Marcus Smart is one of the NBA’s best and most versatile defenders. He is one of the few players in the league who can genuinely guard every position on the floor, and that ability provides the Celtics with an awful lot of lineup options depending on their matchup that night.
Smart is best known for his physicality, which is why he can hold up in the post against taller players, but he also has tremendous quickness, great hands, and is incredibly smart as a defender. All of that makes his propensity to flop one of the most frustrating things about him, because he’s a terrific defender without needing to do it, but can’t help but practice the dark arts of faking contact in big moments. There are plenty of examples of Smart embellishing contact and flying to the floor to try and get a call, and for a recent live show of JJ Redick’s Old Man and the Three podcast, Redick and Jason Gallagher put together a compilation and surprised Marcus by showing it to him on stage, leading to an incredible reaction.
Naturally it ended with photos of the stitches Redick had to get from Smart’s flailing elbow trying to draw a foul on a three-point shot, and the two talked about that and more, with the highlight being Smart explaining the method behind the madness. In explaining his hilariously bad flop against Pascal Siakam in the playoffs, he said he did it knowing it’d draw a challenge from the Raptors and take their only challenge away before the fourth quarter. It’s pretty incredible the levels going on with that decision from Smart, knowing the call has no chance of standing but it’s more important to force them to burn a challenge in that situation than actually caring about whether it’s a foul or not.