Josh Smith Complaining About How Much Harder Life Is Going to Be for Him While He Collects $6.9 Mil From Two Teams This Year is RICH
Audio starts around 14:00
Detroit – It’s time to pass the hat, please, for Josh Smith. At an introductory news conference with the Los Angeles Clippers on Tuesday, the former Detroit Pistons free agent bust pointed out how the next year is going to be a financial challenge. “At the end of the day, you know, I do have a family,” he said. “So it is going to be a little harder on me this year. But I’m going to push through it, you know.” At the end of the day, I wish I knew.
Smith signed a free agent contract for $1.5 million, but he will get another $5.4 million from his deal with the Pistons. If my math is correct, that’s $6.9 million. Sure, L.A. real estate is crazy. But shouldn’t that salary allow him to at least rent a condo in Santa Monica and maybe spring for HBO when the cable guy shows up? Sitting on stage with Smith on Tuesday was DeAndre Jordan, who caused the biggest stink of the NBA summer when he backed out of his commitment to Dallas and returned to the Clippers. “I made a decision for me and my family,” he explained.
That’s rich. His commentary, figuratively. And the guy, literally. He’s banked $90+ mil playing basketball. So I can’t even begin to wonder what he thought the reaction of the average NBA fan would be to a comment like that. Was he expecting sympathy or understanding? It’s such a classic, out of touch, Josh Smith thing to say. And it’s not even the money aspect of this that really bugs me. If you crunch the numbers, Smith is making about half as much as he would have made if he was still under contract in Detroit. I can kind of get that. If you’re expecting to make twice as much money as you end up making, you have to do things a little differently. Technically life is “harder” and that still applies if you’re mega-rich. Even if it’s just having to downgrade private jet models or foregoing that 15th Ferrari, you weren’t expecting your finances to be where they are now. So I’m not going to begrudge him on the dollar amount so much as I’m going to point out that every single thing that’s landed him in this spot are things he’s done to himself.
Josh Smith has max contract level athleticsim, but he’s got the focus of a goldfish with early onset Alzheimers. Couple that with a bad attitude, no interest in developing any of the weaker parts of his game, and the 3 pt shooting percentage of a blindfolded quadriplegic and you’ve got your boy Josh Smith. A guy who’s gone from close to a max contract to a min contract in the span of less than 3 years without injuring himself or having any good reason for failing. Not to mention the fact that he’s managed to bounce from Atlanta to Detroit to Houston and now to LA because everyone is fed up with him. He got paid to leave De-FUCKING-troit. A city that people are evacuating faster than Tiajuana when El Chapo shows up on Main Street. That’s one hell of a silver lining to a series of situations where it looks like you were the issue. And you don’t get to complain about how hard life is when you’re doing every bit of it to yourself. So Josh can dry his tears with his $5.4 mil check that the Pistons paid him not to play basketball for them and buy a slightly smaller mansion while he gets his 4th chance to prove that he can fit on any team NBA team at all. I’m not gonna be up at night worrying about how “hard” he has it.
P.S. He was just one “gotta feed my family” away from being the next Sprewell… so close