Does Roy Wish He Had Ish?
If you’ve ever doubted how critical it is for a college basketball team to have good guards, check out the ACC standings.
Those teams at the top—Duke, Maryland, Wake Forest, Virginia and Virginia Tech—have them. Those at the bottom—Clemson, Miami, Boston College, N.C. State and most conspicuously, North Carolina—don’t.
Really, it makes perfect sense, in that most players in college basketball can’t readily create a shot for themselves and thus are incumbent on the point guard either breaking down his man for a penetration and kick or else getting the team in the right offensive set where the combination of screens and motion can do the trick. But a point guard’s worth extends beyond that. He also sets the tempo, decides when to push the pace or slow it down and generally serves as the coach’s proxy on the court.
So the biggest reason that Wake Forest is 16-5 and 6-3 in the ACC going into tonight’s home game against Boston College is a 6-0 senior who makes fewer than half his free throws and one-quarter of his 3-point attempts. Ish Smith is often criticized for what he doesn’t do well, but it’s my guess that there’s a couple of ACC coaches inside of 100 miles to our east who would like to have him.
If the media selects the league’s best players for All-ACC, then Al-Farouq Aminu is a lock for first team. Aminu, who averages 16.1 points and a conference-leading 11.1 rebounds, is the best talent Wake Forest has had since Chris Paul.
But if the criterion is most valuable, and Wake can get only one player on first team, it should be Ish. By that standard, he would be a strong candidate for player of the year.
“I know there’s a lot of good players in this league and I’m not sure who’s going to be the player of the year,’’ Coach Dino Gaudio said. “But wow, that kid’s got to be up there and talked about. He’s just played terrific down the stretch of so many games, and so many of these overtime games we’ve been involved in. We just try to put the ball in his hands at the end of the game and he’ll make a great pass or hit a big shot. He’s just really playing at a high level.
“And I think he’s doing it on both sides of the floor. He’s guarding and he’s scoring and he’s distributing. He really rebounds the ball too. Look at his rebounds (4.7 per game) from the point guard position. And Sylven Landesberg (of Virginia) is killing us on Saturday and we put (Smith) on the best player. He’s really playing well. There might be some guys playing as well as him in the league. I’m sure there are. But boy, oh boy, he’s playing at a high level.’‘