Smith Will Play Tonight, Lamb Likely Will Too

By Randy Renner

The newest member of the Thunder will jump feet first into the fire tonight against the Memphis Grizzlies, one of the six teams he's played for previously over his four year NBA career.

Smith is as new as new can be participating in his first practice session just this morning, so how ready is he for game action?

"I guess we'll see tonight," was his straight forward answer. "It's an adjustment obviously coming to a new organization but I think I'm pretty ready."

His new teammates assume he is too but they also don't have much to go on yet.

"He's been here for what? Like an hour?" cracked Thunder forward Nick Collison. "But I've seen him play before and he's very fast so I think he'll try to push the tempo which I think fits well with us, at least normally."

Just having that extra body will help out on the perimeter and it's looking more and more like Jeremy Lamb will be able to play tonight, although he's still listed as a game time decision.

"We're slowly gonna get guys back," Collison said and then offered up another hint about Lamb's status, "It's nice to have Jeremy back (see, sounds like he's playing) and I think we've got a couple other guys that might be back soon, we just have to keep plugging away."

Anthony Morrow is one of those guys who should be back soon, but probably not soon enough for tonight's game.

Smith is known as one of the fastest and quickest players in the NBA. That ability should help on both ends of the floor.

Though Smith is just now getting saturated into how the Thunder like to do things, he's been watching from afar and is already pretty familiar.

"I've been in the Western Conference so you get kind of a feel for how they wanna play and how they like to play. I think they're gonna try to keep things simple as they can for me right now and that's how I'm gonna try to keep it. I'm not gonna come in and try to run it like Russ, just keep it simple as I can."

At this point the Thunder are quite happy with that.