The distance from the NBA fields weighs on JR Smith and cannot be denied. However, when he is teased on the subject, it is the person concerned who shows the poisoned tooth. The feeling is that of an a priori exclusion, perhaps conditioned by the past not exactly without incidents along the way.
Excluded from the NBA, on purpose: JR Smith makes the names
Below is a passage from the long interview granted to Pierce Simpson by Complex Sports.
“I absolutely feel like ‘banned’ from the NBA, if you can put it that way. Anyone could sit here and talk about this as a fact. There are 30 teams, exclude the top three players for each of these and just list the names of the players from the fourth to the 15th man and find one that is better than me. I trained with them, I saw their General Managers come up to me to ask things like: ‘How come you are not playing’. They knew very well why. It is a script that has been repeated and has also seen other players as protagonists, [cito] Joe Johnson, Jamal Crawford, Nick Young, Isaiah Thomas. Everyone can still give a lot on the pitch and play [ad alto livello].”
It is difficult to imagine that this outburst, while legitimate, could help JR Smith find his way back into the NBA. Different speech, perhaps, for some of the colleagues he cited, who have also recently walked the parquet of the league.
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