Opinion: Talent, trouble typify Nuggets youngster Smith

DENVER - In an ideal basketball world, J.R. Smith would be wearing North Carolina blue instead of Denver Nuggets blue.

He would be a college basketball star, learning the game. He would have taken a slow ride to the NBA.

In the basketball world we inhabit, Smith is a talented and terribly troubled 22-year-old. He’s engulfed by trouble, and his NBA career teeters on the edge of a cliff.

“I’m not even focused on that,” Smith said Monday night. “All that drama stuff, I’ll leave that to ya’ll to write.”

There’s plenty to write about.

After a spectacular high school career in New Jersey, Smith was headed to North Carolina for college, but instead veered straight to the NBA and a massive pile of money and more temptation than any teenager should ever have to face.

No doubt, temptation is winning.

Smith drove a close friend to his death in a summer car crash. After the fatal crash, the Newark Star-Ledger revealed Smith had collected 27 traffic points in less than a year.

Then, in October, Smith was accused of pouring champagne and spitting on a young woman in a Denver nightclub.

Smith is like any of us. He’s responsible for his misdeeds. He deserves ridicule, and he’s fortunate the Nuggets only slapped a three-game suspension on him after his nightclub shenanigans.

But is it any surprise a mess results when a teenager is handed several million dollars to spend his days and nights roaming the country playing a game while under the bare minimum of supervision?

That’s a formula for catastrophe.

Smith, beginning his fourth NBA season, still can find his way to a fresh chance. He’s young enough and talented enough to navigate away from all his mistakes.

“Well, my ability is there,” Smith said. “My heart is in the right place, and I have the right people behind me.”

For months, Smith might as well have been wearing a shirt with the words “Lost Cause” emblazoned on the front.

And yet Smith remains so full of promise. On Monday, he dropped 29 points in 24 minutes during the Nuggets’ romp over LeBron James and his weary Cleveland Cavaliers.

James, like Smith, went straight from high school to the NBA. His journey is a virtual opposite of Smith’s. King James has carried his team to the NBA Finals and endorses virtually every product known to man.

LeBron is the exception. Teens don’t belong in the NBA. They belong in college classrooms and on college courts. Sure, the NBA has altered rules to force high school superstars to spend at least one season in college, but one year isn’t enough.

Smith followed the money. This just makes sense. If NBA teams keep waving money — and they will — children will keep invading and polluting the pro game.

There was one instant of hope. With just under six minutes left in the first half, Smith soared a foot above the rim, caught Allen Iverson’s alley-oop pass and dropped a reverse jam.

One dunk can’t erase Smith’s vast collection of sins, but one dunk can offer a hint of a better future.