Marcus Smart clearly has no love lost for his former team.
The new Houston Rockets guard Smart spoke this week in an interview to Varun Shankar of The Houston Chronicle. During the interview, Smart took a swipe at his former team, the Los Angeles Lakers.
Smart left the Lakers this offseason to sign with the Rockets as an unrestricted free agent. In this week’s interview, Smart said that the Lakers made a “disrespectful” offer to him that he ultimately turned down.
“First off, I played so well that the offer that was ultimately given didn’t match the way that I played,” Smart was quoted as saying. “Especially when you see guys who played way worse than I did, the offers they’re getting. And then it wasn’t any security that we wanted that they were willing to do.”
The former NBA Defensive Player of the Year Smart, 32, signed with the Lakers as a free agent last summer. He had a respectable 2025-26 campaign in Los Angeles, averaging 9.3 points, 2.8 rebounds, 3.0 assists, and 1.4 steals per game in a low-usage role. Smart also elevated his game in the postseason, starting all 10 playoff contests for the Lakers and averaging 12.9 points, 3.9 rebounds, 5.1 assists, and 2.4 steals per game.
In the end, Smart, a Texas native, signed a two-year, $12.4 million offer with the Rockets instead. This is not the first time either that the ex-lottery pick Smart has taken shots at an old team on his way out.
