Member of Nuggets title team retires from NBA, takes hoops job
Oct 3, 2024, 1:04 PM
Former Denver Nuggets guard and forever an NBA champion Ish Smith is hanging up his sneakers after 14 years in the league but he will stick around to join the Washington Wizards as a pro scout.
Smith only spent one year in Colorado but such was life in his nomadic NBA career where he played for a record 13 teams. It’s not because the guard wasn’t wanted but rather that he was very much wanted by a variety of different teams for a lot of reasons. For instance, after leaving the Nuggets where he was a veteran third-string guard on a title team, he joined the lowly Charlotte Hornets to help some of the young players. There he appeared in 43 games until being waived at the trade deadline in February. But he was unable to get a new gig after his stay in Carolina.
Smith, 36, was undrafted out of Wake Forest and ended up playing 805 regular season games and 23 more in the playoffs. The short guard who joins the Wizards front office had two separate stints in D.C. He also played for the Rockets, Grizzlies, Warriors, Magic, Bucks, Suns, Thunder, Sixers, Pelicans and Pistons in addition to the stops in Denver and Charlotte. For his career, Smith averaged 7.1 points, 3.8 assists, and 2.4 rebounds in 19.2 minutes per game.
Four of those playoff games came for the Nuggets, though it wasn’t much more than garbage time minutes. Smith played 43 games in Denver, again mostly in garbage time but had a few standout games where he was a key backup.
Smith is the first player from the Nuggets first championship team to retire—only minor players from that team, Jack White and Davon Reed are even no longer playing in the NBA. Both Jeff Green and DeAndre Jordan will likely join Smith in retirement very soon.