Home » Malachi Smith’s bet on himself continues with his ascent to Gonzaga

Malachi Smith’s bet on himself continues with his ascent to Gonzaga

Malachi Smith’s recruiting page is still sitting there in plain sight. Evidence of what was. His younger version was an unrated, unranked recruit. Zero stars. Zero! His page on 247Sports included a blank headshot. Rivals didn’t even bother making one.

And now? Smith committed to Gonzaga on Thursday, exiting the transfer portal and landing at one of college basketball’s elite programs. His choice to play for Mark Few, as well as Few’s choice to pursue Smith in the first place, is a validation of what was always there, and what happens with some guidance on the long road. If you want to figure out how Smith grew from being an unheralded high school recruit to Wright State to Chattanooga and now, fairly incredibly, to Gonzaga, start with the phone calls.

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Connie Smith dreaded them. Her phone would buzz. Malachi, again. Her only son. The two are extremely tight, but back then, around 2018, young Malachi didn’t need motherly care. He needed hard love. So she’d answer those calls and shut him down. He was away at school, as a freshman at Wright State, and his playing time was — as it often is for freshmen — all over the place. Twenty minutes in the season opener. Then two minutes the next game. On it went, up and down. Malachi couldn’t figure out why. He was unsure what role he was supposed to have and how to get it.

He’d call to vent.

Her answer?

“Oh, she was like: ‘Don’t call me to complain unless you don’t commit any turnover, don’t miss any free throws and you play great defense every possession,” Malachi says, remembering back. “She wasn’t having it. That was the toughest time of our relationship.”

It’s not that Connie Smith is callous or cold. No, quite the opposite. It was more so that she knows a thing or two about taking that hard road. She knows what it means to ride it out, see things through. Back when she was 18, she didn’t have the option to attend college for free. She opted to instead join the Air Force. Two years later, at 20, she gave birth to Malachi in 1999 and navigated the reminder of her enlistment as a young single mother.

So, no, complaining and quitting were not options.

“Those phone calls were so tough,” Connie says. “All I’d say was, ‘Figure it out.’ To be honest, there were times I’d hang up the phone and my heart would just break. I knew how bad he wanted (compassion), but I couldn’t show him that. That’s not what he needed to hear. Little by little, the calls became few and far between.”

That’s because on the other end of the phone, Malachi was turning his resentment into motivation. As he puts it, “After four or five conversations like that, I was finally, alright, fine, watch this.” He worked harder. He began watching film with assistant coaches after each practice. His playing time increased after a few injuries to older players. Smith took those minutes and earned Horizon League All-Freshman team honors.

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The ball rolls from here. In time, Smith transferred, looking for a better fit. He entered the portal, but only emerged with scholarship offers from Southern Illinois and Chattanooga. He’d never heard of the latter. This was really nothing new for him, though. A few years earlier, heading into his final year of high school, Smith’s only offers were from Missouri State and Montana State. Missouri State withdrew its offer, leaving him with the possibility of spending his college days in Billings, Mon. Before his senior year, Denver and Wright State extended offers and Smith jumped on the Wright State opportunity.

The lesson? He understands what it feels like to take what you can get.

That’s what led to Smith to Chattanooga and an entirely different kind of phone call with his mother. Sitting out in 2019-20 as a transfer redshirt, Smith logged late-night hours in the gym, well after practice. Sitting at home, seven hours away in Illinois, Connie would watch on FaceTime. She’d critique his form. She’d coach ’em up. “OK, give me 10 more.” She’d call out mock buzzer-beater countdowns. Malachi kept getting better. It became more and more obvious to Mocs coach Lamont Paris and everyone else in Chattanooga that a budding star was ready to breakout.

“We’d talk and he’d say, ‘Mom, you don’t even know what’s going to happen. Just wait,'” Connie says. “I get goosebumps just thinking about it.”

Two years, 1,115 points at Chattanooga, 2022 SoCon Player of the Year honors, and one NCAA Tournament appearance later, now we’re here. Smith entered the NBA Draft this spring for the second straight year, but again didn’t come away with the feedback he was looking for and once again landed in the transfer portal.

That’s how Mark Few and the Zags got themselves a new leading man. Sturdy, but savvy, Smith is a 6-foot-4 guard who projects as the pilot in a backcourt that’s already bringing back Julian Strawther and Rasir Bolton. Smith is a natural replacement for outgoing Andrew Nembhard. He should spearhead a loaded Gonzaga lineup that also returns Drew Timme.

What are the Zags getting? Smith averaged 19.9 points, three assists, 6.7 rebounds and 1.7 steals per game as a senior at Chattanooga. He shot 40.7 percent on 3s, 52.0 percent on 2s and 82.5 percent from the line. He’s versatile, can get to the rim, score from all levels and controls things with a strong dribble. He can operate on the ball, off the ball and out of ball screens. He’s long, strong and a solid rebounder. In Chattanooga’s toughest two games of the season, he scored 36 on 14-of-17 shooting in a loss at Murray State and went 4 of 17 with 12 points in a narrow NCAA Tournament loss to Illinois.

That last game, though — it lingers. Smith led the Mocs to the NCAA Tournament by averaging 18.7 points, 7.7 rebounds and 2.3 assists through three wins in the SoCon tournament. But against the Illini, playing through some nagging tightness in his back, he was bottled by Trent Frazier, DeMonte Williams and an Illini defense that ranked second in the Big Ten. The 4-of-17 night included two clean looks at a potential game-winning shot after Illinois took the lead on a late Kofi Cockburn put-back. The Illini survived despite trailing for 39 of 40 minutes. Smith and the Mocs had done more than enough to win, but left heartbroken.

In a hallway outside the Chattanooga locker room that night, Smith lamented that pro scouts might think, sure, he can score 20 a game in the SoCon, but worry he wasn’t good enough to do it against high-majors. After wrestling through a torrent of emotions that night, he finally said, “I’m not gonna let this moment define me.”

Well, now he’ll get his chance. Gonzaga will be a preseason top-five team in the country and face a non-conference schedule including games against Texas, Baylor, Kansas, Washington and Alabama, plus games in the Phil Knight Legacy held in Portland.

Now on the biggest stage, Smith’s name will grow, and his game will be dissected as the Zags try to make a run at that elusive national championship, but the only opinion that’ll truly matter to Smith will be that of mom. Connie grew up around the game. Her father, Lawrence Knight, starred at Loyola Chicago and was the No. 20 overall pick by the Utah Jazz in the 1979 NBA Draft. He was released before his rookie season and never played a game in the league, but spent years playing professionally overseas. As a kid, Connie lived with him in France, Holland and Germany.

Once enlisted in the Air Force, working in supply chain and logistics, Connie returned overseas for a few deployments. She and young Malachi lived in Spain for five years before being stationed at Scott Air Force Base near Belleville, Ill., about 15 miles outside of downtown St. Louis.

Young Malachi was a product of his environment. Discipline. Ps and Qs. Homework was started at 3 p.m., not 4. A fourth-grade teacher told Connie that Malachi would get exceedingly worked up over other kids not following the rules.

On the court, Malachi was OK, but nowhere close to a college-caliber player. He worked on it, got better, but never quite emerged to garner the type of attention like other recent local products like Malcolm Hill and Roosevelt Jones. He played his first three years of high school ball at Belleville East, then transferred to Belleville West to play with a young guy named E.J. Liddell, whose father was Malachi’s peewee football coach. Liddell was garnering all kinds of recruiting attention and Smith hoped to catch some of that spotlight. Maybe one of the big schools would go after him. Which one was he hoping for?

“I was a fan of whoever wanted me, and none of them wanted me,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of people doubt me, tell me what I couldn’t do. They said I couldn’t go DI. Lots of people told me I should embrace going DII.”

That all seems so jarringly in the past. Now Smith is heading to Spokane, good enough for one of the winningest programs in modern college basketball. If he’s indeed handed the keys to this version of the Zags, he’ll be among the most impactful players in college basketball next season. It’s what he and his mother always envisioned, even if it was never before a reality. But things change.

“He’s a very grounded person,” says Connie, who now works in health care since being discharged, “and that’s a product of where he’s been and what he’s gone through.”

It seems that’s what took Malachi Smith from there to here. That, and those calls along the way.

(Top photo: Rob Carr / Getty Images)