Marcus Smart Is Harder to Replace Than the Celtics May Think

The Celtics, a young and wildly talented team coached by a young, relatively inexperienced head coach, at times looked like a club playing without its foot on the pedal this past season.

The criticism came up to begin this last campaign, when Boston jumped out to a hot start on offense, but initially looked bad defensively. It returned in the playoffs when the Celtics struggled to put away the Hawks before nearly being eliminated by the Sixers in the conference semifinals. And the volume was amplified most following Boston’s 3–0 deficit against the Heat to begin the Eastern Conference finals—a stretch in which Joe Mazzulla continued to hold onto timeouts, Jayson Tatum kept struggling in fourth quarters and Jaylen Brown failed to safeguard the ball.

All of which raises a question: If this is a team that often needs a fire lit underneath it—much like the one it had near the middle of the 2021-22 campaign before making a run to the NBA Finals—then why are the Celtics trading away Marcus Smart, their heart and proverbial soul?

The simple answer, of course, is the intrigue of 7-foot-3 floor spacer Kristaps Porzingis, who’s still just 27 years old and is quietly coming off a career year from an efficiency standpoint, not only as a perimeter option but also in the post, where he’d historically struggled at times. (Smart’s name surprisingly surfaced as the final piece of the three-team deal after Boston’s effort to trade Sixth Man of the Year Malcolm Brogdon to the Clippers collapsed Wednesday.)

Still, if there’s one thing Porzingis hasn’t been throughout his career, it’s a sure thing. That was part of why the Mavericks moved on from him a couple years ago, preferring to have his max salary split between a couple more tradeable parts in Davis Bertans and Spencer Dinwiddie.

Smart, on the other hand, has generally always been there for the Celtics. Not just defensively, although he won Defensive Player of the Year a season ago, led the team in deflections per minute this season, and has shown the most heart on this club for years now. But he’s also been important offensively, notching career-highs in field-goal percentage at the rim each of the past two seasons after having shown significant improvement as a three-point shooter in his fifth season. (He’d been a sub-30% shooter over his first four seasons before hitting 36.4% of his attempts in Year Five.) Smart is a highly underrated passer and ballhandler, particularly for a team with two stars who’ve struggled mightily with taking care of the ball in big playoff moments.

For all the things he does on the court—serve as a floor general, defend in hard-nosed fashion—Smart’s biggest intangible might be his institutional knowledge of the club. Similar to someone like Draymond Green, he’s a fantastic communicator on the floor and can often call out sets before they happen or rotate over to prevent a defensive breakdown. (He’ll be a tremendous fit culturally for a team like Memphis, who not only needed a great defensive wing, but also a veteran with a voice that carries for Ja Morant and the Grizzlies’ locker room.) And on the topic of communication, as a ninth-year Celtic, he has the cache to call out the team when it’s not doing what it should. Boston fans will recall that he did exactly that early in the 2021-22 campaign, when he said plainly that Tatum and Brown weren’t distributing the ball the way they should on offense. Between that, and callouts from then-coach Ime Udoka, Boston went on an incredible midseason turnaround to reach the NBA Finals.

But Udoka isn’t with the Celtics anymore, and his replacement, Mazzulla, has shown to be a fundamentally different personality. He doesn’t challenge the team’s accountability in the media and sometimes doesn’t even stop games via timeout to make sure those principles are driven home. All of which arguably makes the presence of someone like Smart more meaningful.

This isn’t to say Smart is perfect. Yes, he is an incredible defender, but one year after being voted Defensive Player of the Year, he failed to make either All-Defensive team this season. Derrick White, the Celtics guard who was named to the All-Defensive team, shot the ball much better from three (38.1%) and had an even better assist-to-turnover ratio than Smart this season. Some might argue that his hustle and his spidey sense of being in the right place at the right time—as he was at the end of Game 6 against Miami, in place for the series-tying putback—makes the combo guard a natural to replace much of what Smart does on the court. (Another question: What does Boston do now with Brogdon, after trying to move him? As last year showed with Brown, failed efforts to quietly move players elsewhere can ruffle feathers.)

The upside of Porzingis is clear: He not only gives Boston another enormous rim protector, but also provides a 20-to-25 point-per-game scorer who’s comfortable scoring from just about anywhere, despite being a 7-footer. He stayed healthy this past season, prompting many to believe he’d likely opt out of the final year on his contract to get his next big payday. Instead, to facilitate the move to Boston, he locked himself into the $36 million for this coming year. (Smart, by contrast, has three more years left on his deal, at almost $20 million per season). A lot is riding on how that season goes. The question of whether Porzingis can stay healthy in a pivotal campaign looms large for a Celtics club with Robert Williams III and 37-year-old Al Horford.

That’s why it’s so stunning to see Boston moving on from Smart, even if it ultimately works out for the Celtics: For years, he’s been pretty damn close to a sure thing for a franchise that desperately needed one. To trade away the team’s heart and soul at such a critical moment is an enormous risk.