One season after Ish Smith had to wait to get on the court for Wake Forest, his coach has to wait for just the right moment to get him off.
Smith, displaced in the starting lineup by sophomore Jeff Teague, played a reserve role as a junior after starting 60 games his first two seasons. The result was that he played just 22 minutes a game last season, down from 32 minutes the season before.
Smith expected more playing time after Teague left Wake Forest during the offseason to play for the Atlanta Hawks. But it's hard to expect anybody to play the kind of minutes that Smith has logged through the Deacons' first 18 games.
Going into Thursday's game at Georgia Tech, Smith is second in the ACC with 35.9 minutes a game. Jon Scheyer of Duke leads -- barely -- with 36 minutes a game.
But in conference games, Smith leads with 38.3 minutes a game, followed by Malcolm Delaney of Virginia Tech with 38.2 and Scheyer with 38.
Although Smith has said often that he wants to play as much as he can, Coach Dino Gaudio and his staff are devising ways to help Smith bear the physical grind.
The Deacons, after beating Virginia on Saturday, took Sunday as the NCAA-mandated one day a week off from practice. And on Monday, the coaches took it easy on Smith, putting him through what Gaudio described as a light practice.
"So in essence he might have what feels like a day and a half or even two days off," Gaudio said.
Gaudio has had trouble finding breaks for Smith during games because so many of the Deacons' games have been close, and because Smith is playing so well. He's averaging 13.5 points, second on the team and well above his previous high of the 8.7 points he averaged as a freshman. His 4.4 rebounds are a career high and, after blocking only four shots over the first three years of his career, he has blocked 14 this season.
He's also on pace to have 171 assists through the first game of the ACC Tournament. He led the ACC as a freshman with 186.
"He puts so much pressure on your transition defense," Coach Paul Hewitt of Georgia Tech said. "He gets the ball out from baseline to baseline faster than anybody in the league. I haven't seen anybody in the country get it there faster."
Gaudio attributes Smith's play to the way he practices.
"I tell those kids, ‘You're practicing well and you're playing well if you're playing hard and you're playing smart,'" Gaudio said. "And that kid, he practices hard all the time. He just practices hard. And I think that's why you see the productivity you see from him on game night. He is just a hard-playing kid, on both ends of the floor."
Gaudio said he and his staff are monitoring Smith's workload, both during games and in practices, in an effort to keep him from wearing down by March. But Gaudio said that some players are physiologically capable of doing what others are not.
"Mike can speak better than I for Jonathan Scheyer, but I don't if I've seen kids play so hard for so long and do not show the signs of fatigue," Gaudio said, referring to Coach Mike Krzyzewski of Duke.
"I was kidding somebody and I said ‘If you did an (oxygen) test on Ish Smith, Jonathan Scheyer and Lance Armstrong, I'm not sure who would win.'
"But he has great stamina. He doesn't fatigue easily. Now we've got some other guys if they're in the game for 2½ minutes, they're ready to come out. But he's not one of them."
dcollins@wsjournal.com
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