-signing Dorian Finney-Smith, plus the biannual exception.
Deandre Ayton and Jake LaRavia split the MLE, and Smart — who was recruited with a phone call by Doncic — got the biannual, agreeing to a two-year, $11 million deal, with a player option on the second year.
He says he wanted to prove that despite being 12 years into his career, his last two seasons were anomalies, not a downward trend.
When he arrived in L.A., he had a conversation with coach JJ Redick about the role he hoped to occupy.
Redick recalls the conversation.
He was at a Fini Pizza in Amagansett, in the Hamptons, and left the restaurant to take the call.
“I told JJ, ‘I’m going to go out here and give you everything I got,'” Smart said. “‘I just ask that if I do earn it, then let me have it. Don’t play too many politics.’ And that’s all I asked, and that’s all you can ask.”
Redick said there were three things he wanted to get across to Smart, now that he had cleared waivers from Washington and was deciding on his next destination. “It was, ‘We need you. We need your defense. We need your voice,'” Redick said. “The second part of that was, ‘I know you because I’ve played against you and I’ve competed against you. … You’re at your best when you’re playing for something. If you come here, we can be playing for something.’ And he agreed with that.”
And the third? “‘You’re going to play,'” Redick said he told Smart. “‘I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I’m very confident that if you’re at your best, you’re going to play a lot.'”
Redick kept his word, starting him 49 games as Smart has averaged 9.6 points, 2.8 rebounds, 2.8 assists and 1.4 steals per game, and living with his 40.3% shooting from the floor and 34.0% from 3 in large part because of the Lakers’ 111.1 defensive efficiency with Smart on the floor. It’s 117.7 with him off this season.
Smart has drawn 19 charges this season, tied for the second most in the NBA, which is already more than the 16 he drew during his DPOY campaign — and there’s still a month to go in the regular season.
“He competes every night,” Reaves told ESPN. “It’s not always pretty, but his competitive level’s going to be at an all-time high every single night. And you need guys like that. I think he’s the one that sets the example for us on the court to go out there and play as hard as we possibly can, because you know he’s going to do that.
“When he’s doing that, every single night flying around, it makes you be accountable to the effort that you bring.”
1:15
Denver Nuggets vs. Los Angeles Lakers: Game Highlights
Denver Nuggets vs. Los Angeles Lakers: Game Highlights
“WHO TOLD YOU to miss it?” a wide-eyed Smart asked Reaves.
On Saturday, moments after the Lakers had defeated the Denver Nuggets 127-125 in overtime, Smart didn’t want to talk about his strip of Aaron Gordon that set up a crucial layup with less than a minute to go in the fourth quarter, one of his five steals.
He didn’t want to discuss the go-ahead 3 he hit with 30 seconds to go in OT that put the Lakers up two.
He didn’t even want to yap about his part in holding a notorious Lakers killer, Jamal Murray, to five points on 1-for-14 shooting.
What had Smart excited was his part in the strategy, suggesting to Reaves that, when he went to the foul line for two shots with 5.2 seconds left in the fourth and the Lakers trailing by three, he intentionally miss the second one.
Reaves ended up executing the miss to perfection and L.A. held on in the extra session to sustain its late-season inertia.
“I feel like every game,” Doncic said of Smart after the Denver victory, “he does something different to help us win.”
And his defensive commitment has remained a constant.
Smart has held 2026 All-Stars, like Murray and Edwards, to a 44.3% effective field goal percentage when he has guarded them, fifth best among 75 players to defend 100-plus shots this season, according to ESPN Research.
“He brings a grittiness and a point-of-attack defender that maybe they didn’t have a year ago,” said Wolves coach Chris Finch. “A guy that can mark somebody all by himself, without a ton of help. Which really is huge, particularly in the playoffs.”
And on a team with Reaves, Doncic and James staying in the headlines, Smart has made his noise in the locker room, as a needed voice.
“On this team, we got a lot of egos, which isn’t saying that these egos are out of control or bad. It’s just everybody’s different,” Smart said of his approach. “We have different personalities and sometimes they just don’t mix at the right time. It’s all about timing with everything.
“And sometimes you might not feel good this day or you might be having a bad game or bad couple games and it just doesn’t feel right. So for me, my leadership was to just make sure I can keep the guys together, keep the positivity and not really let us go into that sunken place that you see most teams do when they’re in a drought.”
There have been some tough stretches for Smart this season, too — just like for the team. He has missed games with back spasms. He went 1-for-12 in a loss to the LA Clippers, 2-for-9 in a loss to the New York Knicks, 0-for-7 in a loss to Boston.
Still, he has kept at it. On March 3, with L.A. clinging to a four-point lead in the final minutes of the fourth against the New Orleans Pelicans, Smart received a pass from Doncic in the corner and hit the 3 to go up seven with 1:34 to go, sealing it — in a game in which he also had seven assists, four steals and three blocks.
“To have the trust to say, ‘You know what? I’m going to give it to this guy in the corner right here,’ I definitely think that it stems from the blocks, the steals, the energy that I bring,” Smart said. “Knowing that this guy’s working. And let’s reward him.”
He has had the third-most starts, fifth-most minutes and sixth-most shot attempts this season for the Lakers. He has had a hand in everything they do.
“He’s made an impact on winning,” Redick said. “And I think that ultimately is … that’s how you rewrite the narrative of your career, is if you’re on a winning team.”
ESPN’s Matt Williams contributed to this report.
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