After watching J.R. Smith struggle with shooting in the season opener and then appear somewhat tentative early yesterday, Knicks coach Mike Woodson had a subtle message for his sixth-man shooting guard.
“I was yelling at him to shoot the ball,” Woodson said. “That’s what I want him to do.”
Telling Smith to shoot is sort of like telling a kid to help himself in the candy store. Coaches don’t normally tell Smith to shoot.
“Nah. Never. I’ve been asked so many times not to shoot. It’s kind of weird,” said Smith, who scored 20 points off the bench — nine in a game-icing fourth quarter stretch of 2:45 where he knocked down three straight 3-pointers — in the Knicks’ 100-84 romp past the 76ers at the Garden. “I shot a few bad shots. I started hearing a few boos from the crowd, so that kind of messed with my head a little bit. But he tells me to keep shooting, I’ve got to keep shooting.”
Never let it be said Smith would waver from the plotted course. The epitome of a streak shooter, he went through a hot streak, finishing 8-of-15 from the floor, including 4-of-5 on trifectas. He also grabbed nine rebounds.
“J.R. Smith has always been a wild card off the bench,” Sixers coach Doug Collins said. “He can come in and be 0-for-12 or he can come in and get you 20 and be that lightning rod. We were [rallying] and he hit back-to-back threes and that made it 15 [with 10:01 left] and that was basically the game.”
Smith shot 3-of-11 in the opening-night 104-84 pasting of the Heat and that came after a very uneven preseason, where he expressed his disappointment at not being viewed as a starter. That also came while he battled an Achilles injury that limited him to just one game in the preseason.
But playing basketball in whatever role can take on a totally different perspective as Smith and basically the world discovered this week. The New Jersey product saw the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, which directly affected his family and friends.
“It affected my house pretty bad in New Jersey — my mom’s house rather,” Smith said. “A lot of my family — aunts, uncles, cousins, friends — are not doing so well, but these are trying times and everybody has to stick together.
“Going to the shore area, Jersey area, it just wasn’t the same. This is my second hurricane going through it as a team. One was Katrina, now Sandy. So it’s just tough. It gets old and tired of saying it, but just feeling it for everybody else around you, it’s just tough.”
So for a couple hours, Smith was able to immerse himself in a game and forget the real world, and the game he got involved with was the team game.
“That’s our emphasis: keep moving the ball, keep finding the open man and whenever we do that, good things will happen,” he said. “A few times, we turned the ball over but you’ve got to expect that playing with new guys. Play defense, move the ball to the open man and just keep playing hard.”
And when all else fails, shoot.