From the moment he was drafted in 2012, Marcus Smart had a defined role as a perimeter defender who lived to make life hell on the opposition’s best player. And now that he has signed with the Los Angeles Lakers, he is now teammates with two of the best players he has had to defend in his career in Luka Doncic and LeBron James.
Due to spending the first nine years of his career with the Boston Celtics, Smart has had a ton of battles with James throughout his career, but Doncic on the other hand, has been a more recent player he has had to try and figure out. And Smart has been extremely impressed with his new teammate.
In an interview on the Sedano & Kap Show on ESPN LA, Smart spoke about how difficult it was to defend Doncic and how he is relived to not have to do so anymore now that they are teammates on the Lakers:
“Awe man, he was a magician literally. The Luka Magic was real. We would game plan for him, you would get yourself ready, you would go look at the film and he would come up with something new or do something that you already knew was coming and you still couldn’t stop it. So to be on the other end of that is definitely a relief and I know that for me, all I gotta do is be able to do my part to help Luka and help this team.”
Doncic doesn’t have the elite athleticism that many other top NBA players possess, but his overall skill level more than makes up for it, as Smart can attest to. No matter what he did and how much he studied to try and figure something out to slow Doncic down, he had an answer.
But those battles between the two created a level of respect and now they are on the same side with the same goal of bringing a championship to the Lakers.
Marcus Smart says Luka Doncic recruiting him to the Lakers meant a lot
Obviously those battles between Luka Doncic and Marcus Smart left some sort of impression as it is well known that the Lakers superstar recruited Smart to join the Lakers upon being bought out by the Washington Wizards. And Smart admitted that the fact that it was Doncic himself calling him personally and trying to get him to join the Lakers really meant a lot.
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