Ish Smith is not a Star NBA Point Guard

Ish Smith, although a savior of the Philadelphia 76ers this season, is not a star NBA point guard.

Ish Smith has been called “the savior” of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team in both of the last two seasons. It was deja vu, almost. Smith came on last year to a struggling offensive team and helped them win more games. This year was the same exact story, with the Sixers trading for Smith yet again.

Now, it’s wondered if the Sixers will aim to keep him around this offseason or make the same mistake they did this year in letting him go, and realizing they didn’t have anyone to replace him effectively. Nerlens Noel knows that he has had no NBA offensive identity without Smith, and has expressed the need for the team to keep him around on the team. The rest of the players and coaches have had nothing bad to say about Smith. He could be one of the only real NBA players on the team.

That does not make him a star though. One of the main questions as the rebuilding process goes forward is whether or not Smith will be with this team when they begin to aim for competitiveness, and to build on that, if he is on the team, will he be a starter?

Good NBA teams that are competitive in the playoffs have star point guards. Ish hasn’t shown statistically through several seasons that he can keep up with the marks of some of those star point guards.

There’s a few point guards that come to mind when I think of stars. Kyle Lowry, Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook, and John Wall. Only one of these players have won a championship yet, but all of them do a great job of leading their teams and making them competitive in their respective conferences. The argument could be made for any of those guys being the “best” out of that sample, but Westbrook and Wall would generally get the most votes.

Passing

Generally speaking, Smith is a great passer. He has been able to give Sixers players better looks than they had gotten all season before, and has caused players with shooting woes (Nik Stauskas) to improve, and has given the Sixers a great pick-and-roll game that allows them to score off of lob passes (Nerlens Noel is the beneficiary here, shooting 71.7 percent off of passes from Smith). Because of the ball movement that Smith’s type of play encourages the Sixers have seen an increase in points per game and offensive rating since he has arrived.

But how does he match up to the other “star” point guards? Not well at all. Aside from outdoing Kyle Lowry, he is far behind the other three guards who have as many as 10 assists per game.

Scoring

Scoring is something that Smith is good at, but it’s definitely not his primary strength. He is able to score when needed and can often go coast to coast if the Sixers need a quick 2 points, but other than that, his primary function on the offense is finding other people to score.

His 40 percent shooting from the field is decent, but there is room for improvement. His 27 percent 3-point shooting shows that it’s in his better interest most of the time to pass.

He fall short yet again compared to the other guards, scoring nearly half of what Russell Westbrook does.

Player efficiency rating

This rating is a method that quantifies on-court production per-minute. It is created so that the league average is 15. Smith, this season, sits at 16.0, a career high for him, but barely above the league average. The other guards, as expected since their assists and points were both higher than Smith’s are much higher than Ish’s.

There is absolutely a crowd that believes Ish Smith can be the savior of this team long-term, and start on even a good basketball team. I find this to be not true. I am not opposed to having Smith around for the long-haul, but I do not believe his function on this team several years down the road is going to be a starter playing more than 20 minutes per game. If that is to be the case, he clearly has a long way to go. He needs to improve his 3-point shot, and get his assist numbers up even more.

Context is important. Smith is a starter on a bad team that has won less than 10 games. He can’t be a starter on much more than that.

All statistics from this article were compiled from basketball-reference.com.