New York Knicks: J.R. Smith Opens Up About Being Traded
Former New York Knicks sixth man J.R. Smith opened up about his relationship with Carmelo Anthony and how upset he was to be traded by Phil Jackson.
Love him or hate him, few players in New York Knicks history have brought Madison Square Garden to life quite like J.R. Smith. He had an uncanny ability to take over a game with shots that met the Kobe Bryant standard on the degree of difficulty scale, which immediately captivated the New York faithful.
Smith’s inconsistency led Phil Jackson to trade the polarizing shooting guard, which is a wound that remains open to this day.
In the year-and-a-half that’s followed his trade, Smith has provided the Cleveland Cavaliers with those same invigorating highs and debilitating lows. He began to find his consistent rhythm in 2015-16, however, which has restored his reputation as one of the better shooting guards in the Eastern Conference.
For as well as he’s playing with LeBron James in Cleveland, Smith couldn’t help but express how much he misses his best friend: Knicks star Carmelo Anthony.
For those who can’t see the video, Smith’s comments about Anthony began as follows:
"“‘Melo’s probably my all-time favorite person that I’ve been around consistently over the course of X amount of years.”"
Smith continued, telling the story of when he and teammate Iman Shumpert were traded from New York to Cleveland.
"“The trade from New York to Cleveland, I was pissed honestly. First of all, it’s not my fault we’re in this situation. We were in the locker room. We were about to play Memphis. I just got off the court warming up. The GM was on the phone. ‘Yeah, we just traded you to Cleveland.’ I’m like, are you serious? I told [Iman Shumpert], I’m like, ‘Ay kid, we out of here.’ He’s like, ‘What?’ We just came off of a 50-plus win year. We were second in the East. We had an unbelievable team, an unbelievable chemistry, and then they break everything down. To rebuild what? More than anything, I was pissed because I couldn’t play with my best friend anymore.”"
That’s a painful recollection of the harsh reality that, at any given moment, a player can be traded from what they believed was a healthy environment.
As Smith alluded to, the Knicks went 54-28 during the 2012-13 season—success that he played a major role in. Smith won Sixth Man of the Year in 2012-13, averaging 18.1 points, 5.3 rebounds, 2.7 assists, 1.3 steals, and 1.9 3-point field goals in 33.5 minutes of action per game.
That netted New York the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference and the organization’s first division title since 1993-94.
Unfortunately, New York fell all the way to 37-45 in 2013-14—the final year of Mike Woodson‘s tenure as head coach. The following summer, Phil Jackson was named team president, and the Knicks made swooping changes that cleared the roster of almost all existing personnel.
For what it’s worth, at the time Smith and Shumpert were traded, New York was 5-31 through 36 games of the 2014-15 season. Thus, for as impressive as the 54-win season was, the Knicks had already fallen far from grace at the time of the fateful deal.
Nevertheless, hearing Smith recount the events of when he was traded makes one realize how unforgiving a career in the NBA can be.