Two-time NBA champion JR Smith was arrested Monday in Texas on a charge of family violence assault causing bodily injury, according to Hunt County jail records.
TMZ reported that Smith was stopped after "an automatic license plate reader flagged the vehicle he was driving and alerted officers to an active warrant."
He was then taken into custody and booked into the Hunt Country Detention Center. At this point, no additional details about the arrest have been made available.
Smith’s basketball résumé is loaded. He came straight out of high school in 2004, finished fifth in Rookie of the Year voting in 2005, and established himself over five seasons with the Nuggets. Over the course of a 16-year NBA career, he became known as a scoring spark off the bench and landed in the top five of Sixth Man of the Year voting three times.
His biggest individual recognition came in 2013, when he won Sixth Man of the Year with the Knicks. He later won championships with LeBron James and the Cavaliers in 2016 and with the Lakers in 2020.
Smith also had plenty of memorable moments along the way, though one still stands out above the rest for the wrong reason. In Game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals, with the score tied late, he grabbed George Hill's missed free throw but dribbled the ball out toward half court instead of putting up what could have been the game-winning shot, apparently believing the Cavs were ahead by one. The game went to overtime, Cleveland lost, and the Warriors finished off the sweep.
After his NBA days, Smith enrolled at North Carolina A&T State University and joined the golf team as a 35-year-old freshman. During four years with the Aggies, he played in seven collegiate tournaments and did well in the classroom, posting a 4.0 GPA in his first college semester and earning the school’s Academic Athlete of the Year honor in 2022.
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